Published on Monday, January 27, 2014 by Common Dreams
'I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these
leaks didn’t cause harm. In fact, they served the public good.'
- Common Dreams staff
Edward Snowden says he sleeps well - despite potential death treats.
(Photo: NDR News/Germany)German television station NDR News on
Sunday night aired an in-person interview with American whistleblower Edward Snowden in
which he speaks both broadly and specifically about the NSA surveillance
programs his actions have helped expose to the world.
Conducted in Moscow, this is the first such interview with
the former NSA contractor since journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras
met and interviewed him in a Hong Kong hotel room last June.
Watch:
[Though earlier available via YouTube, the video of
the interview was pulled.]
The official NDR News transcript from the recorded interview follows.
Hubert Seipel (Seipel): Mr Snowden did you sleep well the last couple of
nights because I was reading that you asked for a kind of police protection.
Are there any threats?
Edward Snowden ( E. Snowden): There are significant threats but I sleep very well.
There was an article that came out in an online outlet called Buzz Feed where
they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security Agency
and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want and what they
told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals - and
these are acting government officials. They said they would be happy, they
would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the
grocery store and have me die in the shower
Seipel: But fortunately you are still alive with us.
E. Snowden: Right but I'm still alive and I don't lose sleep
because I’ve done what I feel I needed to do. It was the right thing to do and
I’m not going to be afraid.
Seipel: "The greatest fear I have", and I quote you,
"regarding the disclosures is nothing will change." That was one of
your greatest concerns at the time but in the meantime there is a vivid
discussion about the situation with the NSA; not only in America but also in
Germany and in Brazil and President Obama was forced to go public and to
justify what the NSA was doing on legal grounds.
E. Snowden: What we saw initially in response to the revelations
was sort of a circling of the wagons of government around the National Security
Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights the
political class circled around the security state and protected their rights.
What’s interesting is though that was the initially response, since then we’ve
seen a softening. We’ve seen the President acknowledge that when he first said
"we’ve drawn the right balance, there are no abuses", we’ve seen him
and his officials admit that there have been abuses. There have been thousands
of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies and
authorities every single year.
Seipel: Is the speech of Obama the beginning of a serious
regulation?
E. Snowden: It was clear from the President’s speech that he
wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don’t need. The
President created a review board from officials that were personal friends,
from national security insiders, former Deputy of the CIA, people who had every
incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible
light. But what they found was that these programs have no value, they’ve never
stopped a terrorist attack in the United States and they have marginal utility
at best for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone metadata
program, actually it’s a broader metadata programme of bulk collection – bulk
collection means mass surveillance – program wasn’t stopping or detecting $8500
wire transfer from a cab driver in California and it’s this kind of review
where insiders go we don’t need these programs, these programs don’t make us safe.
They take a tremendous amount of resources to run and they offer us no value.
They go "we can modify these". The National Security agency operates
under the President’s executive authority alone. He can end of modify or direct
a change of their policies at any time.
Seipel: For the first time President Obama did concede that
the NSA collects and stores trillions of data.
E. Snowden: Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write
an email, make a purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a
card somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it’s a
good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of
any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a suspect, they would go
to a judge, they would say we suspect he’s committed this crime, they would get
a warrant and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in
pursuit of the investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the
totality of their powers in advance - prior to an investigation.
Seipel: You started this debate, Edward Snowden is in the
meantime a household name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You
were working until last summer for the NSA and during this time you secretly
collected thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment or
was there a long period of time or something happening, why did you do this?
E. Snowden: I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the
Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to
Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie
to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate
its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond
that, it was the creeping realisation that no one else was going to do this.
The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to
know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the
government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were
allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected
representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programmes and
that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA
Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority
When you are on the inside and you go into work
everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realise the power you have
- you can wire tap the President of the United States, you can wire tap a
Federal Judge and if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only
way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting.
Seipel: We’re not talking only of the NSA as far as this is
concerned, there is a multilateral agreement for co-operation among the services
and this alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes. What
agencies and countries belong to this alliance and what is its purpose?
E. Snowden: The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the
post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers
banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence
gathering infrastructure.
So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have
Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we
have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades
what sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to
the laws of its own countries.
Seipel: In many countries, as in America too the agencies like
the NSA are not allowed to spy within their own borders on their own people. So
the Brits for example they can spy on everybody but the Brits but the NSA can
conduct surveillance in England so in the very end they could exchange their
data and they would be strictly following the law.
E. Snowden: If you ask the governments about this directly they
would deny it and point to policy agreements between the members of the Five
Eyes saying that they won’t spy on each other’s citizens but there are a couple
of key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the
collection of data. The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on
British Citizens just as the National Security Agency is gathering enormous
amounts of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that they will not then
target people within that data. They won’t look for UK citizens or British
citizens. In addition the policy agreements between them that say British won’t
target US citizens, US won’t target British citizens are not legally binding.
The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that that they are
not intended to put legal restriction on any government. They are policy
agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to
on a British citizen they can spy on a British citizen and then they can even
share that data with the British government that is itself forbidden from
spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of a trading dynamic there but it’s
not, it’s not open, it’s more of a nudge and wink and beyond that the key is to
remember the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the
data it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.
Seipel: How narrow is the co-operation of the German Secret
Service BND with the NSA and with the Five Eyes?
E. Snowden: I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact
the first way I described it in our written interview was that the German
Services and the US Services are in bed together. They not only share
information, the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually
share the tools and the infrastructure they work together against joint targets
in services and there’s a lot of danger in this. One of the major programmes
that faces abuse in the National Security Agency is what’s called "XKeyscore".
It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the
records they collect worldwide every day.
Seipel: What could you do if you would sit so to speak in
their place with this kind of instrument?
E. Snowden: You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody
you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it,
any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that
you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout
the world. It’s a one stop shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s
more you can tag individuals using "XKeyscore". Let’s say I saw you
once and I thought what you were doing was interesting or you just have access
that’s interesting to me, let’s say you work at a major German corporation and
I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form
somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your
friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint which is network activity
unique to you which means anywhere you go in the world anywhere you try to sort
of hide your online presence hide your identity, the NSA can find you and
anyone who’s allowed to use this or who the NSA shares their software with can
do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that have access to
"XKeyscore".
Seipel: This sounds rather frightening. The question is: does
the BND deliver data of Germans to the NSA?
E. Snowden: Whether the BND does it directly or knowingly the NSA
gets German data. Whether it’s provided I can’t speak to until it’s been
reported because it would be classified and I prefer that journalists make the
distinctions and the decisions about what is public interest and what should be
published. However, it’s no secret that every country in the world has the
data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions and millions of data
connections from Germans going about their daily lives, talking on their cell
phones, sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online, all of
this ends up at the NSA and it’s reasonable to suspect that the BND may be
aware of it in some capacity. Now whether or not they actively provide the
information I should not say.
Seipel: The BND basically argues if we do this, we do this
accidentally actually and our filter didn’t work.
E. Snowden: Right so the kind of things that they’re discussing
there are two things. They’re talking about filtering of ingest which
means when the NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider
or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic in a manner that let’s
them search through things they’re saying "if I see what I think is a
German talking to another German I’ll drop it" but how do you know. You
could say "well, these people are speaking the German language",
"this IP address seems to be from a German company to another German
company", but that’s not accurate and they wouldn’t dump all of that
traffic because they’ll get people who are targetes of interest, who are
actively in Germany using German communications. So realistically what’s
happening is when they say there’s no spying on Germans, they don’t mean that
German data isn’t being gathered, they don’t mean that records aren’t being
taken or stolen, what they mean is that they’re not intentionally searching for
German citizens. And that’s sort of a fingers crossed behind the back promise,
it’s not reliable.
Seipel: What about other European countries like Norway and
Sweden for example because we have a lot of I think under water cables going
through the Baltic Sea.
E. Snowden: So this is sort of an expansion of the same idea. If
the NSA isn’t collecting information on German citizens in Germany are they as
soon as it leaves German borders? And the answer is "yes". Any single
communication that transits the internet, the NSA may intercept at multiple
points, they might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden, they might
see it in Norway or Finland, they might see it in Britain and they might see it
in the United States. Any single one of these places that a German communication
crosses it’ll be ingested and added to the database.
Seipel: So let’s come to our southern European neighbours
then. What about Italy, what about France, what about Spain?
E. Snowden: It’s the same deal worldwide.
Seipel: Does the NSA spy on Siemens, on Mercedes, on other
successful German companies for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of
knowing what is going on in a scientific and economic world.
E. Snowden: I don’t want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of
journalists but what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged
in economic spying.
If there’s information at Siemens that they think
would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the
United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it.
Seipel: There is this old saying "you do whatever you can
do" so the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.
E. Snowden: This is something that the President touched on last
year where he said that just because we can do something, and this was in
relation to tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, just because we can do something
doesn’t mean that we should, and that’s exactly what’s happened. The
technological capabilities that have been provided because of sort of weak
security standards in internet protocols and cellular communications networks
have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.
Seipel: Nothing annoyed the German government more than the
fact that the NSA tapped the private phone of the German Chancellor Merkel over
the last 10 years obviously, suddenly this invisible surveillance was connected
with a known face and was not connected with a kind of watery shady terrorist
background: Obama now promised to stop snooping on Merkel which raises the
question: did the NSA tape already previous governments including the previous
chancellors and when did they do that and how long did they do this for?
E. Snowden: This is a particularly difficult question for me to
answer because there’s information that I very strongly believe is in the
public interest. However, as I’ve said before I prefer for journalists to make
those decisions in advance, review the material themselves and decide whether
or not the public value of this information outweighs the sort of reputational
cost to the officials that ordered the surveillance. What I can say is we know
Angela Merkel was monitored by the National Security Agency. The question is
how reasonable is it to assume that she is the only German official that was
monitored, how reasonable is it to believe that she’s the only prominent German
face who the National Security Agency was watching. I would suggest it seems
unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German
leadership that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides, not other
prominent officials, not heads of ministries or even local government
officials.
Seipel: How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North
Carolina, 30 years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?
E. Snowden: That’s a very difficult question to answer. In
general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatising government
functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government
employee for the Central Intelligence Agency but I’ve also served much more
frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is you have private
for profit companies doing inherently governmental work like targeted
espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems and anyone who has the
skills who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to
do so will be empowered by the government to do that and there’s very little
oversight, there’s very little review.
Seipel: Have you been one of these classical computer kids
sitting red eyed during the nights in the age of 12, 15 and your father was
knocking on your door and saying "switch off the light, it’s getting late
now"? Did you get your computer skills from that side or when did you get
your first computer?
E. Snowden: Right I definitely have had a … shall we say a deep
informal education in computers and electronic technology. They’ve always been
fascinating and interesting to me. The characterisation of having your parents
telling you to go to bed I would say is fair.
Seipel: If one looks to the little public data of your life
one discovers that you obviously wanted to join in May 2004 the Special Forces
to fight in Iraq, what did motivate you at the time? You know, Special Forces,
looking at you in the very moment, means grim fighting and it means probably
killing and did you ever get to Iraq?
E. Snowden: No I didn’t get to Iraq … one of the interesting things
about the Special Forces are that they’re not actually intended for direct
combat, they’re what’s referred to as a force multiplier. They’re inserted
behind enemy lines, it’s a squad that has a number of different specialties in
it and they teach and enable the local population to resist or to support US
forces in a way that allows the local population a chance to help determine
their own destiny and I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time. In
hindsight some of the reasons that we went into Iraq were not well founded and
I think did a disservice to everyone involved.
Seipel: What happened to your adventure then? Did you stay
long with them or what happened to you?
E. Snowden: No I broke my legs when I was in training and was
discharged.
Seipel: So it was a short adventure in other words?
E. Snowden: It’s a short adventure.
Seipel: In 2007 the CIA stationed you with a diplomatic cover
in Geneva in Switzerland. Why did you join the CIA by the way?
E. Snowden: I don’t think I can actually answer that one on the
record.
Seipel: OK if it’s what you have been doing there forget it
but why did you join the CIA?
E. Snowden: In many ways I think it’s a continuation of trying to
do everything I could to prosecute the public good in the most effective way
and it’s in line with the rest of my government service where I tried to use my
technical skills in the most difficult positions I could find in the world and
the CIA offered that.
Seipel: If we go back Special Forces, CIA, NSA, it’s not
actually in the description of a human rights activist or somebody who becomes
a whistleblower after this. What happens to you?
E. Snowden: I think it tells a story and that’s no matter how
deeply an individual is embedded in the government, no matter how faithful to
the government they are, no matter how strongly they believe in the causes of
their government as I did during the Iraq war, people can learn, people can
discover the line between appropriate government behaviour and actual
wrongdoing and I think it became clear to me that that line had been crossed.
Seipel: You worked for the NSA through a private contractor
with the name Booze Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What
is the advantage for the US Government or the CIA to work through a private
contractor to outsource a central government function?
E. Snowden: The contracting culture of the national security community
in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests
between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees at the
same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress typically from very well
funded businesses such as Booze Allen Hamilton. The problem there is you end up
in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private
corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public
good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booze Allen Hamilton where
you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges
were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at
any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government
didn’t even know they were gone.
Seipel: At the very end you ended up in Russia. Many of the
intelligence communities suspect you made a deal, classified material for
Asylum here in Russia.
E. Snowden: The Chief of the Task Force investigating me as
recently as December said that their investigation had turned up no evidence or
indications at all that I had any outside help or contact or had made a deal of
any kind to accomplish my mission. I worked alone. I didn’t need anybody’s
help, I don’t have any ties to foreign governments, I’m not a spy for Russia or
China or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor who did I betray?
I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists
who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think
people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The
public is supposed to be their boss not their enemy. Beyond that as far as my
personal safety, I’ll never be fully safe until these systems have changed.
Seipel: After your revelations none of the European countries
really offered you asylum. Where did you apply in Europe for asylum?
E. Snowden: I can’t remember the list of countries with any
specificity because there were many of them but France, Germany were definitely
in there as was the UK. A number of European countries, all of whom
unfortunately felt that doing the right thing was less important than
supporting US political concerns.
Seipel: One reaction to the NSA snooping is in the very moment
that countries like Germany are thinking to create national internets an
attempt to force internet companies to keep their data in their own country.
Does this work?
E. Snowden: It’s not gonna stop the NSA. Let’s put it that way.
The NSA goes where the data is. If the NSA can pull text messages out of
telecommunication networks in China, they can probably manage to get facebook
messages out of Germany. Ultimately the solution to that is not to try to stick
everything in a walled garden. Although that does raise the level of
sophistication and complexity of taking the information. It’s also much better
simply to secure the information internationally against everyone rather than
playing "let’s move the data". Moving the data isn’t fixing the
problem. Securing the data is the problem.
Seipel: President Obama in the very moment obviously doesn’t
care too much about the message of the leak. And together with the NSA they do
care very much more about catching the messenger in that context. Obama asked
the Russian president several times to extradite you. But Putin did not. It
looks that you will stay to the rest of your life probably in Russia. How do
you feel about Russia in that context and is there a solution to this problem.
E. Snowden: I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that these
leaks didn’t cause harm in fact they served the public good. Because of that I
think it will be very difficult to maintain sort of an ongoing campaign of
persecution against someone who the public agrees serve the public interest.
Seipel: The New York Times wrote a very long comment and
demanded clemency for you. The headline "Edward Snowden
Whistleblower" and I quote from that: "The public learned in great
detail how the agency has extended its mandate and abused its authority."
And the New York Times closes: "President Obama should tell his aides to
begin finding a way to end Mr Snowden’s vilification and give him an incentive
to return home." Did you get a call in between from the White House?
E. Snowden: I’ve never received a call from the White House and I
am not waiting by the phone. But I would welcome the opportunity to talk about
how we can bring this to a conclusion that serves the interest of all parties.
I think it’s clear that there are times where what is lawful is distinct from
what is rightful. There are times throughout history and it doesn’t take long
for either an American or a German to think about times in the history of their
country where the law provided the government to do things which were not
right.
Seipel: President Obama obviously is in the very moment not
quite convinced of that because he said to you are charged with three felonies
and I quote: "If you Edward Snowden believe in what you did you should go
back to America appear before the court with a lawyer and make your case."
Is this the solution?
E. Snowden: It’s interesting because he mentions three felonies.
What he doesn’t say is that the crimes that he has charged me with are crimes
that don’t allow me to make my case. They don’t allow me to defend myself in an
open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their
benefit. The espionage act was never intended, it’s from 1918, it was
never intended to prosecute journalistic sources, people who are informing the
newspapers about information that’s of public interest. It was intended for
people who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments who are
bombing bridges who are sabotaging communications not people who are serving
the public good. So it’s I would say illustrative that the president would
choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show
trial.
____________________________________
For those fluent in German, here's the video as it
aired in Germany:
[Though earlier available via YouTube, the video of
the interview was pulled.]
