The NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, pictured in a Hong Kong hotel. (Photo: The Guardian)
At
11 AM EST today, The Guardian hosted a live question and answer session
with the Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security
Administrator contractor.
The transcript follows:
Glenn Greenwald
11:07am ET
Let's begin with these:
1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?
2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how
many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they
still exist?
Snowden's Answer:
1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other
whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of
a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that
the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an
unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to
volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than
in it.
Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against
legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked
civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private
businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal
acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a
technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems
crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of
them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is
running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent
people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a
country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a
potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our
own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a
government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is
meaningless.
2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be
able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and
it cannot be stopped.
* * *
Ewen Macaskill
11:13am ET
I should have asked you this when I saw you but never got round to
it........Why did you just not fly direct to Iceland if that is your
preferred country for asylum?
Snowden's Answer:
Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare
their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a
distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel
with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal
framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong
Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the
public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not
put that past the current US administration.
* * *
ActivistGal
11:17am ET
You have said
HERE
that you admire both Ellsberg and Manning, but have argued that there
is one important distinction between yourself and the army private...
"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure
that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are
all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't
turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."
Are you suggesting that Manning indiscriminately dumped secrets into the hands of Wikileaks and that he intended to harm people?
Snowden's Answer:
No, I'm not. Wikileaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they
carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment
of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the
failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase. However, I
understand that many media outlets used the argument that "documents
were dumped" to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a
valid assertion here.
* * *
D. Aram Mushegian II
11:20am
Did you lie about your salary? What is the issue there? Why did you
tell Glenn Greenwald that your salary was $200,000 a year, when it was
only $122,000 (according to the firm that fired you.)
Snowden's Answer:
I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not
all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about
earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take
pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most
I've been paid.
* * *
Gabrielaweb
11:23am ET
Why did you wait to release the documents if you said you wanted to
tell the world about the NSA programs since before Obama became
president?
Snowden's Answer:
Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would
lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes.
Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming
power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law,
deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the
political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we
see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.
* * *
Anthony De Rosa
11:27am ET
1.) Define in as much detail as you can what "direct access" means.
2.) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?
Snowden's Answer:
1.) More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in
general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has
access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for
anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id
(IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this
are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time.
Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake
justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only
5% of those performed.
2.) NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of
reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its
section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and
viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a
warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of
the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications.
Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand
the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would
consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the
"warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a
reliable judge with a rubber stamp.
* * *
Glenn Greenwald follow-up:
When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your
communications" - what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of
it, or the actual content?
Snowden's Answer:
Both. If I target for example an email address,
for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you,
Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content,
headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time
- and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.
* * *
HaraldK
11:41am ET
What are your thoughts on Google's and Facebook's denials? Do you
think that they're honestly in the dark about PRISM, or do you think
they're compelled to lie?
Perhaps this is a better question to a lawyer like Greenwald, but: If
you're presented with a secret order that you're forbidding to reveal
the existence of, what will they actually do if you simply refuse to
comply (without revealing the order)?
Snowden's Answer:
Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and
more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific
language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the
clout of these companies, we're finally beginning to see more
transparency and better details about these programs for the first time
since their inception.
They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in
regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from
ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and
Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence
Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?
* * *
MonaHol
11:55am ET
Ed Snowden, I thank you for your brave service to our country.
Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this:
I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap
anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the
President if I had a personal email.
Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate?
Snowden's Answer:
Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections
(and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no
protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very
weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our
ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what
is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and
can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get
ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your
protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications
just because of the IP they're tagged with.
More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a
distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicion-less
surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing
95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We
hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created
equal."
* * *
Spencer Ackerman
12:04pm ET
Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have
or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other
governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you?
Snowden's Answer:
This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public,
as the US media has a knee-jerk "RED CHINA!" reaction to anything
involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of
US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why
wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a
palace petting a phoenix by now.
* * *
12:10pm ET
Snowden's Answer:
US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that
could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or
directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did
just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show
was not unveiled by PRISM.
Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs
began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks
were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless
surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how
many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask
yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more
Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most
sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.
Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by
men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us
the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the
way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and
maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis
dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can
give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like
him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a
class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I
would have finished high school.
* * *
Mathius1
12:12pm ET
Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA surveillance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?
Snowden's Answer:
Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one
of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security
is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.
* * *
12:24PM ET
Snowden's Answer:
Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all
examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest
whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in
future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore
wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience
forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better
whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even
harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find
themselves facing an equally harsh public response.
This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to
appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of
law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history
as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than
leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a
special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the
dangerous "State Secrets" privilege, and, upon preparing to leave
office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate
their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review
the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be
no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny -
they should be setting the example of transparency.
* * *
Ryan Latvaitis
12:28pm ET
What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified
information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence
apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?
What evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is
unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit
and defined court order from FISC?
Snowden's Answer:
This country is worth dying for.
* * *
AhBrightWings
12:34pm ET
My question: given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms
of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you
absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now
feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series
of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people
contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha
moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism.
Snowden's Answer:
I imagine everyone's experience is different, but for me, there was
no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior
officials to Congress - and therefore the American people - and the
realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly
supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the
position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence -
baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a
subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is
not informed.
* * *
Follow-up from the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman:
12:37pm ET
Regarding whether you have secretly given classified information to
the Chinese government, some are saying you didn't answer clearly - can
you give a flat no?
Snowden's Answer:
No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with
the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.
* * *
Question:
12:41pm ET
So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala
Snowden's Answer:
Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media
now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my
girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of
suspicion-less surveillance in human history.
* * *
Final question from Glenn Greenwald:
12:43pm ET
Anything else you’d like to add?
Snowden's Answer:
Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because
you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay.
The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for
individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for
the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a
special immunity to its surveillance.
# # #
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