YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → The FULL Snowden Interview

The FULL Snowden Interview — Transcript

by John Stossel · 15,652 words · 1,649 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:00I recently spoke with Edward Snowden
0:02a military contractor who revealed government secrets
0:05and now lives in exile.
0:07Did Snowden do the right thing?
0:09After researching this, I now think he did.
0:13You decide. Here's our full interview.
0:16You went to work for the government,
0:18you signed agreements saying you wouldn't talk about what you did.
0:23Why go to the media?
0:25We talk about awards for progress and civil liberties.
0:30We talk about the importance of independent thought and the history of it.
0:35And this is really what it is.
0:36I did sign up to work for the government.
0:39I volunteered for the Army. I applied to the CIA.
0:45I worked as a contractor in NSA facilities
0:48on NSA computers again and again and again.
0:51People think contractors like you're working in a different building,
0:54but no, it's just a continuation of government service.
0:57And also, you joined the military after 9/11,
1:01because you wanted to fight
1:03I did. When everyone else was protesting.
1:06I was a younger man, and I was a much less politically educated,
1:11I'd like to think, than I am today. Some things only come with experience.
1:17But so yeah, it raises this question of how does
1:22someone like who I was become someone like who I am.
1:29And I got to tell you, it was hard. It wasn't easy. It wasn't natural.
1:35It wasn't something I ever expected to do.
1:37But like I said, I signed up to all of these things.
1:40I volunteered because I believed in a prevailing national mythos
1:49to which we are all subscribed when we're born into our country,
1:54when we go to a school system where we're basically the only one in the world,
1:58where you get up in the morning, and you pledge allegiance to a flag.
2:02We all have the same stories. We all watch the same channels.
2:08We see men like you on TV telling us
2:14what's happening in the world, and what it's like.
2:16And what changed me was a realization that as someone who held a top secret clearance and
2:26had access far beyond what a top secret clearance
2:29would entitle someone to generally,
2:31the private truths of what was actually happening in our government,
2:41what our government actually does,
2:43what our nation was involved in,
2:46without the knowledge or consent of the people that it purports to represent,
2:50was very different than the public representation of it.
2:54And really, just that seed alone
2:58was the start of a journey that would take me many years to ultimately realize,
3:04and the decision, as you said, to come forward.
3:09And the ultimate reason why I came forward was
3:14simply to bridge that gap in my own experience
3:18and share that with everyone else,
3:19to share the realization that I came to,
3:22that what we were being told is true and real and is the state of our world was,
3:29in fact, a witting and continuing lie
3:33by some of the highest representatives in our government.
3:38And I felt that people needed to know that.
3:40What was the lie?
3:41I think the most famous one for me, and really,
3:45the turning point would be when you look at the exchange
3:54between Senator Ron Wyden and then Director of National Intelligence,
4:00James Clapper.
4:01This is a sworn testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
4:07and for those who don't remember it,
4:09because it was some time ago, it looked a little bit like this.
4:12[music]
4:15So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer
4:19to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data
4:24at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
4:28No, sir.
4:30It does not?
4:33Not wittingly.
4:35There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.
4:45Now the importance of this is to think about what that represented.
4:49This, of course, was false.
4:52The NSA was collecting the phone records
4:55of every Verizon customer on a daily basis.
5:00They were doing this for other major telecommunications providers as well,
5:04just didn't have the judicial order for that.
5:06And this was happening to the internet.
5:09This was happening to email communications.
5:11What was happening was a change in technology
5:15from the old internet that was non-commercial, very individual, and simple.
5:22It was pretty crude. Everything was cobbled together.
5:24To this larger, more corporatized internet,
5:27where all of our communications, all of our interactions,
5:30all of our relationships,
5:31all of the things that we read and like online
5:34are being passed to us through a Facebook or a Google or an Apple.
5:42And in secret, these companies had basically gone far beyond what the law
5:50required of government to join programs, where they
5:53would share information with the NSA through the front door of the FBI.
5:58And it was continuing for years without the individual warrants
6:03and legal process that we expected,
6:06and we have become accustom to.
6:09We're told in the Constitution, this is how our government works.
6:12And so for me, when you ask what was the lie,
6:16the lie was not any one particular part in these programs.
6:19It wasn't a particular detail.
6:21It was the fact that there was a breathtaking sweep of intentional,
6:26knowing public deception by people at the level of the Senate,
6:30by people in these different executive agencies,
6:33intelligence agencies, and then in the White House itself,
6:37even from the President, then President Barack Obama,
6:41who campaigned on ending warrantless wiretapping,
6:45that he had criticized so heavily in the Bush administration,
6:47but had in fact, in secret,
6:51extended and embraced these programs and these authorities,
6:55to a level that I began to feel had truly narrowed the boundaries of our rights.
7:02Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens' emails?
7:07No.
7:08Does the NSA intercept Americans cellphone conversations?
7:13No.
7:15Google searches?
7:16No.
7:18Text messages?
7:19No.
7:20Amazon.com orders?
7:22No.
7:23Bank records?
7:25No. We're not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.
7:28You're at the NSA, and you're dealing with these secrets
7:32before you even saw the head of the National Security Agency on TV,
7:37and what did you think about them then?
7:40Well, so this was the thing.
7:41When you look at the arc of my career in intelligence,
7:44I was always working on the technical aspect of it.
7:48And so by and large, I was modernizing our systems because post 9/11,
7:54the intelligence community realized they weren't very good at using technology.
8:01They thought they were, and in a way it was true that they were,
8:06but it was a different era's technology.
8:08They were great with radio. They were great with satellite.
8:11They weren't so good with computers. They weren't so good with the internet.
8:13So they brought in a bunch of shaggy, young guys who looked like me
8:17They really liked what you did. You were a star.
8:22Absolutely. But it wasn't that I was exceptional,
8:25so much that I represented a generation that was native
8:32to these new systems that they had shied away from
8:36because they didn't trust the security of them,
8:38it turned out with good reason.
8:40But my generation came in, we shared our experiences.
8:45We shared our specialties,
8:46and we were always looking at what we were doing through a straw.
8:51And you have to understand, this principle that we hear of in the movies,
8:54need to know, means normally you get a project, you do a project.
8:59You don't know where it goes.
9:00You don't know who else is using it.
9:02But bit by bit, I was redirecting and collecting the flow of intelligence,
9:08then always backing it up, permanizing it,
9:12making it so that if we lost a building, if we lost a site,
9:15we didn't lose everything that had passed through that,
9:18the information that had been passed through that.
9:20My thought, this was information about terrorists.
9:24I thought this was saving lives. I thought this was preventing wars.
9:28But as I moved higher and higher in the organization,
9:33as I moved from CIA to NSA, as I moved from office to office,
9:39my straw that I'm looking through gets wider and wider and wider,
9:43until I land in this place called the Office of Information Sharing.
9:48It turned out I would be much better at this job than anyone expected.
9:52And I saw everything.
9:55And it's only there,
9:57when you see the consequences of your labor
10:03and the different parts of your career,
10:05all brought together with the labor of others,
10:08of your entire generation, who themselves,
10:10not sitting in the position you are,
10:13can't see the big picture impact of what they're doing,
10:15and the public who never even knew this stuff existed.
10:19And again, this was occurring without their consent.
10:22But in theory, it was being carried out in their name.
10:26It felt to me that we needed to know, we needed to actually decide,
10:31is this what we want to happen or not?
10:33And you talked to your supervisors.
10:35Yeah. I talked to my supervisors.
10:37I talked to my colleagues on Constitution Day.
10:40They we're all fine with it. This is just what we do, and no problem.
10:44Actually, it's not quite that people had no problems.
10:49When I brought up these programs that
10:52many of them had never heard of because they hadn't been exposed to them,
10:56I said, "Does this look right to you?"
10:59When I show that we're collecting more internet communications
11:02in the United States at the NSA, than we were in Russia.
11:07Meaning we are ingesting more Americans' communication
11:11than we are ingesting Chinese people's communications
11:15or Russians' communications or North Koreans' communications or whoever you're afraid of.
11:20The bulk of our collection was happening domestically and happening with the aid of
11:26other partners in what's called the Five Eyes Network, the United States, the United Kingdom,
11:31Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
11:34And then the NSA would go, "Well, yes, we're collecting all of these communications, but
11:39we're not reading them all. We're capturing everything that you, John Stossel,
11:44are doing online.
11:45We're capturing everything that your family is doing online,
11:48that your friends are doing online,
11:50but we just pinky promise it's not being used for anything bad."
11:53And then, being an engineer,
11:56I see how these things actually are being touched,
11:58they are being processed,
11:59they are being sorted through every single day.
12:02Algorithmically, it proves the lie that all of these promises,
12:11they don't really amount to much.
12:13All of these processes and regulations and procedures don't amount to much.
12:17And in reality, what the NSA is doing every single day,
12:22its ordinary course of business, is violating not only the laws as written,
12:26but likely the Constitution.
12:28And I tell this to the guy sitting to my right, a good friend of mine,
12:31tell this guy sitting in my left, good friend of mine, to my office manager.
12:36And all of them actually, in private, when you're not in email,
12:41when they're just speaking heart to heart about this,
12:45they go, "No, this is crazy.
12:49I'm not sure why we're doing this.
12:51I'm not sure how we're doing this.
12:52I'm not sure this is legal.
12:54But you know what happens to people who talk about this.
12:59I wouldn't put this in writing.
13:02I wouldn't go to this office or that office.
13:04They're not going to do anything about it.
13:07It's not your job. It's not my job." This is way above our pay level, basically.
13:12But what happens to us as an organization at the NSA?
13:17What happens to us as Americans? What happens to us as a society?
13:24If everybody sees something wrong and goes,
13:28"Well, if I say something about it, I'm going to get in trouble."
13:30What happens if everybody goes,
13:32"I'm not going to do anything about this because it's not my job."
13:36That's how things go wrong in a much more serious way.
13:43And the reality was, I was just like them.
13:45For a long time, I had a growing sense of unease, but in reality,
13:52it was not my job to fix it.
13:54And this was actually one of the criticisms that was eventually leveled
13:57against me, was they go, "Who elected you?"
13:59But it's not about who you are. It's about what you've witnessed.
14:08It's about what you can prove and does that matter?
14:13And I think the last seven years,
14:15when we've seen the courts review these
14:17programs and confirm that they were in fact unlawful,
14:20we've seen laws change even by the legislature
14:23that was implicated in the wrongdoing in the first place.
14:26But at some point, you decided, I'm not going to keep my mouth shut
14:29Yeah. It's exactly because of this.
14:34If I keep my mouth shut, the guy to my right, the guy to my left,
14:37we all think this is wrong, and we all keep our mouth shut,
14:44what does tomorrow look like?
14:46And the year after that? And the year after that?
14:48The reality with these extraordinary powers in government, particularly...
14:54and we all understand this now, in the post 9/11 moment,
14:58because it's not just surveillance.
14:59It's happened in more, it's happened in international diplomacy,
15:02it's happened in economy with the financial crisis,
15:04and having to bail out the banks, but we don't bail out ordinary people.
15:09When the government writ large identifies a moment of crisis.
15:19They used that crisis for an exceptional demand for exceptional powers,
15:27to which they normally wouldn't be entitled.
15:29This was the rise of the Patriot Act.
15:31This was how the Bush administration got involved in more or less wiretapping.
15:36This is how we got extra judicial killings through drone strikes, off the ground.
15:41This is how we got involved in torture.
15:43But it's always justified as, again, an exception to ordinary operations,
15:50something that's done for a narrow purpose in a narrow way,
15:55but then nobody objects to it.
15:59These all happen in secret, remember.
16:01They keep the body of witnesses small by design,
16:06to limit the amount of dissent that can occur internally, organizationally,
16:11and those who do complain are generally shuffled off the program.
16:14They're put in a closet somewhere,
16:16and they ride out their days to retirement, if they're lucky,
16:19never doing anything that matters again,
16:22but also not having access to anything that could cause problems
16:25for those who are violating people's rights or our laws.
16:30But this, as you said, why speak up?
16:35If you sit by and see a system engaged in wrongdoing,
16:43and you do nothing, even if you don't participate in it any longer,
16:50even if you resign, you are perpetuating a system of wrongdoing.
16:55You have become not just part of the wrongdoing, but party to it.
17:00And for me, when we looked at this, this was affecting the country that I love.
17:06This was affecting the internet that I grew up with,
17:08that was practically part of my family by this point in my life.
17:12And then you extrapolate from how we got involved
17:20in this overreaching surveillance state to begin,
17:23with the national security state.
17:24And step by step, bit by bit, exception after exception,
17:29these extraordinary and narrow authorities become permanent
17:34and perpetual authorities.
17:37And bit by bit, as the domain of government expands,
17:41the territory that is claimed to the people narrows.
17:48And this became such a concern to me
17:52that I was willing to risk a great deal to tell people about it
17:57and see if they agreed, or if I was just crazy.
18:00My preference and I think, the American people's preference
18:05would have been for a lawful,
18:08orderly examination of these laws.
18:11A thoughtful, fact-based debate,
18:16that would then lead us to a better place.
18:21There were other avenues available for somebody,
18:23whose conscience was stirred
18:25and thought that they needed to question government actions.
18:30So why go to certain members of the media?
18:34President Obama later said there were other avenues available
18:38to someone whose conscience was stirred, inspector generals, Congress?
18:44No. This is a great question.
18:49We always look at these things because we don't
18:52want anybody in government to be able to go out and
18:56throw any secret about anything out on the media willy-nilly.
19:02And this is one of the primary institutional criticisms against me.
19:06Now on the other hand, are there internal channels, as Obama posited?
19:11For me, no.
19:12Even under the most generous reading of the law at the time,
19:15what he said was incorrect.
19:17And he said, so at a time, that by the way, he knew it was incorrect,
19:21even though it was politically useful because this had been debated in
19:25newspapers around the country by this point.
19:27I was not an employee of the NSA.
19:32I was employed at a private company that was contracted to do work for the NSA,
19:37at NSA buildings, on NSA equipment.
19:40The only difference between myself and the actual NSA employee sitting
19:44to my right in the office was he had a blue badge. I had a green badge.
19:49Green was for contractor, blue was for staff, employee of government.
19:52But the whistleblower protection laws did not apply to contractors.
19:58This makes sense, if you think about it, in the context of the moment,
20:02because how can the government protect someone from complaints
20:06when it's not actually their employee?
20:09How can the government prevent someone from being disciplined
20:13when they're private company for whatever purpose?
20:15And the reality is, was even if I had gone through an internal process,
20:23had I gone to Congress, had I gone to the President himself,
20:27the ultimate result would have been the same.
20:32I would have been stopped at some level by an individual
20:36like the NSA inspector general,
20:40who was supposed to be a watchdog that makes sure the NSA's
20:43activities are legally compliant, or the office of general counsel.
20:49And I would have been terminated from my position.
20:51I would have been investigated by the police.
20:54And I very likely would have been charged under exactly the same laws
20:57that I've been charged under today.
21:00We know this, not because I'm speculating and throwing this out of air,
21:04but because it had happened before in the case of a former NSA executive,
21:08at a much higher level than myself, by the name of Thomas Drake,
21:13who did go through proper channels and whose story I was
21:16very familiar with because I was determining,
21:18should I do this? Is it right? Will it work? Will it be effective?
21:21William Binney, who was charged with Thomas Drake at the same time,
21:25were investigated at the same time as Thomas Drake, for the same disclosure.
21:29He had men with guns drawn, coming to his house at dawn.
21:33Yes, exactly. You have the FBI burst in your house.
21:35They take all your computers. They arrest you. They interrogate you.
21:39You lose your clearance. You lose your job.
21:41First, I went to the House Intelligence Committee
21:43and the staff member that I personally knew there.
21:45And she then went to the chairman of that committee
21:48we were all trying to work internally in the government
21:51for over these years trying to get them to come around
21:54to being constitutionally acceptable
21:55and take it into the courts and have the court's oversight of it too.
21:59We naively kept thinking that, that could happen and it never did.
22:05They decided to raid us, to keep us quiet, threaten us.
22:08In my case, they came in with guns drawn.
22:11I don't know why they did that, but they did.
22:13Thomas Drake, who was an executive at the top of the US intelligence community,
22:17now works at an Apple store.
22:20But it's important to understand that he did go through proper channels.
22:25He did everything right.
22:26And when he went to these officials, this is what they said.
22:29This is the office of general council at the NSA,
22:33a man by the name of Vito Potenza.
22:36If he came to me, someone who was not read into the program,
22:39and told me that we were running amuck, essentially,
22:46and violating the Constitution, there's no doubt in my mind,
22:49I would've told him, "Go talk to your management. Don't bother me with this."
22:54The minute he said, if he did say you're using this to violate the Constitution,
23:05I probably would've stopped the conversation at that point, quite frankly.
23:09So if that's what he said he said, then anything after that,
23:14I probably wasn't listening to anyway.
23:15And this is the reality. And I think everybody understands this naturally.
23:20These internal watchdog shops in government,
23:22they're great if you need to report sexual harassment.
23:26They're great if you need to report some discrimination,
23:29if somebody's stealing office supplies.
23:31If you go, the entire agency of government is engaged in a conspiracy
23:38to deceive the public about the reality that we are right now,
23:41of working in concert across agencies, to carry out a program that is in violation,
23:48not only law, but the Constitution, they're not equipped to handle that.
23:53And they're not interested investigating that. That's not why they were appointed.
23:58I got to say, in my endless 100 year career,
24:01no one has ever rolled in video before.
24:04That's usually what I need to do. If you ever-
24:07I'm a technologist. Sorry, I can't help it.
24:10That's good. All right.
24:12Why do you think you were charged under the Espionage Act, that's pretty rare.
24:17To send a chilling message.
24:19To whom?
24:20To other whistle blowers,
24:21to others in the government not to speak out or speak up.
24:25Do not tell truth to power. We'll hammer you.
24:29Drake on 60 Minutes, where he said the purpose was to send a chilling message.
24:35Do not tell truth to power. We will hammer you.
24:38I think that that's absolutely correct.
24:40When you look at the lived experience of whistle blowers.
24:45And again, these are separated by decades of
24:49different White Houses, different Presidents,
24:51different administrations, different Congresses,
24:54different policies, the response is always the same.
24:57If someone inside of government reveals government wrongdoing,
25:02at the level that threatens the reputations and certainly the electability
25:10of, whether we're talking about agency heads,
25:12whether we're talking about politicians,
25:15whether in the legislature or the executive branches,
25:19their first priority is to stop you from talking
25:26because they want to control the narrative.
25:28And this is really what this is about.
25:30When you look at all of this mass surveillance,
25:34whether we're talking about internet surveillance,
25:36whether we're talking about telephonic surveillance,
25:39whether we're talking about domestic surveillance,
25:42whether we're talking about international surveillance...
25:44You've been in the news a long time,
25:46you've seen these officials, you've interviewed these officials.
25:48They constantly tell us this is for your safety.
25:52This is to investigate terrorists, right?
25:54And I kind of believe it.
25:56Right. We all believe it to some extent,
25:59particularly when we share the national trauma of 9/11.
26:01But when you look from the inside, as an employee,
26:06at what we're doing with this, I see all the reporting,
26:09I've got access to the reporting.
26:10And then you look at things that happened in the wake of scandal.
26:14For example, after I came forward, Obama,
26:16who was facing extraordinary pressure,
26:17appointed two independent commissions to investigate these programs.
26:20Because he was trying to basically justify these things
26:26and find where they were accurate, where they were useful.
26:28This was the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
26:33and the President's Review Group
26:35on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.
26:37Both of these groups had full access to classified information.
26:41Both of them talked to all sides of the intelligence community.
26:44They went to the FBI, they went to the CIA, they went to the NSA,
26:47and they said, "Look, we've got the clearances, give us your success stories.
26:51Show us where this helped. Show us where this saved lives.
26:53Show us why we should be doing this."
26:56And they looked because at the time,
26:58we had people, we had Keith Alexander then,
27:02Director of the National Security Agency going in front of Congress,
27:05going on TV and saying, "This stopped 47 plots," or whatever.
27:10"People are alive. Buildings are up because these programs."
27:14Well, Barack Obama's own investigations into this
27:18found that in the case of the very first program that we looked at,
27:23this was the mass surveillance telephone records domestically,
27:27it didn't stop a single terrorist attack in more than 10 years of operation,
27:33and that's happening in secret, mind you,
27:35before it's the front pages and all of that stuff.
27:38And in the only case, they also found,
27:42sorry, that it never made a concrete difference.
27:44And that's their words. In a single counter-terrorism investigation.
27:48There were plots that were found,
27:49but the court found that they already had the information.
27:55They didn't need all this spying.
27:57We've heard over and over again the assertion,
27:59that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted.
28:02That's plainly wrong. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted.
28:06The American people are getting left with inaccurate impression
28:11of the effectiveness of the NSA programs.
28:14They actually never discovered a plot through these programs.
28:17Never. Not once.
28:18What they did do is they found information related to a plot in a single case.
28:24And this was a cab driver in California, I believe,
28:29wiring about $8,500 to his clan in Somalia,
28:36which was affiliated with Al-Shabaab,
28:38which was on a terrorism list, according to State Department.
28:43This was their great success story.
28:44And in this case, judges had...
28:48sorry, we had already had watch dogs go through it.
28:51Thanks. Fortunately, to Obama in this case.
28:53And now, we have since had courts go at it and confirm it was unlawful,
28:59and it was unnecessary.
29:01And mind you, this is with access to the classified record,
29:03because they said by the time the government
29:07had enough information to look these guys up
29:09in the NSA database, CIA, FBI, whatever,
29:13they also had enough evidence
29:15to go to a court through traditional means
29:18and get a warrant without relying on all this, right?
29:22You didn't have to collect this by violating the rights of 330 million
29:27Americans when you simply could have used the old traditional means of
29:31law enforcement to get exactly the same material
29:34from exactly the same companies without breaking the law.
29:38It's dozens of terrorist events, that these have helped prevent.
29:46The tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist
29:49attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54
29:53Keith Alexander says these programs helped prevent dozens of terrorist events,
29:59the deputy director. The reason there hasn't been a major attack
30:03in the United States since 9/11 is not an accident.
30:07The number of terrorist attacks the NSA programs contributed to stopping is 54.
30:15That makes me feel safer when I hear that.
30:18Right. But we want to believe it's true,
30:22but it's not. This 54 number has been looked at intensively
30:28by advocates and apologists for the national security state, by critics of it.
30:34And since then, it's boiled down again to I believe one case.
30:38And this one case in this is not a Somalian wiring $8,500.
30:44I believe it's some guy with mental illness
30:48who was thinking about bombing a subway in New York.
30:53But it's the same context, the same thing.
30:55They didn't need this authority. It wasn't necessary.
30:57Because look, let's say you dump John Stossel, work at the NSA.
31:03You do the job I did in my last position.
31:05You go in every day, you've got the desk in front of you with your keyboard,
31:09connected to a system called XKeyScore.
31:11This is basically Google for spies, right?
31:15It allows you to search through all of the different methods of
31:20ingestion that we have, not just domestically,
31:23but overseas through our partners, in what we call second party countries
31:29these are these Anglophone countries in the five eyes
31:31I mentioned earlier as well as third-party partners.
31:34We have sensors all over the world, some of them placed by hacking,
31:38some of them placed in data centers.
31:40And you can type anybody's phone number
31:42and anybody's email and any website and any IP address
31:46for a phone or a computer or a laptop that you can see all the traffic
31:51that has passed any of these sensors.
31:54You can write to your FBI analyst buddy,
31:59and have them pull anybody in the world's basically whole Facebook list,
32:05everything they've ever clicked on,
32:07anything that the Facebook Pixel tracker was on the website
32:10for when they were reading things, their Amazon order history,
32:13everything they've typed in that Google search box.
32:15You have access to everything, and you want to stop a terrorist plot.
32:22How do you know who to look up?
32:24And this is why these programs don't actually stop terrorism.
32:29You have to have a seed.
32:30You have to have something to start your searches from.
32:33You have to have a cause for suspicion.
32:35Traditionally, under the Fourth Amendment,
32:37we require probable cause for these kinds of investigations to begin.
32:43Police officers get a tip from someone.
32:46They noticed something when they're working the beat.
32:48They know their communities. They see someone acting strange.
32:52They get a complaint and they investigate on this basis, right?
32:56Well, in intelligence,
32:58the way these tips come across is generally from the same thing.
33:02It's from a confidential informant. It's from law enforcement.
33:05It's from whatever. But once you have this,
33:09once you have probable cause to begin investigating someone,
33:12you can go to a court. You can get a warrant.
33:15You can access the same information
33:16without collecting it from the entire internet before.
33:19And so this is the thing.
33:21When you look at the fact that the government itself
33:26no longer makes these claims that it stopped 54 plots, right?
33:30They have disowned that.
33:31Keith Alexander no longer works for the NSA. He's out.
33:35Now he works on the board of directors at Amazon.com.
33:40The thing is, what are these things effective for?
33:46Because you go, well, why does the government pay for these programs?
33:49Why go to all this trouble if it doesn't stop attacks?
33:52Yeah, why?
33:54And the answer of course is because these programs
34:00are tremendously useful for something different,
34:03and that is information gathering, right?
34:06Intelligence, general investigation about anything on anyone.
34:10It may not be effective in preventing terrorist attacks.
34:15Because again, it's not particularly more useful
34:18relative to the tools that we already have, because again, terrorism is rare.
34:24It is scarce. And people don't realize this
34:26based on the way the media has changed.
34:28But the incidence of terrorism over time is actually declining
34:34relative to the last century.
34:36If you look at, for example, terrorist attacks in Western Europe,
34:39they have declined decade over decade since the 1960s.
34:44People forget about it, but things like that IRA ...
34:47Maybe because of intelligence in the NSA.
34:50Well, again, I worked for these agencies and I would like to believe that was true.
34:55But the rate at which they were falling is completely different
34:59from the rate of mass surveillance.
35:01And this is what people misunderstand about my politics and my positioning.
35:05I am not against the use of intelligence.
35:10I'm not against the existence of intelligence agencies.
35:13I'm not against surveillance.
35:15I am against mass surveillance.
35:18And this is what I brought information forward about.
35:21And just to play devil's advocate here. Why should I care?
35:25I figure Google and Facebook knows everything about everybody anyway.
35:31I figure that teenage boy across the street
35:34could be picking up the stuff I send.
35:37The cork's out of the bottle. What difference does it make?
35:41Well, this goes back to kind of that nothing to hide argument,
35:45which is like, "I lead a very ordinary life. I watch my shows.
35:51I go to work. I take care of my family. Yeah, I'm weird. Yeah, I look at porn."
35:56If we're talking about the average person on the internet,
36:00everybody looks at porn, right? It's happened.
36:01Even if you don't want to, there's a pop-up ad somewhere. It's in your history.
36:05But the reality is most people do and they want to, and that's not strange.
36:10People, particularly Americans, feel an enormous sense of shame about this,
36:15but it's a tremendously common activity.
36:16At the same time, it makes us feel uncomfortable.
36:20For a lot of us, if our family knew everything that we looked up on the internet,
36:25we would worry about how they would look at us.
36:27If every company in the world knew everything that you looked at,
36:33we would feel uncomfortable with it.
36:35But then what happens when your workplace knows?
36:39What happens when your government knows?
36:43And who decides what is normal, what's acceptable, and what's not?
36:48We can do things that are very common today
36:51or we can have positions or interests
36:54that are very uncommon today but harmless.
36:57In a free society, we are allowed to be different.
37:01We are allowed to be weird.
37:03We can be strange as long as we're not hurting anyone else.
37:06But laws change, social mores change, the norms shift.
37:13And once we are entered into this system where everything we've ever done,
37:17everything we were ever interested in,
37:19everything we've ever bought,
37:20everywhere we've ever gone, everywhere that we have ...
37:23or anyone that we have ever talked to
37:25is instantly captured at the moment it happens
37:28and memorialized in some database somewhere just waiting to be used,
37:32it will be used.
37:34And we already see this happening in places like China, right?
37:38We don't want to emulate China where we have a social credit system
37:41where things that you do which are harmless,
37:44which aren't hurting anyone,
37:45but institutions or railways or airlines or the
37:49Communist Party that sweeps into power,
37:51is already in power, decides it's disfavored, it should be penalized,
37:55it should be disincentivized, now you can no longer get a job.
37:59Now you have to wait and go to the local police station
38:02to get a pass to be able to travel and visit your family.
38:06We cannot anticipate these things.
38:09And the problem that I have with this idea of argument
38:14is that we should have to prepare for it,
38:17we should think and constrain our intellectual curiosity,
38:21and even frankly, our weirdnesses, our distinctions,
38:26our differences, our weirdness, the things that place us in the minority,
38:29because we could potentially someday be judged on the basis for it,
38:34even if we had done nothing wrong, even if it wasn't strange,
38:37because the definition of what is wrong is constantly changing.
38:42If Google's got it and Facebook has it,
38:45why is it so much worse that our government has it?
38:49This is a great question. There's two ways this is typically responded to.
38:56One, and this is one that I used myself and many used before,
39:00is that, well, the difference is Google can sell you
39:04a different pair of shoes on the basis of what it knows about you, right?
39:07The ads that it places on the side of your bar, but they can't put you in jail.
39:12They can't bomb you, right? The government can.
39:16And for a lot of people, the government does.
39:19The second thing, which I think is actually more interesting,
39:23requires a little bit more technical understanding of how
39:28these programs are implemented, but not
39:29so much that I think it loses even a general audience.
39:33Google knows an incredible amount about an incredible number of people,
39:38but it is still finite.
39:39There are things that they do not know.
39:41Google does not necessarily know what you bought on Amazon.
39:45Google does not necessarily know what you liked on Facebook.
39:48Google does not necessarily know what you posted on Instagram.
39:52Facebook knows what you posted on Instagram because they own that, right?
39:56Amazon knows what you bought on this, but they don't
39:58know what you're saying in your email on Google
40:00because it's a Gmail account, right?
40:02There are silos in industry that even if they're very large,
40:06still limit what these different companies know,
40:09the maximum domain of their understanding of
40:13you as an individual and us broadly as a population.
40:17Government, however, through its course of authorities
40:20in these kinds of systems is able to look into each of these different silos
40:26and then co-link them together.
40:29They see everything that Facebook sees as well as everything that Google sees,
40:35as well as everything that Amazon sees,
40:37as well as everything that your phone provider sees,
40:40as well as everything that your airline provider has in terms of your travel history
40:45and so on and so forth to an extraordinary extent.
40:48There are no limitations placed on this beyond their
40:55appetite and willingness to pursue these silos and find a way into them.
41:00I am a little embarrassed in that I'm a consumer reporter and I report on markets,
41:06I haven't done much on spying or military secrets,
41:11and I hadn't paid much attention to you.
41:14I got you confused before researching for this interview
41:18with Manning and Julian Assange, Snowden, which ... who did what?
41:23But now that I've done the research, I conclude that you really got screwed,
41:31yet you talked about this very dispassionately and thoughtfully.
41:38Aren't you pissed off?
41:39I mean, James Clapper lied to Congress and to the American people,
41:46and he wasn't fired.
41:48He served out his term in the Obama administration,
41:50and now he works for CNN, and Keith Alexander ...
41:55I think that's kind of a condemnation of the direction our media has gone in,
41:59but I understand your point.
42:02Absolutely.
42:03Keith Alexander now runs a private security firm,
42:07appropriately, and is on Amazon's board.
42:11They made out. You're in exile.
42:13Yeah. I mean, you don't do the kinds of things that I did if you're a pessimist.
42:22You do them because you're an idealist. You believe that things can get better.
42:26You believe that we can do better. When I came forward,
42:30it was in recognition of the fact that there is a two tiered system
42:35to the way American society is ordered today.
42:40There are those in power who operate largely behind a veil of secrecy ...
42:46and this applies even to people who aren't working for the NSA, right?
42:50This happens to Congressman.
42:53It's very difficult to find out who they're meeting with.
42:56It's very difficult to figure out what lobbyists are having conversations
43:00with who and what laws are being shaped
43:03and what text is being written that is passed into law
43:06that impacts all of our lives but was corporately sponsored, right?
43:11And these people are getting donations to their campaign,
43:14or famously, the justice system.
43:16If you're a young person from a minority community with limited access to
43:25wealth and especially education,
43:27you're going to be treated very harshly by our court system.
43:32But if you're one of these made men working on a high level,
43:38you will face a very different flavor of justice, shall we say.
43:42none in the case of these two guys who lie.
43:45Precisely, or no justice at all.
43:48But that will never change unless we make it change, right?
43:53Power admits nothing without a demand.
43:56Government is not going to reform itself.
43:59And the only way that things get better anywhere is through sacrifice.
44:03We've known this since we crawled out of the swamp of history.
44:06If you want to stay warm, somebody is going to have to go through the trouble
44:10of building a house.
44:12It's not going to be fun, they're not going to love it,
44:13but they're going to be doing it because it makes life better.
44:16Somebody out there is going to have to do the hard work
44:19of growing the food that we all survive on.
44:21And they don't get a lot of thanks for that. But society is a team sport.
44:27Our society, as exists today, is flawed. I recognize that, right?
44:34I am doing what I can to make it better as I can.
44:39I don't have any illusions that I'm going to fix it.
44:43I'm not going to save the world. That's not how this works.
44:46And I think this is why I can be very much at peace
44:50with the choices that I've made and
44:54unfortunately, the price that I've paid as a result of that,
44:57because it was the right thing to do.
44:59And it has made things better.
45:01Even if it hasn't fixed the problem, people now can understand these things.
45:06We can begin to argue for better policies.
45:10And in fact, they're already happening.
45:11Our courts, which for literally decades excused themselves
45:17at all from weighing in on the legality and constitutionality of surveillance
45:24in the context of national security, have since 2013 when I came
45:29forward ruled repeatedly on these programs and repeatedly ruled
45:34against the government.
45:37They had backstopped these things fully again, for a very, very long time
45:42the NSA's engaged in repeated substantial legal violation.
45:46The FISA court called, a systemic non-compliance by the government.
45:50But the programs go on.
45:52Some of these programs have been halted.
45:54Section 215 of the Patriot Act is no more.
45:57This was ended by an act of Congress
46:00and also at the urging of no less than Barack Obama,
46:05who at the very beginning of 2014, interesting in terms of timing,
46:09after the very first court to rule against these programs
46:13said it was likely unlawful and unconstitutional,
46:16came out in his State of the Union speech and said
46:19although he could never condone what I did,
46:23he felt that this conversation about surveillance,
46:27its legalities, its limits, had made us stronger as a nation.
46:31And he urged Congress to pass what was then called the USA Freedom Act
46:36to basically put new legal restraints on this.
46:38But as you say, that didn't end the problem of mass surveillance.
46:42That just pushed the tube of toothpaste,
46:45and now the toothpaste is in a slightly different part of the same tube.
46:48However, mass surveillance occurs largely through certain technical principles,
46:58certain vulnerabilities mechanically in the way our communications
47:02move from your phone or the laptop on your desk
47:06across the internet to
47:08whoever it is you're trying to communicate with, right?
47:11Whether we're talking about a website,
47:12whether we're talking about someone that you're talking to on the phone.
47:17Now, fewer and fewer people use plain voice.
47:21Fewer and fewer people use plain SMS.
47:23Now they're using encrypted messages like the Signal messenger or WhatsApp,
47:27which I will not trust myself for a long period of time
47:31because it was bought by Facebook.
47:33But WhatsApp was the world's most popular messenger.
47:36It had 1 billion users, and post-2013,
47:39they adopted a new technical protection called end-to-end encryption,
47:45which is intentionally designed to limit precisely
47:51the kind of mass surveillance that was being discussed in 2013.
47:53So now, at the flip of a switch,
47:56one billion people get a greater level of privacy that is not reliant on jurisdiction.
48:02It's not reliant on law. It's not reliant on politics.
48:05And encryption works?
48:07Encryption does work. One of the lessons as a result of 2013,
48:12all these disclosures about how the NSA works,
48:15how the surveillance works,
48:16is you can be sneaky in a lot of ways as the NSA,
48:26as the CIA, when you're trying to steal a secret.
48:28But encryption is basically just math.
48:33And there is no, currently, with the best knowledge that we have of mathematics,
48:38any sneaky way to just make encryption go away entirely
48:42from a point of interception, right?
48:45So as, again, your phone tries to reach this other person,
48:49wherever they are in the world,
48:51it has to go through the network of many other people,
48:54through the Starbucks that you're sitting at,
48:56through their internet service provider, through a data center,
48:59through a transatlantic cable that goes to, for example, France,
49:02their data center, their local internet service provider,
49:05their Starbucks that they're sitting in.
49:08Any one of these points, anybody sitting on that line
49:12can snatch a copy of the conversation.
49:14And if the wasn't encrypted, they can read it,
49:17whether it's a criminal hacker next to you at the cafe,
49:20or whether it is a national government,
49:23being that the American government or the French government or anybody
49:26in between, right?
49:27But the thing is, the only way really to get around strong encryption
49:36that is properly implemented is precisely what the purpose
49:42of the 2013 stories was to achieve,
49:45which is to make governments shift from mass indiscriminate
49:50collection of communications to specific individualized targeted collection.
49:55This means hacking, right?
49:57So imagine for a second, you send this encrypted communication
50:02to the person that you're talking to.
50:05People in the middle, tons of them, they all catch it, they all collect it,
50:08but none of them can read it because an encrypted message
50:11cannot be unlocked without a mathematical key.
50:14It's just the answer to the math problem that you make up
50:17that you share with the other person on the other side.
50:20You guys know the answer, but nobody else in the world can come up with it.
50:23Now, mass surveillance no longer works.
50:29Game over, finished. Doesn't work quite that way.
50:31There's some more technical ways.
50:33We can talk about metadata later if you're interested, but it's more in depth.
50:36But the bottom line is how then if you're the CIA, and for example,
50:41this is not someone harmless in a Starbucks,
50:45this is an actual terrorist or a spy or a dissident
50:49in a place like Bahrain or Oman or Hong Kong,
50:52which unfortunately is all too real and happens every day.
50:56How do they read this message?
50:58And the answer is they steal a copy of the key.
51:02Instead of catching it as it goes across the line,
51:05which they can no longer do ...
51:07they can't do this for everybody en mass around the world ...
51:09they have to target the two places in the world that that message is readable,
51:16where it's un-encrypted.
51:17And that's on your device and the device of the person that you're talking with.
51:21Now, instead of dealing with encryption,
51:23instead of dealing with that global network, that easy, cheap mass surveillance,
51:27they do the hard work, the traditional targeted investigative work,
51:31of hacking that phone, or selling that person an implanted phone
51:35that's got spy devices built into it basically.
51:38And then when that person is encrypting messages
51:41or when they're receiving messages and decrypting them,
51:43because they have taken over the phone,
51:47encryption no longer matters to them because
51:49they can see it when it's unencrypted.
51:52They can steal that encryption key, that answer to the math problem,
51:57when it exists on the phone before it's forgotten, before it disappears.
52:01So long and short, because I know that was probably a complicated
52:06for a lot of people, encryption, end-to-end encryption,
52:10which is to say properly implemented encryption that
52:12doesn't have a man in the middle, it doesn't have some Facebook,
52:14some Google who's keeping their own copy of the key,
52:17but encryption where the keys are only held by the communicants,
52:22by the people who are supposed to know this information,
52:25that defeats mass surveillance in the generic general sense
52:30that we understood in 2013. It does not prevent all surveillance.
52:34It does not prevent particularly legitimate targeted surveillance,
52:37but it returns the intelligence and law enforcement world to the more traditional
52:43means of investigation, which have fewer implications
52:47for our rights at large as a society.
52:50Let’s talk a little more about your personal story.
52:54You decide that you gotta do this. You ask 27 countries for asylum.
53:01People are, shall we say, less familiar,
53:04particularly now with seven years of distance between.
53:07What exactly happened in 2013?
53:10So I left the United States and met with journalists in a hotel room in Hong Kong.
53:16Hong Kong was selected because it was a kind of no man's land
53:19that had very good media access.
53:22It had a largely unfiltered internet, neither of which is true today, unfortunately.
53:26But it was very easy for journalists to operate.
53:29It was very easy for me to access, as a US intelligence employee,
53:33without popping up on any radars or anything like that.
53:36And I would meet with them there.
53:41And China also would not necessarily be free to operate against us,
53:45particularly the way they can today,
53:47because of rivalries and friction and bureaucratic infighting
53:50between the local Hong Kong services and the Beijing government.
53:54So this was really an ideal kind of no man's land in which to operate.
53:59I provided them with documents and explained the significance of them.
54:03And I didn't publish any documents. This is important for people to understand.
54:07I didn't put anything online. I instead told the journalists to look through this,
54:13explained it, and if they felt, as I did, that this was in the public interest to know,
54:20they would need to make an independent editorial judgment
54:23that this was the case, go to the government in advance of publication,
54:27give the government a chance to argue against this,
54:30say, "That Snowden guy's crazy, or he doesn't understand
54:32this or this document's incorrect, or if you publish this, people will get hurt."
54:36Basically give the government the best chance to argue against this,
54:41which the government took and almost all cases that I'm aware of.
54:45And they talked to the White House and talked to governments.
54:48Exactly. What happened was, as I mentioned before,
54:52I had had a decade's worth of history,
54:56and actually more than a decade's worth of history, of cases to look over.
55:01I looked at Daniel Ellsberg in the case of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s,
55:04and the injunction against the newspapers working with him,
55:08how that was resolved by the courts, what that meant.
55:10I looked at the case of Thomas Drake,
55:11how even though he went through the right channels,
55:15he ended up at the same place where his story, unfortunately, didn't get out.
55:21He faced enormous consequences, policy, and the public
55:24were unable to grapple with this very important issue
55:28because of the government suppression of it.
55:29And then I looked at the case of WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning
55:32with the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.
55:35And one of the interesting things against this was Manning of course,
55:38was arrested. And they said Manning had blood on her hands,
55:43cost the lives of all these soldiers and publishing this material,
55:48which was only secret, not top secret,
55:50was going to cause basically the atmosphere to catch fire
55:54and the oceans to boil off. And none of this happened.
55:57And in fact, at Manning's sentencing,
55:59the judge specifically asked the government,
56:02"Do you want to argue that people were harmed as a result of this?
56:07Do you want to say someone was hurt, someone died, anything like this?
56:11Because we'll take it into our sentencing consideration, give a harsher sentence."
56:15And the government said, "Actually, no, we can't show that. It doesn't exist."
56:20And this is what we saw actually in the case of Ellsberg. It's a constant
56:24refrain, where the government goes whenever they're put in the hot seat,
56:28they don't want to talk about the concrete harms of their policy.
56:32They don't want to talk about how they violated rights.
56:35They don't want to talk about how they broke the law.
56:37Instead, they want to shift the conversation to the whistleblower,
56:41to the source of the disclosure, say they're weird,
56:44say they're disloyal, say they have problems,
56:47say they should've done this for whatever reason,
56:49Say that you're going to get spies killed
56:51or you're going to reveal troop movements.
56:54Precisely. What they want to do is talk about the theoretical risks
56:59of journalism in an open society, instead of the concrete
57:05demonstrated harms as documented by the government's own malpractice.
57:10And so this was something that I anticipated.
57:12This was why this sort of process was designed.
57:15I used three different journalists at three different outlets.
57:18They could all go to the government.
57:20The government would get a chance to do this so we could demonstrate
57:23we had gone in theoretically the most responsible way.
57:27We had done everything the government thought was
57:30proper and appropriate as compared to prior cases,
57:32and see if it made a difference.
57:34And the interesting thing is,
57:35even though this was sort of tremendously indulgent
57:40of the government's interests, it didn't make a single change in their messaging.
57:46They use the same rhetoric against me as they did with Manning,
57:49as they did with Drake, as they did with Ellsberg.
57:54But from here, I left Hong Kong en route to Latin America.
58:03And I tell this story in my book, Permanent Record, how it happened.
58:06But as I was leaving Hong Kong, the government ... we're not sure ...
58:11there's no true way to know whether this was an intentional strategic decision
58:17or whether they panicked and it was just a mistake.
58:20But once the government had learned that I had departed Hong Kong,
58:24they canceled my passport, which meant I couldn't leave Russia.
58:28And I spent the next 30 days and 30 nights basically trapped
58:34in this Russian airport, Sheremetyevo, trying to get asylum from,
58:39as you said, these 27 different countries,
58:42things that Americans wouldn't be particularly concerned with, Germany, France.
58:46And every time one of these countries
58:51would appear to be leaning towards granting asylum, saying, "Okay, come here,"
58:57they would get a phone call from one of two people,
59:00then Secretary of State John Kerry, or
59:04the soon to be possibly... excuse me... then Vice-President, Joe Biden.
59:14And this is the interesting thing.
59:18Why would the US government work so hard to keep me trapped in Russia
59:26rather than allowing me to go to a jurisdiction
59:28where they would be much freer to operate?
59:30And much more comfortable, realistically, like France or Germany
59:33or Iceland or something like that,
59:34if they had even the slightest doubt about my loyalty?
59:41And this is something, a question that even to this day,
59:43I have difficulty answering.
59:45I would assume they just didn't want you to go anywhere,
59:47and you happened to be in Moscow. They didn't think it though.
59:53Right. Imagine you're the director of the NSA, or you're the CIA,
59:57and you've got this guy out there, he's the person that you
59:59hate the most in the world.
1:00:01And you know all your authorities, you know all your incredible powers,
1:00:04you know even the things that I didn't know with all of my access.
1:00:08All the ways you can get people and they go,
1:00:12"We really don't like this guy. We really want to do something about him."
1:00:15Would you rather me be in Moscow or literally anywhere else?
1:00:23And so to me, it's very strange that the government
1:00:27worked quite hard to keep me exiled specifically in Russia.
1:00:32And I've always been a little bit, particularly as years have gone by and you can't
1:00:37explain it away simply as a mistake of policy back then,
1:00:40they've had time to rectify it.
1:00:41They realized that me being in Russia provides them
1:00:45with an evergreen political attack that doesn't have to be explained.
1:00:47It doesn't have to be justified.
1:00:49Simply the association with Russia
1:00:51is enough for them to call into question my character.
1:00:53And some Americans would say, "Really, he went to China?"
1:00:57And admittedly it was Hong Kong and different then,
1:01:00"And Russia? These two countries?
1:01:03And there was no other way to get to Latin America except through Russia?"
1:01:08Right, certainly. And I mean, this was a subject of much debate
1:01:12and it was again born out, there was a lot of public reporting on this
1:01:15back in 2013, when it was contemporary.
1:01:19The reality is you can't fly from Hong Kong,
1:01:22or at least couldn't fly from Hong Kong at the time to
1:01:25Latin America without crossing US airspace,
1:01:29unless you went the long way around.
1:01:32Then you do this and you have to go... It's a very short list.
1:01:35What are the non-extradition countries to get from Hong Kong
1:01:39all the way over to South America?
1:01:41And again, it's just building a bridge through the air step-by-step.
1:01:45And my whole flight manifest to this point has been made public.
1:01:48There were journalists on the flight that I was ticketed for
1:01:52from Moscow to Havana,
1:01:54taking pictures of my empty seat when I was prevented from boarding.
1:01:58So, yeah, this has all been looked into and to me,
1:02:04it's frustrating, but it's also interesting because I wonder,
1:02:06if they did this intentionally, if they did this strategically,
1:02:11it was really the most brilliant move they made
1:02:15in terms of communications planning that they could have.
1:02:19I'm not sure we can give them that much credit
1:02:21because it very well could have been a moment of panic,
1:02:24but it is, I think, disappointing that all these years later,
1:02:28they still haven't rectified it.
1:02:29And it didn't work out well for you.
1:02:31Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.
1:02:35She's now running for political office.
1:02:38Politicians say you should be killed.
1:02:41Well the funny thing is we see that much less now than we did in 2013.
1:02:47The reality is there's sort of a pardon movement going on on my behalf.
1:02:52I have not asked for pardon from this president or the prior president,
1:02:57but many others have on my behalf,
1:02:59and I'm tremendously grateful for that and the advocacy
1:03:02that people have brought forward. But... Excuse me.
1:03:08The thing is, as each year passes and all of those claims,
1:03:12as you said they were like, "Oh, he got people killed.
1:03:15There were agents, there were programs or whatever. All this stuff fell apart.
1:03:18It didn't work."
1:03:20None of it came to pass, and this was exactly the story in the Manning case.
1:03:25Obama could not have commuted Manning's sentence politically, realistically,
1:03:32in this 2013 era, in this 2014 era,
1:03:37but years after when Manning's actions were actually in 2009, 2010,
1:03:42you start getting year after year after year.
1:03:46The fact that what Manning did, did not harm national security in a material way.
1:03:52It did not harm individual's lives and livelihood in a material way.
1:03:57All it did is informed the public and embarrassed the US government and
1:04:05its partner governments in the case of diplomatic cables.
1:04:09But largely it was about reputational harm, right?
1:04:13The government had egg on its face and it retaliates as a result of this.
1:04:16Moreover, you know from reporting on the justice system in other contexts,
1:04:19I think, the government is very interested
1:04:22in what it describes as the deterrent effect.
1:04:26Manning becomes secondary to someone like me,
1:04:29or Ellsberg or Drake, any of these people,
1:04:31they become secondary to the point of the government
1:04:34pointing to the rest of their workforce.
1:04:37Even if this person did the right thing, even if they did it carefully,
1:04:41even if they did it in the best way,
1:04:43we don't want you to emulate it, so we are going to come after this person,
1:04:47chase them all the way around the earth in order to set an example.
1:04:52I hope you get pardoned. It's a little puzzling.
1:04:56The Attorney General says you're a traitor and the information you peddled,
1:05:00you peddled it around like a commercial merchant.
1:05:05Yeah you never tried to get money from it.
1:05:10President Trump in 2013 said,
1:05:14"They got a lot of information out of this guy.
1:05:16He's a terrible guy who's set our country back.
1:05:19This is a bad guy and there's still a thing called execution."
1:05:24This guy is a bad guy and there is still a thing called execution
1:05:29But then seven years later, a reporter asks him,
1:05:32"Do you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon?"
1:05:35And he says, "Well, I'm going to look into it."
1:05:37Do you want to give Edward Snowden a pardon?
1:05:39Well I’m gonna look at it. I’m not that aware of the Snowden situation,
1:05:43but I’m going to start looking at it.
1:05:44Yeah, this is a good example of the distance Donald Trump
1:05:49has traveled from 2013 Trump to 2020 Trump.
1:05:53But also more generally when you bring up the case of the Attorney General,
1:05:56who does not seem familiar at all with the basic facts of the case
1:06:00when he's speaking publicly on it, that is a lot of distance historically.
1:06:04A lot of things have happened in between then.
1:06:07And as we start to look at what happened in 2013,
1:06:11less with the heat of the moment and sort of careers on the line,
1:06:15and more dispassionately from a historic context,
1:06:19I think it's clearer and clearer that what I did was the right thing to do.
1:06:24In fact, public opinion is swinging very heavily toward that side.
1:06:30And in fact, even elite opinion, which is largely turned against
1:06:36individuals working outside of the organization in this kind of way,
1:06:42you will not find a lot of love for whistle blowers in corporate America,
1:06:48in government agencies, in any country in the world, I think.
1:06:51But even there you are beginning to see people speak in, in fact,
1:06:57I would say large majority terms, favorably rather than disfavorably.
1:07:02I think that's because history has a way of exonerating the truth.
1:07:06In some ways, attitudes switch the other way. President-elect Biden before he became
1:07:13vice-president was against the spying, this data collection and said, "It's very intrusive. We're
1:07:20going to trust the president and vice-president to do the right thing. Don't count me in on that,"
1:07:25The real question is what do they do with this information they collect
1:07:30that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda?
1:07:32That we’re going to trust the president and vice president
1:07:35of the united states to do the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.
1:07:39But he changed his tune once he was in power.
1:07:41Yeah. And again, this was the same for President-elect Barack Obama.
1:07:46Some people say, well, Obama was this raving liberal
1:07:50before now he's a Dick Cheney.
1:07:52He tells this very briefly in his memoir.
1:07:56He said yeah, he was campaigning against mass surveillance.
1:08:01Yeah, it was wrong. Yeah, it shouldn't have been done, it was a problem,
1:08:04so on and so forth.
1:08:06But then he says, after he became president,
1:08:08he realized he was seeing that from the cheap seats
1:08:11and now Bush's wars were his wars.
1:08:16And this is very in line with his decision
1:08:20to move from investigating Bush era abuses, things like torture,
1:08:24things like unlawful killing, things like the massive
1:08:30domestic surveillance program that happened under the Bush administration.
1:08:36He didn't investigate them at all.
1:08:37Instead he said it was important that we look forward, not backwards.
1:08:41And it's this, this lack of accountability amongst the American political elite.
1:08:48At the same time we are constantly increasing the level of accountability
1:08:53for ordinary members of the public,
1:08:55particularly when we talk in the context of this mass surveillance.
1:08:58Not only is the government policing you, Twitter is policing you,
1:09:02what you say online. YouTube is locking your channel, whatever.
1:09:06There are people in little police hats everywhere you look.
1:09:13At the same time, these people with power are excusing their behavior.
1:09:17They are heightening the standard of accountability to which we are held.
1:09:21And to me, I say, isn't this backwards?
1:09:24We used to call them public servants and we were private citizens
1:09:32because we were supposed to know everything about them
1:09:35and we were all supposed to scrutinize them.
1:09:38And we were private citizens because no one was supposed to know
1:09:41what we were doing. We had no power, we had no influence
1:09:44and so we were meant to be left alone,
1:09:45but that is increasingly being inverted.
1:09:47And we are under a constant gaze electronically,
1:09:52at the same time they are permanently sheltered
1:09:55by this fog of unaccountability, and that's by design.
1:10:01Just to be clear, Twitter and YouTube can't put us in jail?
1:10:06Yeah, they can't... well yet, but stay tuned.
1:10:10Or force you to stay in Moscow.
1:10:13You can't return to America at the moment.
1:10:17You got married in Russia. What's your life in exile like?
1:10:24My long-term partner of many years
1:10:27who was with me in the United States, Lindsay Mills, she is also American,
1:10:31and I got married.
1:10:33We are expecting our first child, which is a tremendous stroke of fortune.
1:10:38I'm really excited about it.
1:10:42And this is really all consuming for us right now, I think. It's a scary thing.
1:10:47I've never been through this before, and I think it's even more frightening for her.
1:10:54But the reality is exile as a political weapon is beginning to fail.
1:11:02These conversations, this, what's happening between you and I today
1:11:07was a rare and extraordinary thing when it first started happening in my story
1:11:14in the beginning of 2014, but now due to this global pandemic,
1:11:20it's everywhere, all the time.
1:11:22I just had a conversation with Ai Weiwei who lives in exile from China
1:11:27as a result of his own criticism of his government.
1:11:32And this idea from history that governments used to be able to go,
1:11:37"Fine, we're just going to divorce you from the public conversation.
1:11:42We're going to silence you through distance,"
1:11:46it doesn't work anymore because even though I
1:11:49put my head down on the pillow far away,
1:11:53I still very much live in the United States.
1:11:56And our child, I think, will hopefully embody the best of all worlds.
1:12:02You're applying for citizenship in Russia and some Americans say,
1:12:08"That's disloyal. That makes me suspicious."
1:12:11Yeah, I mean, this is part of the same conversation that I think has been
1:12:17intentionally pushed by the government for many years now.
1:12:20The reality is I've been in Russia now for seven years.
1:12:23I cannot leave. I'm expecting to start a family
1:12:30and I want my son to not grow up as an outsider.
1:12:35I don't want him to feel like he is born into exile, as I am.
1:12:38I want him to feel at home wherever he is.
1:12:43I don't want my wife to be separated from me
1:12:48because she doesn't have permanent residence in the same way that I do.
1:12:53Particularly when borders to Russia are closed, as they are today.
1:12:57So the only way that my family can be together is for me to do this,
1:13:02and I don't think that's wrong.
1:13:04A year ago you released Permanent Record and the government sued,
1:13:09froze the proceeds.
1:13:13They sought to, it's true.
1:13:15But the reality is the government's judgment
1:13:19in the case of Permanent Record is not enforceable,
1:13:22certainly not internationally, questionably domestically.
1:13:25And I don't have any assets in the United States'
1:13:29banking system or whatever that they could pull.
1:13:31So that judgment hasn't had any material effect,
1:13:35but more broadly I speak publicly.
1:13:37I did before, that was also a part of the lawsuit,
1:13:40and I continue to do so today.
1:13:42I'm very fortunate for the invitations to speak
1:13:45because it's allowed me to live a good life in a difficult situation
1:13:49and I have no reason to expect that'll change.
1:13:51Just to be clear, we're not paying you. These are other speeches.
1:13:59What are some of the worst privacy violations left,
1:14:01and talk for example about LOVEINT
1:14:06Sure, so LOVEINT or love intelligence as it's a sort of portmanteau for,
1:14:12is the intelligence community's
1:14:17insider cute term for spying on spouses, romantic interests, exes.
1:14:24Normally we use this INT to refer to intelligence.
1:14:28There's SIGINT for signals intelligence,
1:14:30there's COMINT for communications, intelligence.
1:14:32There's HUMINT for human intelligence,
1:14:35you would think of it as the James Bond, human enabled operations.
1:14:38Well, LOVEINT is where you take this giant,
1:14:44world spanning surveillance system...
1:14:46or even just your local police force, whatever...
1:14:49and you turn it to going,
1:14:51"Hey, who did she call after she hung up the phone?"
1:14:56Or, "Where's she going?" "What is he doing?"
1:14:58And this has happened and the NSA has actually publicly confirmed
1:15:03this happened after the accusations came out, in at least 13 different instances.
1:15:09One of the particularly interesting things about this practice of LOVEINT
1:15:13is that the government doesn't typically
1:15:16charge people with crimes when they're found to do this,
1:15:20even though this is felony behavior.
1:15:22And this is true anytime analysts at the NSA or
1:15:26CIA or elsewhere in the intelligence community,
1:15:28abuse their governmentally granted authorities.
1:15:32And you might go, "Well, why is that?"
1:15:36But the answer is self-apparent when you think through it.
1:15:39The existence of this program is a secret.
1:15:43The operation of this program
1:15:45is itself possibly unlawful in the most charitable sense,
1:15:50likely unlawful in the way I would put it.
1:15:54So avowing that these programs exist,
1:15:57avowing that a government employee who had gone through a polygraph,
1:16:02gotten a top super clearance,
1:16:03was actively using these programs to spy on Americans
1:16:08or any unauthorized target like that,
1:16:14simply admitting that is possible would expose these systems
1:16:18to legal challenges. So what does the government instead do?
1:16:20It simply disciplines them, or worst case fires them.
1:16:24Shuffles them out and gets a new body and puts it in the chair.
1:16:27So this is the low level constant abuse
1:16:31that is not likely to go away because it's introduced by a human element
1:16:38in the context of this larger systemic problem.
1:16:41What else is the problem? PRISM? Turbulence?
1:16:46Well I mean, we could go on all day with this. I would say for the average listener,
1:16:55if you want to see the full scope of what's
1:16:58happening and why it matters, all of the facets of it,
1:17:01look at my book Permanent Record.
1:17:04That's why I wrote it, is for you.
1:17:06But what's not in the book,
1:17:10and what is a concern is what's coming down the road.
1:17:13I see things like companies like Amazon.
1:17:21For example, the fact that they just appointed the former NSA director
1:17:25who resigned in disgrace for having overseeing the
1:17:30mass surveillance program that now courts have condemned as unlawful,
1:17:33that should be of concern to people. Why are they doing that?
1:17:37Why does that seem like a good idea to them?
1:17:38But then when you look at what they actually do,
1:17:42Amazon's web services as it's called,
1:17:44which is a cloud provider for technical hosting on the internet,
1:17:49it runs basically like half the internet. I looked at statistics recently,
1:17:53and I think when you look at the largest sites,
1:17:56it is a substantial portion of the internet's traffic.
1:18:00This is all going through Amazon's data center.
1:18:03These are all things they can see. These are all things that can record.
1:18:06Now, when you intersect all of the different devices that Americans have,
1:18:14that they visit websites from,
1:18:17this has an internet address associated with your device.
1:18:21You likely have identifiers for the sites that you're connected to,
1:18:27you know, a username or a log in, or a phone number.
1:18:30A Facebook or a Gmail login. You also have cookies.
1:18:34These are little digital files that are planted in your browser, visiting a site,
1:18:39which allows them to show you different ads to keep you logged in,
1:18:42different kind of things.
1:18:46Now, this means you can track to a more detailed degree
1:18:52what people are looking at on the internet,
1:18:54what they're visiting, what they're searching for,
1:18:56what their interests are, what their political leanings are.
1:18:59You can do sentiment analysis,
1:19:00even without looking at anyone on the individual level,
1:19:04by taking these identifiers, these locations,
1:19:07these associations and affiliations, where they were in the world,
1:19:11because their location services were turned on.
1:19:13Who they were there with,
1:19:15this is happening more in the context of COVID tracing programs.
1:19:23Then you go with all this rich information
1:19:26that Amazon has about purchasing decisions,
1:19:28about financial information, they know what your card is.
1:19:31They know what your shipping address is.
1:19:34They know all of these things and you start to collate these together.
1:19:37And now we see Amazon,
1:19:38because of their Alexa or Echo or whatever these things are called
1:19:43these days, they hire Keith Alexander,
1:19:46they implement this thing called the Sidewalk program or whatever,
1:19:48where it is listening not just to you in your home.
1:19:52It's not just listening for your devices,
1:19:54but it's listening for the radio information provided by
1:19:58other people's cell phones by the wifi access point
1:20:02in the unit next to you in an apartment building, or on vacation or at a hotel.
1:20:06And all of these things are being collated by Amazon and it's all being sent back.
1:20:10What they are doing is they're getting a broader and more detailed sense
1:20:18of the world's identity, individual identities.
1:20:27Collectively and individually, they are cross-referencing
1:20:33them with basically intellectual interests
1:20:35and pursuits and purchasing information. This is called enriching it,
1:20:39and then they're sharing it.
1:20:41They're applying it to uses that we don't know about.
1:20:43They're partnering increasingly with police through subsidiaries.
1:20:48We see things like Google and they ring doorbells and all that.
1:20:52What this means is we're entering increasingly a quantified world
1:20:57where everywhere you go, everything you do,
1:21:00everyone you interact with and everything you are interested in
1:21:06is now being pre-judged.
1:21:10It is being collected and recorded and analyzed and assessed.
1:21:13And not by humans, we don't have the benefit of human judgment here.
1:21:16An algorithm makes a decision about whether you're desirable or undesirable,
1:21:20about whether the things you're doing are good or bad.
1:21:23And we don't know how that is being applied yet,
1:21:25but we do know once they have this information,
1:21:28we can't take it back from them under the laws as they are written today.
1:21:33The United States of America is one of the only, if not the only
1:21:37developed democracy in the world today that does not have a basic privacy law.
1:21:46We have the constitution
1:21:48Would that make a difference?
1:21:49Here's the problem
1:21:52Americans by and large don't care
1:21:56and I mostly don't care.
1:21:58Alexa, are you spying on me?
1:22:04Actually she answers, "No, I'm not spying."
1:22:11So she's still going off.
1:22:14John Oliver had to do a bit with you where the only way he could
1:22:18get people interested in the invasion of privacy
1:22:21was to point out that this little light here, where I see the green light,
1:22:26it isn't always on if the NSA is spying on us.
1:22:29And they might take pictures of our private parts and show it to people,
1:22:33only that got a reaction.
1:22:35The government should not be able to look at dick pictures
1:22:38If the government was looking at pictures of Gordon’s penis
1:22:41I definitely feel it would be an invasion of my privacy
1:22:45They should never ever, the US government, have a picture of my dick.
1:22:51Yeah. This is something that I encounter constantly.
1:22:56And again, I've spoken in places all over the world.
1:23:00All kinds of different countries, all kinds of different audiences,
1:23:03all kinds of different age groups
1:23:05and I typically hear this as a question being asked by older people.
1:23:13The interesting thing is it's formulated a lot of times as young people don't care.
1:23:19They're on Facebook, they're on Instagram.
1:23:22They're putting this all out there on social media.
1:23:26And the reality is when I talk to audiences and I have these conversations,
1:23:29young people care more about privacy,
1:23:35and they care more about these intrusions.
1:23:38Because just as my generation grew up with the web as it was
1:23:42in the 1.0 version, and now I'm aging out of the youth,
1:23:47even though I still consider myself young enough, right?
1:23:51They know this web 2.0,
1:23:55this interactive web where you aren't just reading things on static sites,
1:23:59but you're interacting with them, you're posting, you're enriching,
1:24:03but that sharing is selective.
1:24:06And this is clear when you look to these big,
1:24:08basically beauty pageant sites like Instagram,
1:24:11where people are putting themselves through filters,
1:24:14they're showing their wonderful dinner.
1:24:16They're not showing their garbage piece of burnt toast in the morning.
1:24:21Why?
1:24:22They're doing that because they understand that they are selectively sharing.
1:24:26They're looking at experiences in their lives, the parts of themselves, as thoughts.
1:24:31Parts of a conversation that they want to bring other people into.
1:24:35They want to invite you into this.
1:24:37They don't give you everything and what is happening is that trust,
1:24:42that openness is being exploited by
1:24:46companies that could not sell us products
1:24:49when they commercialized the web 1.0.
1:24:52Do you remember the tech boom and Pets.com.
1:24:55Younger listeners have no idea what we were talking about,
1:24:58but the early forays into the internet were not wildly successful.
1:25:05There was a boom and a bust
1:25:06because they were trying to sell us things that we did not need.
1:25:09Once they realized that there was only so much they could sell us,
1:25:14they went searching for a new product,
1:25:16that led to the new web and their new product is us.
1:25:21We are not the users of this system. We are being used by this system.
1:25:27And the reason that you say you don't care about this is...
1:25:32and I say this without any offense intended whatsoever...
1:25:35is because you do not understand the way that that system is
1:25:39being used against you.
1:25:40That's not due to a failing in you as an individual, that is by design.
1:25:45These companies do not want you to understand how it is being used.
1:25:48They work with lawyers-
1:25:50How is it being used against me?
1:25:52It's profiling.
1:25:53It is basically creating what's called a pattern of life and a social graph,
1:26:01not just for you, but for everyone.
1:26:03This means that even if you're trying to do something anonymously,
1:26:08let's say you have something like a cancer scare,
1:26:12and do you want to look up an oncology clinic, you want to call a doctor.
1:26:17Or there's a Planned Parenthood thing happening with a young woman,
1:26:23all of these different things, you just want a moment to seek help.
1:26:29You're in a vulnerable state you try to open a private browser window...
1:26:33by the way that doesn't work for the kind of tracking that
1:26:37we're talking about here on the network level, just for anybody listening,
1:26:39but a lot of people think it does.
1:26:42And they re-associate your identity based on what's called a fingerprint
1:26:48that they've established of your browser, of your device, of your logins.
1:26:51Google's doing these things on your phone.
1:26:53Apple's doing these things on your phone.
1:26:55To different extents,
1:26:57but the idea is they're trying to encapsulate not just what you are,
1:27:03but how you think, how you live, who you interact with
1:27:08to make you a value in a database, in a set,
1:27:12in a solution that can then be influenced and controlled.
1:27:16When you asked what they're doing to you, right?
1:27:20This is where people start to lose it
1:27:22because it feels like an abstraction,
1:27:23it's not clear to them because they haven't seen
1:27:25a neighbor get marched off on the street,
1:27:29as happened in, like, World War II, kind of Nazi uprising context.
1:27:34Where you've got datasets that were constructed for a census
1:27:39by a group like IBM and then it's abused and applied to a different purpose.
1:27:43And we went, "Well, it's harmless. It's a census. It's something that you want."
1:27:49You don't see how these things are going to be applied later.
1:27:52But what they are doing today, in the most concrete form,
1:27:57as I said, is they are collapsing everything about you
1:28:01into a known value that can then be manipulated.
1:28:07That is beginning and the end of the system.
1:28:10They want to make you controllable.
1:28:11We talked about mass surveillance before and how it's not effective
1:28:14in the context of surveillance.
1:28:15What is it effective for? It is this kind of intelligence/surveillance
1:28:23which is a means of influence, right?
1:28:27People ask me about terrorism, and they go,
1:28:29"Why weren't these effective for stopping terrorism?"
1:28:33And it's because they were never designed to stop terrorism.
1:28:36They are about diplomatic manipulation.
1:28:39They are about social influence.
1:28:41They are about an informational advantage.
1:28:43They are about power.
1:28:45The corporate variant is about the same thing.
1:28:51When you look at all of these things we've talked about in the past,
1:28:53like election interference,
1:28:55and this last wave was really ugly with political advertising and targeting,
1:29:00that is just the smallest part of a very big game.
1:29:04The bottom line is power is derived from many means.
1:29:10It can be from violence. It can be from law.
1:29:14It can be from money. Financial influence, right?
1:29:19But the new means of influence.
1:29:20The one that is most easily hidden,
1:29:23and the one that is the most reliable at scale,
1:29:27which is you can't buy off everyone in the world
1:29:29and you can't murder them all if you want to have something to control.
1:29:32And even with law, there are law breakers, right?
1:29:34There are the edge cases there. With information,
1:29:39applied at the right time, in the right way,
1:29:41you can change behaviors.
1:29:43When you see a banner ad,
1:29:45they're trying to shape your behavior to sell you a new pair of shoes,
1:29:49but they can also control what you see and, in enough time,
1:29:55and this has been studied by academics, what you believe.
1:30:00Facebook, which is a big company.
1:30:03We're not talking like a small startup that's a little bit shady here.
1:30:07They ran their own psychological studies on the current population
1:30:14to see if they could make you angry.
1:30:16They intentionally wanted to manipulate their users
1:30:19It works! They did!
1:30:21And it worked. Exactly. You are correct.
1:30:25This is controlling human behavior by a private company.
1:30:29For what end? Just to see if they could.
1:30:31Well, the next variants, and this was years ago,
1:30:35are not going to be just to see if they could.
1:30:38It is going to be for their advantage.
1:30:40It is going to be to shape laws, it is going to be to shape elections,
1:30:44and it is going to be to shape individual outcomes.
1:30:48They are going to change lives.
1:30:51It might be good for you, right?
1:30:53You might get a job that you didn't expect to have.
1:30:55But it could also be very, very bad for you,
1:30:59and I think for a significant portion of the population, it will be.
1:31:02I don't feel threatened.
1:31:03You make a good case why I should.
1:31:06I'm not scared of Amazon or Facebook
1:31:09because yes they want to manipulate me, but-
1:31:15I am a little scared of the algorithm and how it might divide America by
1:31:19feeding us more of what we believe and push us apart more.
1:31:23But basically they want my money, and to get my money
1:31:27in a free market, a company has to give me what I want.
1:31:31And that's a good thing.
1:31:33Even if we look at this from the most libertarian perspective,
1:31:37when we talk about the free market operating,
1:31:39we are presuming that there is open competition.
1:31:42We are presuming that there is fair competition.
1:31:45We do not live in a perfect world.
1:31:46We do not have the benefit of a perfect market.
1:31:50There are monopolies that exist.
1:31:52There are companies that exploit flaws in regulations
1:31:57and the moats that have been granted to them,
1:32:01and it's hard to find a better example of this
1:32:05than a lot of the internet giants as they exist today.
1:32:09And so I think it's fair to recognize that, even though, yeah, free market.
1:32:15Even though we have consumer choice, even though we can do other things,
1:32:18that only is true where there is an alternative,
1:32:22where there is a reasonable competitor that can provide the same service.
1:32:26Or that it's even possible to launch a competitor to do these things.
1:32:29And I don't believe this is true in that larger sense.
1:32:33But as you say... So you were saying, if I heard it correctly,
1:32:37that you're not super afraid of these things in the specific sense.
1:32:43You understand the general sense. You have these fears.
1:32:47But what can you do to protect yourself?
1:32:51This is always a question that I get.
1:32:53And it's very difficult to answer because the advice changes year to year.
1:32:58Because technology is dynamic. The devices are changing.
1:33:00The protocols are changing. The services are changing.
1:33:03The platforms are changing. The laws are changing.
1:33:05And so I don't like to give specific advice because it dates very quickly,
1:33:11and this video will live forever with
1:33:13all of the rest of the things on our permanent record.
1:33:16What I will tell you is there are organizations out there
1:33:20that are dedicated to creating these kind of guides
1:33:24for how to protect yourself and keeping them up to date.
1:33:27You can search for sites like privacy tools,
1:33:32like surveillance self-defense guides from the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
1:33:37the American Civil Liberties Union creates guides.
1:33:39The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which I'm the president of,
1:33:43creates a guide for working journalists.
1:33:48But largely the most important thing to protect yourself
1:33:52is to recognize you are not going to win an arms race
1:33:56against the richest companies in history and the most
1:34:03powerful states that the world has ever seen.
1:34:07The surveillance problem, first and foremost,
1:34:11is a political problem.
1:34:14Because it is enabled by a political class that does not share our burdens.
1:34:18It does not share our struggles.
1:34:20And it exempts itself from this gaze.
1:34:24It is not held to the same standard of behavior,
1:34:27the same level of accountability as you and I,
1:34:30and this system, this knowledge,
1:34:32this influence will increasingly be used to shape our lives while
1:34:36excusing them from these same methods of control.
1:34:39So political action, I think, and concern is actually the root of resolving this.
1:34:45And recognizing what are the ways that this can be changed?
1:34:49What is the single point of failure
1:34:52that all of these exploitative practices are relying on?
1:34:57That allows this system, as it is, to come into being.
1:35:01And we talked before about these silos.
1:35:03The Google stash, the Facebook stash,
1:35:05everybody's private records that are raining in there,
1:35:09being used in different ways,
1:35:10and the government can sort of open the lids
1:35:12to the different salt shakers and help themselves.
1:35:18Well, how did those silos get filled?
1:35:20We have, in the United States, as I said, no basic privacy law.
1:35:27The fourth amendment binds the Federal government and the state government,
1:35:33but it does not define or restrain these companies
1:35:37that are basically acting in willful conspiracy with regulators,
1:35:42where each hand washes the other in a sort of monopoly position.
1:35:47There is, I believe, a common failure in the laws as they are interpreted
1:35:56by the courts of the United States today.
1:35:58In a 1970s-era case... this sounds random, but I promise
1:36:02it comes together very quickly... called Smith versus Maryland,
1:36:07and it led to the birth of what is called the Third Party Doctrine.
1:36:11If you look back in American history,
1:36:15into what law enforcement could get through investigations,
1:36:19they were strictly limited to two categories of gains.
1:36:23They were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime.
1:36:26If they were chasing a burglar, they could get a warrant.
1:36:30The warrant would allow them to go in the house, go in the business, whatever.
1:36:34They could get the bag of loot, the fruits that they won.
1:36:36They could take the crowbar, the mask, the gloves,
1:36:40the instrumentalities of the crime.
1:36:42And they could use this as evidence to convict.
1:36:45They could not go to that burglar's landlord and get records of payment.
1:36:51They could not go to the phone company
1:36:53and seize the phone company's records.
1:36:55Because they were neither fruits nor instrumentalities.
1:36:58This new world, where the government can demand
1:37:03private entities' private records about customers
1:37:10or even your own records about yourself, your diaries or whatever,
1:37:13is a very, very new thing. It's about 60 years old, right?
1:37:19And in this Smith versus Maryland case in the 1970s,
1:37:22the government interpreted one case of the cops
1:37:26investigating basically a man making harassing phone calls to a woman,
1:37:32where this was an individual who was suspect of wrongdoing,
1:37:35the cops went to the phone company
1:37:38and said, "Can we get his phone records to see if he called this house?"
1:37:43because the woman saw his license plate as he drove by,
1:37:46sort of leering at her house, and thought it was him,
1:37:49and the cops agreed. Phone company turned it over,
1:37:52and sure enough, it was him.
1:37:54They caught the guy making the harassing phone calls.
1:37:56This seems fair. But they did it without a warrant.
1:38:01And when this went all the way up to the Supreme Court,
1:38:04because the Supreme Court knew he was a bad guy, knew he did a bad thing,
1:38:06they didn't want to let him walk.
1:38:09And so they tried to create a paradigm in which they
1:38:13could go to the phone company, could do this,
1:38:15they could give this person's records of what they were doing over to the cops.
1:38:19Without a warrant. And this was called the Third Party Doctrine.
1:38:23The government said that, because these records did not belong to the man,
1:38:28even though they were records about him,
1:38:31they belonged to the company because the company created them.
1:38:35That man had no privacy interest in those records.
1:38:38Therefore, he had no fourth amendment protections
1:38:41regarding those records.
1:38:42Well, in the decades since the 1970s when the court could not have imagined
1:38:48the world that we live in today,
1:38:50that our movements could be tracked by our phones,
1:38:52that companies have records of everything about us,
1:38:55the government has repeatedly leaned on this one single outdate court opinion
1:39:01of one guy making scary phone calls to go, "No one in the country,
1:39:08no one in the world has a privacy interest
1:39:11in any records that are created about them
1:39:15but held by a third party." If that changes, the surveillance ends.
1:39:19Ends? Really? People won't find a way to get around it?
1:39:23I think legally,
1:39:25if you recognize that people have a property interest or a privacy interest
1:39:31in information about them, that means it's no longer the company's records.
1:39:35They're your records. And so you now are in the driver's seat.
1:39:39Yes, Amazon could create a record about you with your consent,
1:39:42but you control it. You can revoke it. You can destroy it.
1:39:46And this is what has changed. Right now, we have a non-consensual relationship.
1:39:53It is premised on the illusion of consent, the idea that you clicked OK to continue,
1:39:58but that doesn't work in any other contract law sense.
1:40:04You can't click OK to bind yourself into servitude for the rest of the life.
1:40:09You can't click OK to be victimized repeatedly anywhere else except the internet.
1:40:15And I think as soon as we recognize that this is not proper
1:40:20and is not appropriate life will be better for all of us.
1:40:26Because we will have more control over our own destinies
1:40:28and over our own stories.
1:40:30I confess that I'm a bad example when it comes to what you say about worrying
1:40:35about this, in that I've been on television since I was in my 20s,
1:40:41calling businessmen crooks, and I figured I had enemies, and
1:40:48some of them wanted to get me, and so I've been very careful,
1:40:52and when I got a cancer scare, I wrote a column about it,
1:40:56so I figure I have no privacy, really. And I've kind of
1:41:02come to terms with that.
1:41:03But there ought to be a private sphere, where people could go.
1:41:07It's a fair point. I will say there is a difference between you
1:41:11and shall we say the average person?
1:41:13Because just like we talked about public officials and private citizens,
1:41:17we also have this other category of public figures.
1:41:20And you aren't nobody. You have a platform.
1:41:24You have a voice. You have influence. You have friends.
1:41:27You have associations. You have connections.
1:41:31And more importantly, you derive your power,
1:41:34I think, in society from sharing that voice and using that voice,
1:41:39but not everybody is as clever as you, as well spoken as you, right?
1:41:44And has the history and the skill set that you do.
1:41:49And I think recognizing that there are different people in this society
1:41:54with different capabilities isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing.
1:41:59It's okay for someone to say they do not care about this, that, or the other.
1:42:04But the way rights work is it's not for the average person,
1:42:10and it's not especially for the most privileged among us, right?
1:42:15Bill Gates doesn't need rights.
1:42:17Bill Gates writes the laws, right? Bill Gates can hire his own army.
1:42:22Rights are for the least among us.
1:42:24They are for the minorities. They are for the strange.
1:42:27They're for the exposed.
1:42:28They're for the people who stand out and are different.
1:42:30Rights exist to protect the minority from the majority
1:42:35because it is our differences that lead to progress, and those differences,
1:42:41those disagreements, those new ideas always start out as a minority of one.
1:42:48And just like a seedling, we, in free societies,
1:42:52make an intentional decision to structure our systems,
1:42:55our laws, to protect and shelter these weirdos,
1:43:01so that once they have been tested, we can benefit from those ideas.
1:43:05Well, I thank you very much for giving us lots of time here.
1:43:09Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be with you.
1:43:11Thank you, Edward Snowden.
1:43:13Stay free.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of The FULL Snowden Interview by John Stossel, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 15,652 words across 1,649 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.