The Edward Snowden affair has seriously cooled down now and that is
a good thing. After all, the content is long stale and no longer
relevant as secrecy if much of it ever was. What was outed was the
illegal collection of all data by the NSA. We needed to know that.
The data itself is naturally so massive that it is massivily
inaccessible unless you can target what you know already. You must
miss what you do not know.
There is a reason wire taps are rarely used in crime work. Just who
wants to listen attentively to a couple hundred hours of anyone's
banal conversations to pick up a few minutes of meaning? It really
has to be mr Big to put up with all that.
The same holds true for all this data. Worse, your real targets can
thwart search programs with simple codes that substitute the illegal
item with a perfectly legal one. The only folks that can understand
are the two people communicating.
Edward Snowden
Speaks: A Sneak Peek at an Exclusive Interview
We recently met with
the courageous whistleblower for over three hours in Moscow for a
wide-ranging conversation on surveillance, technology and politics.
Katrina vanden
Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen
October 10, 2014
Stephen F. Cohen,
Edward Snowden and Katrina vanden Heuvel
On October
6, Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and
contributing editor Stephen Cohen sat down in Moscow for a rare and
wide-ranging conversation with Edward Snowden, whose courageous
actions exposing the extent of warrantless surveillance of millions
living in the United States by the NSA have sparked a critical,
unprecedented and transformative debate about mass surveillance.
Among other issues, they discussed the price Snowden has paid for
speaking truth to power, his definition of patriotism and
accountability, how his experience has changed his view of US
history and his frustration over America’s political system. What
follows are a few passages from their conversation. A longer edited
version will be published in a forthcoming issue and at
TheNation.com.
Katrina vanden
Heuvel: The Nation, many years ago, did an issue on patriotism
and asked about a hundred people—how do you define patriotism?
You’ve been called many names, and you’ve been called a patriot,
but how do you, personally, define patriotism?
Edward Snowden: So,
in terms of patriotism, I would say that what defines patriotism,
for me, is the idea that one elevates—or they act to benefit—the
country, right? That’s distinct from acting to benefit the
government, and that distinction, that’s increasingly lost today.
You’re not patriotic, just because you back whoever is in power
today. You’re not patriotic because you back their policies.
You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people
in your country, in your community, in your family, those around
you.
And sometimes that
means making hard choices, choices that work against your own
personal interest. You know, people sometimes say I broke an “oath
of secrecy,” that was one of the early charges leveled against me.
But it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath
of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You’re
asked to sign a civil agreement, called “Standard Form 312,”
which basically says, if you disclose classified information they
can sue you, they can do this, that and the other. And you stand at
risk of going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and
that’s the oath of service. The oath of service is not
to secrecy; it’s to the Constitution—to protect it against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. That’s the oath that I
kept, that James Clapper and Keith Alexander did not.
Stephen Cohen: You
signed that?
ES: You raise your
hand, and you give the oath in your class when you “on-board.”
All incoming officers are made to do it when you work for the
Central Intelligence Agency. At least, that’s where I took the
oath—as well as another in the military.
But “whistleblowing,”
as a label, calling someone a whistleblower, I think that does
them—it does all of us—a disservice, because it “otherizes.”
Using the language of heroism, calling Dan Ellsberg a hero, you
know, all these people who made great sacrifices—what they have
done is heroic—but to distinguish them from the civic duty they
have performed by saying they are heroes excuses the rest of us from
the same civic duty to stand up and say when we see something wrong,
when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, when
we witness the people in power abusing that power, engaging in
massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United
States. We have to stand up and say something, or we are
party to that bad action.
KvH: In light of your
personal experience—the risks you’ve taken, you’re sitting
here in Moscow. When you think of a young man or woman who might
want to take comparable risks, do you think your experience
encourages or discourages that?
ES: I think when you
compare my example to the example of Chelsea Manning—who revealed
the Iraq war logs, which showed that there were attacks against
civilians, whether intentional or unintentional, that had been
concealed by the military; the fact that there were people being
held indefinitely that classified documents had said did not
represent a threat to anyone or any state or any government anywhere
but were instead being held for intelligence purposes and would
never face any charges against them. You know, these are the kinds
of things voters in a democracy need to know in order to make
meaningful choices. But when they were brought forward—regardless
of your opinion on how it was done or whether it could’ve been
done better or if it was a good or bad thing—Manning got
thirty-five years in prison. Meanwhile, I’m still free. I talk to
people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I’m able to
participate in the debate. I’ve been able to campaign for reform,
and I’m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did
and succeed.
There’s a danger
when governments go too far to punish people for actions that are
dissent rather than a real threat to the nation; they delegitimize
not just their systems of government, not just their systems of
justice, but the very legitimacy of their government. Because when
we bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly
intended to work in the public interest, we deny them the
opportunity, the ability, to even mount a public-interest defense.
The espionage charges they brought against me, for example,
explicitly deny the ability to make a public-interest defense. There
were no whistleblower protections that would’ve protected me—and
that’s known for everybody who’s in the intelligence community.
There are no proper channels for making this information available
when the system fails comprehensively.
The government would
assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the
intelligence community should bring their concerns about these
programs to the ones most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely
on those people to correct the problems that those people
intentionally authorized. It’s clear that doesn’t work. We see
in the case of Thomas Drake, who brought forward serious evidence of
waste, fraud and abuse in the government and the mass surveillance
programs, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis and other
whistleblowers in the past, going all the way back to Dan Ellsberg.
The government is not concerned with damage to national security
because in each of these cases, damage did not result.
At the trial of
Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific
damage that had been caused by a massive revelation of classified
information. The charges are a reaction to the government’s
embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities,
otherwise they would substantiate what the harms were. We’re now
more than a year on from the NSA revelations, and despite numerous
testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes
from anonymous officials who have an axe to grind, not a single US
official, not a single representative of the United States
government has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm
caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that Keith
Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, said
this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation.
KvH: Are you looking
forward to Laura Poitras’s movie [Citizenfour]? I think it is
going to have a big impact.
ES: She’s very
impressive. Of all of the journalists that I’ve worked with, she
was actually the most conscious of operational security out of
anybody. I don’t know if it’s because she had spent time in the
war zone or what. But she was very rigorous in how she followed
everything, and that was really encouraging. It’s rare for me to
meet somebody who can be more paranoid when it comes to electronic
security than I can be.
Katrina vanden
Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen
October 10, 2014
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