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I Wasn't Trying To Change The Laws Or Slow Down The Machine. Maybe I Should Have. My Critics Say That I Was Not Revolutionary Enough. But They Forget That I Am A Product Of The System. I Worked Those Desks, I Know Those People And I Still Have Some Faith In Them, That The Services Can Be Reformed.

-Edward Snowden

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I Wasn't Trying To

Edward Snowden

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I Wasn't Trying To Change The Laws Or Slow Down The Machine. Maybe I Should Have. My Critics Say That I Was Not Revolutionary Enough. But They Forget That I Am A Product Of The System. I Worked Those Desks, I Know Those People And I Still Have Some Faith In Them, That The Services Can Be Reformed.

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We Have Seen Enough Criminality On The Part Of Government. It Is Hypocritical To Make This Allegation Against Me. They Have Narrowed The Public Sphere Of Influence.

Sphere Of Influence

People Sometimes Say I Broke An Oath Of Secrecy - 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 Are Asked To Sign A Civil Agreement, Called A 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 Risk Going To Jail.

I Would Argue That Security And Liberty, Security And Privacy Are Not Actually Opposing. The Only Place Those Can Be Oppositional Is In The Realm Of Rhetoric But Not Fact.

Bulk Collection Means All Of Your Communications Are Being Secretly Intercepted. They Are Being Stolen As They Cross India, And They're Being Stored In These Silos So That They Can Be Rifled Through At The Convenience Of Secret Agents, Basically.

We've Seen A Departure From The Traditional Work Of The National Security Agency. They've Become Sort Of The National Hacking Agency, The National Surveillance Agency. And They've Lost Sight Of The Fact That Everything They Do Is Supposed To Make Us More Secure As A Nation And A Society.

The Majority Of Terrorist Attacks That Have Been Disrupted In The United States Have Been Disrupted Due To Things Like The Time Square Bomber, Who Was Caught By A Hotdog Vendor, Not A Mass Surveillance Program, Not A Cyber-espionage Campaign.

I Considered Bringing Forward Information About These Surveillance Programs Prior To The Election, But I Held Off Because I Believed That [barack] Obama Was Genuine When He Said He Was Going To Change Things. I Wanted To Give The Democratic Process Time To Work.

Custom Developed Digital Weapons, Cyber Weapons Nowadays Typically Chain Together A Number Of Zero-day Exploits That Are Targeted Against The Specific Site, The Specific Target That They Want To Hit. But It Depends, This Level Of Sophistication, On The Budget And The Quality Of The Actor Who's Instigating The Attack. If It's A Country That's Less Poor Or Less Sophisticated, It'll Be A Less Sophisticated Attack.

So When They Say I'm A Low-level Systems Administrator, That I Don't Know What I'm Talking About, I'd Say It's Somewhat Misleading.

The Charges [government] Brought Against Me, For Example, Explicitly Denied My Ability To Make A Public-interest Defense.

I Love My Country. I Love My Family. And I Have Dedicated My Life To Both Of Them.

I Love My Family

America Should Be Cooling Down The Tensions In The Internet, Making It A More Trusted Environment, Making It A More Secure Environment, Making It A More Reliable Environment, Because That's The Foundation Of Our Economy And Our Future.

Terrorism Kills Far Fewer People Than Cigarettes, Or Alcohol, Or Car Accidents. But We Don't See Ourselves Restructuring Society And Lives In Order To Make Those Threats Go Away.

Before 2013, If You Said The Nsa Was Making Records Of Everybody's Phone Calls And The [government Communications Headquarters] Was Monitoring Lawyers And Journalists, People Raised Eyebrows And Called You A Conspiracy Theorist. Those Days Are Over.

What We Need To Do Is We Need To Create New International Standards Of Behavior - Not Just National Laws, Because This Is A Global Problem. We Can't Just Fix It In The United States, Because There Are Other Countries That Don't Follow U.s. Laws. We Have To Create International Standards That Say That Cyber Attacks Should Only Ever Occur When It Is Absolutely Necessary.

I Don't Want To Hide. If I Get Arrested, I Get Arrested.

When It Comes To Social Policies, I Believe Women Have The Right To Make Their Own Choices, And Inequality Is A Really Important Issue.

The Issue Is We're Losing Leverage. Governments Are Increasingly Getting More Power And We Are Increasingly Losing Our Ability To Control That Power, And Even To Be Aware Of That Power.

Are Our Competitors - For Example, China, Which Is A Deeply Authoritarian Nation - Becoming More Authoritarian Or More Liberal Over Time?

If The United States Is Promoting The Development Of Exploits, Of Vulnerabilities, Of Insecurity In This Critical Infrastructure, And We're Not Fixing It When We Find It, Instead We Put It On The Shelf So We Can Use It The Next Time We Want To Launch An Attack Against Some Foreign Country. We're Leaving Ourselves At Risk.

Your Rights Matter, Because You Never Know When You're Going To Need Them.

We Hack Everyone Everywhere. We Like To Make A Distinction Between Us And The Others. But We Are In Almost Every Country In The World. We Are Not At War With These Countries.

All I Was Was A Mechanism.

It's Interesting That You Mention [andrei] Sakharov's Creative Axis - He Had Produced Something For The Government That He Then Realized Was Something Other Than He Intended. That's Something [nsa Whistleblower] Bill Binney And I Share.

Every Time We Walk On To The Field Of Battle And The Field Of Battle Is The Internet, It Doesn't Matter If We Shoot Our Opponents A Hundred Times And Hit Every Time. As Long As They've Hit Us Once, We've Lost, Because The U.s. Is So Much More Reliant On Those Systems.

I Think That's Actually What's Missing From Government, For The Most Part. We've Got A Lot Of Policy People, But We Have No Technologists, Even Though Technology Is Such A Big Part Of Our Lives. It's Just Amazing, Because Even These Big Silicon Valley Companies, The Masters Of The Universe Or Whatever, Haven't Engaged With Washington Until Recently. They're Still Playing Catch-up.

What We're Really Debating Is Not Security Versus Liberty, It's Security Versus Surveillance. When We Talk About Electronic Interception, The Way That Surveillance Works Is It Preys On The Weakness Of Protections That Are Being Applied To All Of Our Communications. The Manner In Which They're Protected.

Acting Government Officials, They Said They Wanted - They Would Be Happy, They Would Love To Put A Bullet In My Head, To Poison Me As I Was Returning From The Grocery Store, And Have Me Die In The Shower.

We Have To Be Able To Ask Questions In Order To Answer Them.

I Wasn't Trying To Change The Laws Or Slow Down The Machine. Maybe I Should Have. My Critics Say That I Was Not Revolutionary Enough. But They Forget That I Am A Product Of The System. I Worked Those Desks, I Know Those People And I Still Have Some Faith In Them, That The Services Can Be Reformed.

In The United States The White House Has Appointed Two Different Independent Panels Who Had Full Access To Classified Information For The Last 10 Years That Master Balance Has Been In Place In The United States, And They Found That Despite Intercepting The Calls - Everybody In The Country, - It Had Never Stopped A Single Terrorist Attack. So The Question Is, Why Would These Officials Be Pursuing These Policies, If We Know They Don't Work, If They Don't Stop Terrorism?

It's Important To Remember When You Start Doing Things Like Attacking Hospitals Through The Internet, When You Start Attacking Things Like Internet Exchange Points, When Something Goes Wrong, People Can Die. If A Hospital's Infrastructure Is Affected, Lifesaving Equipment Turns Off.

By Putting These Sort Of Lines Around What Ideas Are Proper Or Improper, We Lose Things.

I Don't Want To Live In A World Where There's No Privacy, And Therefore No Room For Intellectual Exploration And Creativity.

Do You Check It When You Travel, Do You Check It When You're Just At Home? They'd Be Able To Tell Something Called Your 'pattern Of Life.' When Are You Doing These Kind Of Activities? When Do You Wake Up? When Do You Go To Sleep? What Other Phones Are Around You When You Wake Up And Go To Sleep? Are You With Someone Who's Not Your Wife?

Hong Kong Has A Reputation For Freedom In Spite Of The People's Republic Of China. It Has A Strong Tradition Of Free Speech.

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.

We Are No Longer Citizens, We No Longer Have Leaders. We're Subjects, And We Have Rulers.

The Reality Is If We Sit Back And Allow A Few Officials Behind Closed Doors To Launch Offensive Attacks Without Any Oversight Against Foreign Nations, Against People We Don't Like, Against Political Groups, Radicals, And Extremists Whose Ideas We May Not Agree With, And Could Be Repulsive Or Even Violent - If We Let That Happen Without Public Buy-in, We Won't Have Any Seat At The Table Of Government To Decide Whether Or Not It's Appropriate For These Officials To Drag Us Into Some Kind Of War Activity That We Don't Want, But We Weren't Aware Of At The Time.

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.

The Question For Us Is Not What New Story Will Come Out Next. The Question Is, What Are We Going To Do About It?

The Nsa And Israel Wrote Stuxnet Together.

We Need To Think About Encryption Not As This Sort Of Arcane, Black Art. It's A Basic Protection.

Defending Ourselves From Internet-based Attacks, Internet-originated Attacks, Is Much, Much More Important Than Our Ability To Launch Attacks Against Similar Targets In Foreign Countries.

I'm Not A Politician, And I Do Not Think I Am As Effective In This Way As People Who Actually Prepare For It - Is To Focus On Technical Reform, Because I Speak The Language Of Technology. I Spoke With Tim Berners-lee, The Guy Who Invented The World Wide Web. We Agree On The Necessity For This Generation To Create What He Calls The Magna Carta For The Internet. We Want To Say What "digital Rights" Should Be. What Values Should We Be Protecting, And How Do We Assert Them.

People Would Publish Their Websites; Other People Would Read Them. But There Was No Real Back And Forth Other Than Through E-mail. Web 2.0 Was What They Called The Collaborative Web - Facebook, Twitter, The Social Media.

The United States Need To Be Focusing More On Creating A More Secure, More Reliable, More Robust, And More Trusted Internet, Not One That's Weaker, Not One That Relies On This Systemic Model Of Exploiting Every Vulnerability, Every Threat Out There.

We're Opening The Doors To People Launching Missiles And Dropping Bombs By Taking The Human Out Of The Decision Chain For Deciding How We Should Respond To These Threats. And This Is Something We're Seeing More And More Happening In The Traditional Means As Our Methods Of Warfare Become Increasingly Automated And Roboticized Such As Through Drone Warfare.

America Is A Fundamentally Good Country. We Have Good People With Good Values Who Want To Do The Right Thing. But The Structures Of Power That Exist Are Working To Their Own Ends To Extend Their Capability At The Expense Of The Freedom Of All Publics.

If I Am Traitor, Who Did I Betray? I Gave All My Information To The American Public, To American Journalists Who Are Reporting On American Issues. If They See That As Treason, I Think People Really Need To Consider Who They Think They're Working For. The Public Is Supposed To Be Their Boss, Not Their Enemy.

You Would Be Surprised How Effective, At Least For Influencing Low-information Voters, Negative Propaganda About Me Is.

I'm Not A Movie Guy. I Don't Know All This Stuff That Comes With Celebrity. I Don't Know Who The Actors Will Be And Stuff Like That. But Anybody Who Wants To Talk About The Issues - That's Great.

My Perspective Is If You're Not Willing To Be Called A Few Names To Help Out Your Country, You Don't Care Enough.

When You're Attacking A Router On The Internet, And You're Doing It Remotely, It's Like Trying To Shoot The Moon With A Rifle. Everything Has To Happen Exactly Right. Every Single Variable Has To Be Controlled And Precisely Accounted For. And That's Not Possible To Do When You Have Limited Knowledge Of The Target You're Attacking.

Us Has To Be Able To Rely On A Safe And Interconnected Internet In Order To Compete With Other Countries.

I'm Just Another Guy Who Sits There Day To Day In The Office, Watching What's Happening, And Goes, 'this Is Something That's Not Our Place To Decide.' The Public Needs To Decide Whether These Programs Or Policies Are Right Or Wrong.

It's Ok If We Wiretap Osama Bin Laden. I Want To Know What He's Planning - Obviously Not Him Nowadays, But That Kind Of Thing. I Don't Care If It's A Pope Or A Bin Laden. As Long As Investigators Must Go To A Judge - An Independent Judge, A Real Judge, Not A Secret Judge - And Make A Showing That There's Probable Cause To Issue A Warrant, Then They Can Do That. And That's How It Should Be Done.

The Public Don't Want To Authorize The Internet To Become A Battleground. We Need To Do Everything We Can As A Society To Keep That A Neutral Zone, To Keep That An Economic Zone That Can Reflect Our Values, Both Politically, Socially, And Economically.

Maybe Boutique Media, Maybe People Who Are Reading Papers And Talking To Academics And Whatnot, Maybe They Understand, Because They're High-information. But A Lot Of People Are Still Unaware That I Never Intended To End Up In Russia. They're Not Aware That Journalists Were Live-tweeting Pictures Of My Seat On The Flight To Latin America I Wasn't Able To Board Because The Us Government Revoked My Passport.

The Most Important Thing To The United States Is Not Being Able To Attack Our Adversaries, The Most Important Thing Is To Be Able To Defend Ourselves. And We Can't Do That As Long As We're Subverting Our Own Security Standards For The Sake Of Surveillance.

The Government Would Assert That Individuals Who Are Aware Of Serious Wrongdoing In The Intelligence Community Should Bring Their Concerns To The People Most Responsible For That Wrongdoing, And Rely On Those People To Correct The Problems That Those People Themselves Authorized.

Everyone Everywhere Now Understands How Bad Things Have Gotten — And They’re Talking About It. They Have The Power To Decide For Themselves Whether They Are Willing To Sacrifice Their Privacy To The Surveillance State.

Surveillance State

The New Iphone Has Encryption That Protects The Contents Of The Phone. This Means If Someone Steals Your Phone - If A Hacker Or Something Images Your Phone - They Can't Read What's On The Phone Itself, They Can't Look At Your Pictures, They Can't See The Text Messages You Send, And So Forth. But It Does Not Stop Law Enforcement From Tracking Your Movements Via Geolocation On The Phone If They Think You Are Involved In A Kidnapping Case, For Example.

We've Got Crazy Little Sites Going Up Against Established Media Behemoths.

The Big Tech Companies Understood That The Government Had Not Only Damaged American Principles, It Had Hurt Their Businesses.

In Liberal Societies We Don't Typically Require Citizens To Rearrange Their Activities, Their Lives, The Way They Go About Their Business, To Make It Easy For The Police To Do Their Work.

I Don't Care If I End Up In Jail Or Guantánamo Or Whatever, Kicked Out Of A Plane With Two Gunshots In The Face. I Did What I Did Because I Believe It Is The Right Thing To Do, And I Will Continue To Do That.

We Have To Decide Why Terrorism Is A New Threat. There Has Always Been Terrorism.

Extremists Are Not Going To Disappear.

The Immoral Cannot Be Made Moral Through The Use Of Secret Law.

The Problem Is When [the State] Monitor All Of Us, En Masse, All Of The Time, Without Any Specific Justification For Intercepting In The First Place, Without Any Specific Judicial Showing That There's A Probable Cause For That Infringement Of Our Rights.

I Describe It As Tribalism Because They're Very Tightly Woven Communities. Lack Of Civility Is Part Of It, Because That's How Internet Tribes Behave. We See This More And More In Electoral Politics, Which Have Become Increasingly Poisonous.

When You Are Subverting The Power Of Government, That's A Fundamentally Dangerous Thing To Democracy.

The Surveillance Revelations Are Critically Important Because They Revealed That Our Rights Are Being Redefined In Secret, By Secret Courts That Were Never Intended To Have That Role - Without The Consent Of The Public, Without Even The Awareness Of The Majority Of Our Political Representatives.

The United States Is More Reliant On The Technical Systems. We're More Reliant On The Critical Infrastructure Of The Internet Than Any Other Nation Out There. And When There's Such A Low Barrier To Entering The Domain Of Cyber-attacks We're Starting A Fight That We Can't Win.

I'm Still Alive, And I Don't Lose Sleep Because I Have Done What I Feel I Needed To Do, It Was The Right Thing To Do And I Am Not Going To Be Afraid.

Even If It Were, You Run Into The Same Problem With International Commerce: If You Create A Device That Is Famous For Compromised Security And It Has An American Back Door, Nobody Is Gonna Buy It.

As I Said Before, [patriotism] Is Distinct From Acting To Benefit The Government - A Distinction That's Increasingly Lost Today.

By Creating A Self-policing, Self-reporting, Sort Of Self-monitoring Culture Through Law, Through Statute, And Imposing That On The Academic World, I Think Not Only Are We Losing A Significant Measure Of Freedom In Academic Traditions And In Our Civil Society, But We're Actually Making Ourselves Less Competitive With Every Other Country Around The World That Does Not Do That. Because That's Where Researchers Are Going To Go And That's Where Academics Are Going To Go. And Ultimately, That's Where Breakthroughs Are Going To Occur.

I Talk To People In The Aclu Office In New York All The Time. I'm Able To Participate In The Debate And To Campaign For Reform. I'm Just The First To Come Forward In The Manner That I Did And Succeed.

As For My Personal Politics, Some People Seem To Think I'm Some Kind Of Archlibertarian, A Hyper-conservative.

We Have To Confront The Reality Of Our World, And Make The Hard Decisions About Which Way We Want To Move Forward.

It's Fascinating To See How Things Have Changed. Basically, Every Time The Us Government Gets Off The Soapbox Of The Sunday-morning Talk Shows, The Average American's Support For The Surveillance Revelations Grows.

I Don't Think Political Reform Is Likely To Succeed. [senators Tom] Udall And [ron] Wyden, On The Intelligence Committee, Have Been Sounding The Alarm, But They Are A Minority.

A Lot Of People In 2008 Voted For Obama. I Did Not Vote For Him. I Voted For A Third Party. But I Believed In Obama's Promises.

How Do We Preserve Our Civil Rights, Our Traditions As A Liberal Democracy, In A Time When Government Power Is Expanding And Is More And More Difficult To Check?

People At Civil-liberties Organizations Say It's A Sea Change, And That It's Very Clear Judges Have Begun To Question More Critically Assertions Made By The Executive. Even Though It Seems So Obvious Now, It Is Extraordinary In The Context Of The Last Decade, Because Courts Had Simply Said They Were Not The Best Branch To Adjudicate These Claims - Which Is Completely Wrong, Because They Are The Only Nonpolitical Branch. They Are The Branch That Is Specifically Charged With Deciding Issues That Cannot Be Impartially Decided By Politicians.

I Can't In Good Conscience Allow The U.s. Government To Destroy Privacy, Internet Freedom And Basic Liberties For People Around The World With This Massive Surveillance Machine They're Secretly Building.

That's One Of The Biggest Issues That We See In The Question Of Governments Right Now, I Think, In The Western World. Is That Increasingly All Of Our Elected Officials Are Pulled From The Same Class. These Aren't Normal People. I Don't Want To Say They're All Terrible People, But At The Same Time, They're Not Like You And Me. These Are People Who Have Sort Of A Nine To Five Working History.

If Even One Country, An Iceland For Example, Defects From This Global Legislative Bargain And Says No, We're Not Going To Enforcement Mass Surveillance Here. We're Not Going To Do That. That's Where All Of The Data Centres, All The Service Providers In The World Will Relocate To. And I Think That Gives Us A Real Chance To See A More Liberal Than Authoritarian Future.

They Are Intent On Making Every Conversation And Every Form Of Behaviour In The World Known To Them.

Government Spying

The Definition Of A Security State Is One That Prioritizes Security Over All Other Considerations.

Much Of What I Saw In Geneva Really Disillusioned Me About How My Government Functions And What Its Impact Is In The World. I Realised That I Was Part Of Something That Was Doing Far More Harm Than Good.

Individuals Have International Duties Which Transcend The National Obligations Of Obedience. Therefore Individual Citizens Have The Duty To Violate Domestic Laws To Prevent Crimes Against Peace And Humanity From Occurring.

In America, We Collect More Digital Communications From America Than We Do From The Russians.

As Inequality Grows, The Basic Bonds Of Social Fraternity Are Fraying - As We Discussed In Regard To Occupy Wall Street. As Tensions Increase, People Will Become More Willing To Engage In Protest. But That Moment Is Not Now.

You Are Also Asked To Take An Oath, And That's The Oath Of Service. The Oath Of Service Is Not To Secrecy, But To The Constitution - To Protect It Against All Enemies, Foreign And Domestic. That's The Oath That I Kept, That James Clapper And Former Nsa Director Keith Alexander Did Not. You Raise Your Hand And You Take The Oath In Your Class When You Are On Board. All Government Officials Are Made To Do It Who Work For The Intelligence Agencies - At Least, That's Where I Took The Oath.

People Have To Be Free To Investigate Computer Security. People Have To Be Free To Look For The Vulnerabilities And Create Proof Of Concept Code To Show That They Are True Vulnerabilities In Order For Us To Secure Our Systems.

We Need To Make Sure That Whenever We're Engaging In A Cyber-warfare Campaign, A Cyber-espionage Campaign In The United States, That We Understand The Word Cyber Is Used As A Euphemism For The Internet, Because The American Public Would Not Be Excited To Hear That We're Doing Internet Warfare Campaigns, Internet Espionage Campaigns, Because We Realize That We Ourselves Are Impacted By It.

I Care More About The Country Than What Happens To Me. But We Can't Allow The Law To Become A Political Weapon Or Agree To Scare People Away From Standing Up For Their Rights, No Matter How Good The Deal. I'm Not Going To Be Part Of That.

The Fbi Was Creating A World Where Citizens Rely On Apple To Defend Their Rights, Rather Than The Other Way Around.

Suspicionless Surveillance Has No Place In A Democracy. The Next 60 Days Are A Historic Opportunity To Rein In The Nsa, But The Only One Who Can End The Worst Of Its Abuses Is You. Call Your Representatives And Tell Them That The Unconstitutional 'bulk Collection' Of Americans' Private Records Under Section 215 Of The Patriot Act Must End.

I Think We're Going To See A Move Away From That, Because Young People - Digital Natives Who Spend Their Life On The Internet - Get Saturated. It's Like A Fashion Trend, And Becomes A Sign Of A Lack Of Sophistication.

I Describe Myself As An Indoor Cat, Because I'm A Computer Guy And I Always Have Been.

When It Comes To The Internet, When It Comes To The United States' Technical Economy, We Have More To Lose Than Any Other Nation On Earth.

One Concern I Had While I Was Working Actively In The Intelligence Community - Being Someone Who Had Broad Access, Who Was Exposed To More Reports Than Average Individuals, Who Had A Better Understanding Of The Bigger Picture - Was That The Post - World War Ii, Post - Cold War Directions Of Societies Were Either Broadly Authoritarian Or [broadly] Liberal Or Libertarian.

The Majority Of People In Developed Countries Spend At Least Some Time Interacting With The Internet, And Governments Are Abusing That Necessity In Secret To Extend Their Powers Beyond What Is Necessary And Appropriate.

The Chairs [in Congress] Are Part Of The "gang Of Eight." They Get Briefed On Every Covert-action Program And Everything Like That. They Know Where All The Bodies Are Buried. At The Same Time, They Get Far More Campaign Donations Than Anybody Else From Defense Contractors, From Intelligence Corporations, From Private Military Companies.

The Courts Were Afraid To Challenge Executive Declarations Of What Would Happen. Now, Over The Last Year, We Have Seen - In Almost Every Single Court That Has Had This Sort Of National-security Case - That They Have Become Markedly More Skeptical.

I Have Used Mass Surveillance To Target People, So I Do Know How It Works.

I Went To St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg Is Awesome.

When The Lights Go Out At A Power Plant Sometime In The Future, We're Going To Know That That's A Consequence Of Deprioritizing Defense For The Sake Of An Advantage In Terms Of Offense.

They [the Authorities] Will Act Aggressively Against Anyone Who Has Known Me. That Keeps Me Up At Night.

I Was Living A Charmed Life.

The Iraq War That I Signed Up For Was Launched On False Premises. The American People Were Misled. Now, Whether That Was Due To Bad Faith Or Simply Mistakes In Intelligence, I Can't Say For Sure. But I Can Say It Shows The Problem Of Putting Too Much Faith In Intelligence Systems Without Debating Them In Public.

There's No Saving Me.

What Defines Patriotism, For Me, Is The Idea That One Rises To Act On Behalf Of One's Country.

The New Iphone Encryption Does Not Stop Them From Accessing Copies Of Your Pictures Or Whatever That Are Uploaded To, For Example, Apple's Cloud Service, Which Are Still Legally Accessible Because Those Are Not Encrypted. It Only Protects What's Physically On The Phone.

When You Say, ‘i Have Nothing To Hide,’ You’re Saying, ‘i Don’t Care About This Right.’ You’re Saying, ‘i Don’t Have This Right, Because I’ve Got To The Point Where I Have To Justify It.’ The Way Rights Work Is, The Government Has To Justify Its Intrusion Into Your Rights.

To Do That They, The Nsa Specifically, Targets The Communications Of Everyone. It Ingests Them By Default. It Collects Them In Its System And It Filters Them And It Analyses Them And It Measures Them And It Stores Them For Periods Of Time Simply Because That's The Easiest, Most Efficient, And Most Valuable Way To Achieve These Ends. So While They May Be Intending To Target Someone Associated With A Foreign Government Or Someone They Suspect Of Terrorism, They're Collecting You're Communications To Do So.

By Leaning On Companies, By Leaning On Infrastructure Providers, By Leaning On Researchers, Graduate Students, Post-docs, Even Undergrads, To Look At The Challenges Having An Untrusted Internet, Where We Have To Put Our Communications On Wires That Are Owned By A Phone Company That We Can't Trust, That's Working In Collaboration With A Government That We Can't Trust, In Areas Around The World, We Can Restructure That Communications Fabric In A Way That It's Encrypted.

One Of The Kind Of Unexpectedly Liberating Things Of Becoming This Global Fugitive Is The Fact That You Don't Worry So Much About Tomorrow. You Think More About Today. And Unexpectedly, I Like That Very Much.

On The Other Hand, The Internet Is There To Fill Needs That People Have For Information And Socialization. We Get This Sort Of Identification Thing Going On Nowadays Because It's A Very Fractious Time. We Live In A Time Of Troubles.

I Know The Media Likes To Personalize Political Debates, And I Know The Government Will Demonize Me.

A Zero-day Exploit Is A Method Of Hacking A System. It's Sort Of A Vulnerability That Has An Exploit Written For It, Sort Of A Key And A Lock That Go Together To A Given Software Package. It Could Be An Internet Web Server. It Could Be Microsoft Office. It Could Be Adobe Reader Or It Could Be Facebook.

I Have No Relationship With The Russian Government At All.

Russian Government

Many Of Our Ally States Don't Have These Constitutional Protections - In The Uk, In New Zealand, In Australia. They've Lost The Right To Be Free From Unreasonable Search And Seizure Without Probable Cause. All Of Those Countries, In The Wake Of These Surveillance Revelations, Rushed Through Laws That Were Basically Ghostwritten By The National Security Agency To Enable Mass Surveillance Without Court Oversight, Without All Of The Standard Checks And Balances That One Would Expect.

Every Time Somebody On The Internet Sort Of Glances At Us Sideways, We Launch An Attack At Them. That's Not Going To Work Out For Us Long Term, And The U.s. Have To Get Ahead Of The Problem If We're Going To Succeed.

If I Had To Guess What The Future's Going To Look Like For Me - Assuming It's Not An Orange Jumpsuit In A Hole - I Think I'm Going To Alternate Between Tech And Policy.

When We Think In The Context Of The Last Decade's Infringements Upon Personal Liberty And The Last Year's Revelations, It's Not About Surveillance. It's About Liberty.

When We Look At How, Constitutionally, Only Congress Can Declare War, And That Is Routinely Ignored. Not Nato Or The Un, But Congress Has To Authorize These Endless Wars, And It Isn't.

[sovereignty] Would Break The American Monopoly, But It Would Also Break Internet Business, Because You'd Have To Have A Data Center In Every Country. And Data Centers Are Tremendously Expensive, A Big Capital Investment.

Internet Business

The State Says: "well, In Order For It To Be Legitimate Civil Disobedience, You Have To Follow These Rules." They Put Us In "free-speech Zones"; They Say You Can Only Do It At This Time, And In This Way, And You Can't Interrupt The Functioning Of The Government. They Limit The Impact That Civil Disobedience Can Achieve. We Have To Remember That Civil Disobedience Must Be Disobedience If It's To Be Effective.

We Decentralise Permissions Over The Use Of Our Communications.

I Read These Polls Because Civil-liberties Organizations Tell Me I Need To Be Aware Of Public Opinion.

Too Often We Forget That Social And Political Movements Don't Happen Overnight. They Don't Bring Change Immediately - You Have To Build A Critical Mass Of Understanding Of The Issues.

There Have Been Times Throughout American History Where What Is Right Is Not The Same As What Is Legal. Sometimes To Do The Right Thing You Have To Break The Law.

American History

Citizens With A Conscience Are Not Going To Ignore Wrong-doing Simply Because They'll Be Destroyed For It: The Conscience Forbids It.

My Whole Model, From The Beginning, Was Not To Personally Publish A Single Document. I Provided These Documents To Journalists Because I Didn't Want My Biases To Decide What's In The Public Interest And What Is Not.

When It Comes To Cyber Warfare, We Have More To Lose Than Any Other Nation On Earth. The Technical Sector Is The Backbone Of The American Economy, And If We Start Engaging In These Kind Of Behaviors, In These Kind Of Attacks, We're Setting A Standard, We're Creating A New International Norm Of Behavior That Says This Is What Nations Do. This Is What Developed Nations Do.

The Question Of Whether I, As A Whistleblower, Should Be Pardoned, Is Not For Me To Answer.

I'm Not A Spy For Russia Or China Or Any Other Country For That Matter.

When We Have Some Horrible Terrorist Attacks Happen In Some Country We See In The Recording That Follows, That The Intelligence Community Already Knew About These People In Advance. We Know That These Countries Were Involved In Intelligence Sharing Premiums, That They Benefited From Mass Surveillance, And Yet They Didn't Stop The Attacks. Yet At The Same Time We Immediately See Intelligence Officials Running To The Newspapers And Claiming That We Need More Surveillance, That We Need More Intrusion, That We Need More Expense Of Powers Because It Could Have Stopped An Attack.

I Went To A Website The Other Day And Right At The Top Of The Page It Showed Me My Ip Address. It Was The Most Disturbing Moment I Have Ever Experienced. This Website Even Told Me What Internet Browser I Was Using, And What Day It Was. Computers Can Do Anything.

There Are Proxies, Proxy Servers On The Internet, And This Is Very Typical For Hackers To Use. They Create What Are Called Proxy Chains Where They Gain Access To A Number Of Different Systems Around The World, Sometimes By Hacking These, And They Use Them As Sort Of Relay Boxes.

Something We Have To Remember Is That Everything About The Internet Is Interconnected. All Of Our Systems Are Not Just Common To Us Because Of The Network Links Between Them, But Because Of The Software Packages, Because Of The Hardware Devices That Comprise It. The Same Router That's Deployed In The United States Is Deployed In China.

You Shouldn't Send An Email From A Computer That's Associated With You If You Don't Want It To Be Tracked Back To You. You Don't Want To Hack The Power Plant From Your House If You Don't Want Them To Follow The Trail Back And See Your Ip Address.

I'm Still Working For The Government.

I Have Had Many Opportunities To Flee Hk, But I Would Rather Stay And Fight The United States Government In The Courts, Because I Have Faith In Hong Kong's Rule Of Law.

If We Allow The United States To Set The Precedent That National Borders Don't Matter When It Comes To The Protection Of People's Information, Other Countries Are Watching. They're Paying Attention To Our Examples And What Is Normative Behavior In Terms Of Dealing With Digital Information.

A Given Order May At Any Given Time Fail To Represent Those Values, Even Work Against Those Values. I Think That's The Dynamic We're Seeing Today.

Ultimately, If People Lose Their Willingness To Recognize That There Are Times In Our History When Legality Becomes Distinct From Morality, We Aren't Just Ceding Control Of Our Rights To The Government, But Our Futures.

Americans Hack Everyone Everywhere. We Like To Make A Distinction Between Us And The Others. But We Are In Almost Every Country In The World. We Are Not At War With These Countries.

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.

There Are More Important Things Than Money. If I Were Motivated By Money, I Could Have Sold These Documents To Any Number Of Countries And Gotten Very Rich.

Microsoft Is In A Court Battle With The Department Of Justice. The Doj Is Saying, "we Want Information From Your Data Center In Ireland. It's Not About A Us Citizen, But We Want It." Microsoft Said, "ok, Fine. Go To A Judge In Ireland. Ask Them For A Warrant. We Have A Mutual Legal-assistance Treaty. They'll Do It. Give That To Us, And We'll Provide The Information To You In Accordance With Irish Laws."

You Can Show A Guy Sort Of Peeking Over The Wall, You Can See A Guy Tunneling Underneath, You Can See A Guy Going Through The Front Door. All Of Those, In Cyber Terms, Are Vulnerabilities, Because It's Not That You Have To Look For One Hole Of A Specific Type. It's The Whole Paradigm.

Anyway, It's Not True That The Authorities Cannot Access The Content Of The Phone Even If There Is No Back Door. When I Was At The Nsa, We Did This Every Single Day, Even On Sundays. I Believe That Encryption Is A Civic Responsibility, A Civic Duty.

We Need The Security Standards To Apply To The Internet. We Need To Be Able To Trust That When We Send Our Emails Through Verizon, That Verizon Isn't Sharing With The Nsa, That Verizon Isn't Sharing Them With The Fbi Or German Intelligence Or French Intelligence Or Russian Intelligence Or Chinese Intelligence.

I'm Ultimately Satisfied That We Know A Little Bit More About How The World Really Works.

The Bare Bones Tools For A Cyber-attack Are To Identify A Vulnerability In The System You Want To Gain Access To Or You Want To Subvert Or You Want To Deny, Destroy, Or Degrade, And Then To Exploit It, Which Means To Send Codes, Deliver Code To That System Somehow And Get That Code To That Vulnerability, To That Crack In Their Wall, Jam It In There, And Then Have It Execute.

Going All The Way Back To Daniel Ellsberg, It Is Clear That The Government Is Not Concerned With Damage To National Security, Because In None Of These Cases Was There Damage.

If You Ask Anybody At Cyber Command Or Look At Any Of The Job Listings For Openings For Their Positions, You'll See That The One Thing They Don't Prioritize Is Computer Network Defense. It's All About Computer Network Attack And Computer Network Exploitation At Cyber Command.

The [barack] Obama Administration Almost Appears As Though It Is Afraid Of The Intelligence Community. They're Afraid Of Death By A Thousand Cuts - You Know, Leaks And Things Like That.

I Have Had No Contact With The Chinese Government ... I Only Work With Journalists.

Allowing The U.s. Government To Intimidate Its People With Threats Of Retaliation For Revealing Wrongdoing Is Contrary To The Public Interest.

What I Wanted To Do Was Give Society The Information It Needed To Decide If It Wanted To Change The System.

I Believe That When [senator Ron] Wyden And [senator Mark] Udall Asked About The Scale Of This, They [the Nsa] Said It Did Not Have The Tools To Provide An Answer. We Do Have The Tools And I Have Maps Showing Where People Have Been Scrutinised Most. We Collect More Digital Communications From America Than We Do From The Russians.

For Me, In Terms Of Personal Satisfaction, The Mission's Already Accomplished. I Already Won. As Soon As The Journalists Were Able To Work, Everything That I Had Been Trying To Do Was Validated. Because, Remember, I Didn't Want To Change Society. I Wanted To Give Society A Chance To Determine If It Should Change Itself.

When The Us Government Got Word That I Was Planning To Leave Russia To Go To Latin America, They Brought Down The Plane Of The - The Presidential Plane, Which Had Diplomatic Protection, That Had The Bolivian President On Board. They Closed The Airspace In Four Different Countries In Europe, I Believe, Which Was Extraordinary, Unprecedented.

The United States Has Faced Threats From Criminal Groups, From Terrorists, From Spies Throughout Our History, And We Have Limited Our Responses. We Haven't Resorted To Total War Every Time We Have A Conflict Around The World, Because That Restraint Is What Defines Us. That Restraint Is What Gives Us The Moral Standing To Lead The World.

The Nsa Has Built An Infrastructure That Allows It To Intercept Almost Everything.

Government Spying

A Child Born Today Will Grow Up With No Conception Of Privacy At All. They'll Never Know What It Means To Have A Private Moment To Themselves An Unrecorded, Unanalysed Thought. And That's A Problem Because Privacy Matters, Privacy Is What Allows Us To Determine Who We Are And Who We Want To Be.

I Think It's Reasonable That The Government, When It Has A Warrant From A Court, When It's Exposed To Scrutiny By A Legal Process That Would Be Upheld, Not Just Nationally, But Internationally As A Reliable And Robust Standard Rights Protection, They Can Enjoy Certain Powers. This Is No Different From Having The Police Able To Get A Warrant To Go And Search Your House, To Kick At Your Door Because They Think You're An Arms Dealer Or Something Like That. There Needs To Be A Process Involved, It Needs To Be Public, And It Needs To Be Challengeable In Court At All Times.

The Nsa Has Built An Infrastructure That Allows It To Intercept Almost Everything. With This Capability, The Vast Majority Of Human Communications Are Automatically Ingested Without Targeting. If I Wanted To See Your Emails Or Your Wife's Phone, All I Have To Do Is Use Intercepts. I Can Get Your Emails, Passwords, Phone Records, Credit Cards.

I'm Not A Communist, A Socialist Or A Radical. But These Issues Have To Be Addressed.

[brazil] Went To The Un And Said, "we Need New Standards For This." We Need To Take A Look At What They're Calling "data Sovereignty."

There Can Be No Faith In Government If Our Highest Offices Are Excused From Scrutiny - They Should Be Setting The Example Of Transparency.

It's Much Easier, I Think, To Protect Communications While They're In Transit At Least, Than It Is To Enforce Legislation In Every Country In The World To Say That You Can't Do This.

I Wonder If It's Conservative Or Liberal [ Inalienable Rights Idea], Because When We Think Of Liberal Thought, When We Think About The Relation To Liberty, We're Talking About Traditional Conservatism - As Opposed To Today's Conservatism, Which No Longer Represents Those Views.

Ending Mass Surveillance Of Private Phone Calls Under The Patriot Act Is A Historic Victory For The Rights Of Every Citizen. Yet While We Have Reformed This One Program, Many Others Remain.

A Political Decision Has Been Made Not To Irritate The Intelligence Community. The Spy Agencies Are Really Embarrassed, They're Really Sore - The Revelations Really Hurt Their Mystique. The Last Ten Years, They Were Getting The Zero Dark Thirty Treatment - They're The Heroes. The Surveillance Revelations Bring Them Back To Big Brother Kind Of Narratives, And They Don't Like That At All.

The Internet Has To Be Protected From Intrusive Monitoring Or Else The Medium Upon Which We All Rely For The Basis Of Our Economy And Our Normal Life, We'll Lose That, And It's Going To Have Broad Effects As A Consequence That We Cannot Predict.

If You Seek To Help, Join The Open Source Community And Fight To Keep The Spirit Of The Press Alive And The Internet Free. I Have Been To The Darkest Corners Of Government, And What They Fear Is Light.

My Sole Motive Is To Inform The Public As To That Which Is Done In Their Name And That Which Is Done Against Them.

There Are Times Throughout History And It Doesn't Take Long For Either An American Or A German, To Think About Times In The History Of Their Country Where The Law Provided The Government To Do Things Which Were Not Right.

We Can Still Publicly Post A Message To Facebook That's Globally Readable. But We Could Also Adjust Things So That They Can Only Be Shared With Those Closest To Us, And The Confident That This Is Enforced Through Both Legal And A Systemic Standards-based Protection.

The Government Doesn't Want Us To Know What They're Doing, How They're Interpreting The Law, How They're Interpreting And Redefining Their Powers, And Increasingly, How They're Redefining The Boundaries Of Our Rights And Our Liberties, Broadly, Socially, And Categorically Without Our Involvement.

All Those People Who Went Out [to Occupy Wall Street] Missed Work, Didn't Get Paid. Those Were Individuals Who Were Already Feeling The Effects Of Inequality, So They Didn't Have A Lot To Lose. And Then The Individuals Who Were Louder, More Disruptive And, In Many Ways, More Effective At Drawing Attention To Their Concerns Were Immediately Castigated By Authorities. They Were Cordoned Off, Pepper-sprayed, Thrown In Jail.

We've Learned That We've Allowed Technological Capabilities To Dictate Policies And Practices, Rather Than Ensuring That Our Laws And Values Guide Our Technological Capabilities.

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.

When People Conceptualize A Cyber-attack, They Do Tend To Think About Parts Of The Critical Infrastructure Like Power Plants, Water Supplies, And Similar Sort Of Heavy Infrastructure, Critical Infrastructure Areas. And They Could Be Hit, As Long As They're Network Connected, As Long As They Have Some Kind Of Systems That Interact With Them That Could Be Manipulated From Internet Connection.

Increasingly We're Seeing These Ultra-partisan Sites Getting Larger And Larger Readerships Because People Are Self-selecting Themselves Into Communities.

We Have The Means And We Have The Technology To End Mass Surveillance Without Any Legislative Action At All, Without Any Policy Changes.

Cyber Command Is Supposed To Be Defending Our Critical Infrastructure At Home, But They Are Spending So Much Time Looking At How To Attack Networks, How To Break Systems, And How To Turn Things Off. I Don't Think It Adds Up As Representing A Defensive Team.

This Whole Pre-criminal Investigation, Where We Watch Everybody, All The Time, Just In Case, Is Really An Extraordinary Departure From The Western Liberal Tradition.

There Are Programs Such As The Nsa Paying Rsa $10 Million To Use An Insecure Encryption Standard By Default In Their Products. That's Making Us More Vulnerable Not Just To The Snooping Of Our Domestic Agencies, But Also Foreign Agencies.

I Don't Want To Directly Confront Great Powers, Which We Cannot Defeat On Their Terms. They Have More Money, More Clout, More Airtime. We Cannot Be Effective Without A Mass Movement, And The American People Today Are Too Comfortable To Adapt To A Mass Movement.

The Consent Of The Governed Is Not Consent If It Is Not Informed.

Consent Of The Governed

I Have A Somewhat Sneaky Way Of Effecting Political Change.

Political Change

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