Security...or Surveillance? The Edward Snowden Interview
In this wide-ranging exclusive interview, former intelligence analyst turned whistleblower Edward Snowden tells all. What to say to those who argue that they've got nothing to hide so nothing to fear from the intrusive ears of the state? Snowden is engagingly philosophical yet frank about his current position and where we are headed as a society. Check out the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where he is Board President: https://freedom.press/
In this wide-ranging exclusive interview, former intelligence analyst turned whistleblower Edward Snowden tells all. What to say to those who argue that they've got nothing to hide so nothing to fear from the intrusive ears of the state? Snowden is engagingly philosophical yet frank about his current position and where we are headed as a society. Check out the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where he is Board President: https://freedom.press/
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Co-host today, Daniel McAdams, is with me.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
Well, Daniel and our viewers, we have a very special guest today.
He is well known as a computer specialist and professional, probably one of the best in the world, and he is very well known.
But he's best known for revealing to the American people and to the world what the NSA had been doing to the American people and the abuse of our liberties.
And we obviously have the guest that was most instrumental in this, and that is Edward Snowden.
Edward, welcome to our program today.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
It's good to be here.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Good.
You know, I want to start off with a couple really difficult questions.
And I'm being a little facetious because there's a few things that I'm curious about, even though we know a lot about the activities you're involved in and the political ramifications and the significance of your goal to protect civil liberties.
But I'm a little bit curious, and I don't know what you can tell us about it, but I'd like to know a little bit, what do you do all day long?
Do you have a schedule that is pretty tolerant, or do you have to, are you in survival mode?
Whatever you can say about that, I'd be fascinated with it.
Sure, I mean, things were really crazy back close to the event in 2013.
You know, you never knew what was happening, what they were saying sort of from the government side and how we need to respond.
There was this crazy cycle of deception that was occurring where the journalists would publish some report that would say, this is what's happening.
This is what the government's doing.
This is how they're violating your rights.
And the government would immediately come out and go, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't do that.
That's a misunderstanding.
That's not quite right.
And they would issue very narrow but very specific denials on particular points.
And so then immediately the journalists would have to find some particular point that disproved that.
And then the government would sort of walk back their denial.
And this went on and on and on.
And, you know, this was completely consuming my life, their lives, everybody involved for the longest time.
But as we've gotten farther and farther away from the event, I've become more and more free to pursue my own interests once again.
And, you know, I keep telling people it's kind of a challenge because they want me to sort of front for these issues of privacy and civil liberties and the protection of people's rights.
And I want to do what I can, but I'm not a politician.
I'm an engineer.
So now I'm able to finally once again start doing more practical work.
Just last year, I gave a presentation with Andrew Bunny Huang, one of the most prominent hardware researchers in the world at MIT on how we can make sort of phones safer to sort of understand what's happening inside of them.
Because when we start looking at all of the problems that we're facing today, they really come on two tracks.
There's the political track of the government passing laws that don't protect citizens' rights.
And even what laws and protections we do have, then they then violate or ignore.
And then there's the other side, the practical side of, well, how technically is this even happening?
How is it that so many governments are spying on so many people?
Because even if we pass the best legal reforms in the world in the United States, that doesn't do anything against China or Russia or Germany or France or Brazil or any other country in the world.
If we want to solve these things, if we want to sort of enforce the protections of human rights that we ourselves inherited for the next generation, we need to find new means, new mechanisms of enforcing those rights in new times.
And I think that's going to be primarily through science and technology.
Well, I have one other question, and I don't expect you to give a real long answer to this, but I'm always fascinated about meeting people that are generally like-minded.
And you obviously have libertarian beliefs, and you've identified, I believe, with libertarian ideas.
Has that been a long-term thing?
Did you consider yourself a libertarian early on?
Or did you have a transition?
And was there anything special that influenced you in that direction?
Because obviously, you're concerned about civil liberties, as we all should be.
You know, this is one of those challenges because I don't actually like political labels.
Some people say, you know, I'm a libertarian.
I'm like, ah, you know, I understand the ideology and I appreciate a lot of the arguments.
Then they go, oh, I'm a liberal, you know, because I've criticized Donald Trump or something like that.
And I go, that's not quite right, even though I work every day with the ACLU.
Or they go, you know, I'm a Republican or something like that because I may have issued some criticism of Hillary Clinton.
And none of that is quite right, right?
We're more than sort of tribes.
We're more than sort of labels.
It is true that I think we have challenges that are deriving from governments reaching a new scale that they haven't previously occupied historically.
The rise of these sort of super states, right?
And there's this dynamic that seems attached to that, which is that the larger the state becomes, the less accountable to its people, to its citizens, it seems to become at the same time.
When you look at the grossest violations of human rights happening in the world, whether they're in a place like China or Russia or a place like the United States, where they're using the sort of harsh tactics they used against protest groups like Black Lives Matter,
the surveillance of civil rights leaders, the targeting of minority groups, ecological protesters, whatever you have, you don't see these same kind of things happening at the same scale in places like Denmark, right?
Small government tends to be more respecting of individuals' rights than large governments.
And the question that we need to ask is sort of why?
I don't really know where that belief came from.
I don't really even know if it's true.
I'm open to change and sort of being persuaded on these ideas.
But I think the internet produces a lot of people who look at these issues differently in a less tribal way because you hear more influence.
You hear from many more people.
And the more people in a conversation, I think the better informed it often is.
Well, Edward, I have to say I like your hesitance to embrace labels.
I think that's the perfect answer.
There are too many dogmatic isms.
But I wanted to ask about something that you have mentioned in the past.
And I think it's very important because as you hear all the time when these revelations come out, like yourself and others have made, well, you've got to give up some security.
You've got to give up some personal privacy for security.
And I've seen in several interviews, you've made the point that what we're getting is not security.
You mentioned Michael Morrell, who said, we've never caught anyone based on surveillance.
You say what this is is surveillance, not security.
Maybe you can go into that a little bit more for the distinction between the two.
So the idea here is sort of apologists for the national security state like to trot out the old tired arguments where they go, look, we need to find a balance between your liberty and security, right?
And that sounds persuasive, it sounds fair until you actually start to analyze it, you weigh it, you sort of look at it, you turn it over in your hands, and you go, well, this isn't really about liberty and security at all.
It's about liberty versus surveillance.
Because surveillance exists in a vacuum of security.
Surveillance is enabled by a lack of security.
It's where you're exposed.
It's where you're available to be observed.
It's where you can be tracked and recorded and monitored, right?
Life becomes more private.
Life becomes more free when you are not observed, when you are not watched, when you're not recorded.
And this gets into things that are fairly abstract.
People don't like to talk about that much.
But the real core question here is, what is liberty?
I could ask either of you, you know, this is called the Liberty Report, and you may have different answers, right?
You ask 10 people on the street and they'll have 10 different answers.
We're not really taught in a concrete way what liberty really is other than sort of the brand for Team America.
But people have said recently privacy is what we used to call liberty.
And in the same breath, we say that privacy is dead.
And that's a tragic thing because what liberty is, I believe, in sort of a more concrete way, is the right to the self.
It's the ability to have something that's yours rather than society's.
And this is codified into our language, right?
When we talk about private property, we're talking about your right, your ability to have something that belongs to you.
You decide how this is going to be handled.
You decide what color you want to paint your house.
You decide what color shirt you want to wear.
You don't have to ask anyone.
Liberty is freedom from permission.
It is the foundation, the fountainhead from which all other rights derive.
People start to say these arguments like, I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide, and you shouldn't either.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
But this literally has its origins in Nazi propaganda, Joseph Gaegles.
Privacy isn't about something to hide.
Privacy is about something to protect.
It's about the ability to be you, to have a thought for yourself, to have a thing for yourself, to have some difference, to have some idea that's new and untested and untried that you can sort of sharpen amongst those that you trust and then introduce into the world, into that contest of ideas, and allow it to sort of walk out on its own if we don't have that.
We don't have anything because the value of freedom of speech derives from that space to decide what it is that you actually believe, what it is that you want to say.
Freedom of belief of religion doesn't mean anything if you simply inherit something from the state or from a family and haven't arrived at that belief on your own.
It goes on and on and on.
Whether we talk about the right to a fair trial, to due process, freedom from search and seizure, every right that you look at in the Constitution has a nexus to that right, fundamental foundational right to privacy, because that's what allows you as an individual to have some claim to this world that is your own.
Saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
You know, I think that is so true.
I'm going to ask a question that's going to relate to politics, but actually I'm not too much into politics because I've always argued that people's attitudes are what are really important.
And yet I've spent a lot of years in politics trying to figure out how things work.
And we do have to get involved to the point is why don't they obey the law?
You know, there are laws in the book that's supposed to protect our privacy.
And yet we have These laws being passed that violates the constant the Constitution.
And while there, and even now, I try to figure out who runs things because there are some days I say, Well, there are no two parties, they're not fighting over anything other than overpower because they get together and they do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.
The Deep State Riddle00:08:03
If we got to vote for sanctions, they vote for sanctions.
If we have to vote to endorse the Fed's system, they do that.
And that brings up the subject: who calls the shots?
And it's becoming more commonplace now for people to realize that the average congressman is not calling the shots, that there's a force out there and is referred to as the deep state.
And I would like to know if you could make some comments on that.
And some people are saying, you know, the deep state is alive and well, and they may well be in operation in cahoots and maybe trying to destroy this presidency.
So, yeah, this is a really complicated sort of question because there's no clear agreement on what the definition of this term deep state means.
So, some people can deny it by redefining that term or putting it in a narrow way this way, or they can say, of course, it exists by putting it in a different way.
So, I would say, generally, when we're talking about the deep state, right, what we're talking about is a massive government that survives beyond administrations, right, that is not responding to the politics of people.
This belongs to not a particular party mechanism, but it survives across parties, across administrations.
And of course, this is seen most easily, most readily, in the intelligence services, because they are so little accountable to the public, right?
Everything we do at the NSA, the CIA, is typically classified by default unless you actually work to make it not classified.
When I sent an email to make lunch plans with my office mates, that was going to be classified.
And this is actually incentivized by policy because when you're typing your sort of email in the office, they make you staple by policy sort of this little identification line that says, you know, I'm this person, I work for this group in this office on this subject matter.
Here's my phone numbers and everything like that.
So, whenever you write an email, sort of you're accountable for that.
People can go, oh, I want to ask this person what's going on.
But the side benefit of it is for the government is that information itself is classified.
So, now even the most banal email that you're sending is also classified.
And while this is not necessarily designed to be that way, right, that's not necessarily the intention behind this policy.
The result of this policy is that people in the intelligence community learn very quickly that they can hide any embarrassing information, they can hide any inconvenient details behind these barriers of classification.
And you can think of this kind of like people playing rounds of a game.
When this first started, when the classification authority first was put forward, these are times of total war, right?
We're talking about concerns of foreign invasion, of U-boats in the harbor, of lives that are being lost in a real way by an actual state enemy where there really are no rules.
But what happens when the war is over, right?
What happens when we win?
Those structures don't go away.
And in the intervening periods, they think about how they can use these rules for their own policy benefits to build up their influence, their budgets, their clout, their influence.
And they get better and better at this with each passing year.
Each time you get a new administration, it's a new round in that game.
And eventually, the people who are the greatest experts at understanding and abusing these rules, the best bureaucrats, are not sitting in the White House.
They're not sitting in the Congress because those guys come and go as the years pass and then win elections and they lose elections.
It's the people who sit there for 30 years or more in these agencies with their hands on the lever the whole time.
And that's what the deep state is, sort of in a larger sense, but it's not limited to government.
These people are also contractors and private sort of war-making industries, whether they're defense contractors, intelligence contractors.
These are people at think tanks, you know, groups that are designed to influence policies, sort of war-making think tanks like the Atlantic Council and things like that.
And the question ultimately is when we allow this to happen for a long enough period of time, and they become expert enough in steering our government across parties.
It doesn't matter whether Republicans in office, it doesn't matter whether you have Democrats in office.
They all respond the same.
They all eventually get to the point of saying yes.
When enough pressure is brought to bear, it raises the question of who really has the most power in our society.
Is it the voter, and at least in theory, the politicians that are supposed to be carrying out their will?
Or is it this larger constellation of influential groups and actors who are able to subvert and shape the decisions, influence the decisions of these congressmen or presidents?
In your opinion, do we need the NSA?
And if you would say yes, what should it look like?
I'm assuming you think it should look different than it is if we need one.
Yeah, so this is, again, I'm the wrong person to ask this question in a surprising way because I'm a product of the system, right?
I am a child of government.
I came up in a federal family.
My father worked 30 years before retiring from the military.
My grandfather was an admiral.
My mother works for the federal courts.
She still works for the federal courts, which is an irony that's not lost on.
And I always presumed that I would end up working for the government.
And in fact, I did.
I hoped I could make a positive difference.
And I'd like to think that I did.
But the idea here is, you know, when we go, oh, should we burn these agencies to the ground?
It's far too easy for me to identify with them and to see the good in them.
The United States National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, they have violated the rights of every man, woman, and child in the United States and around the world over the last two decades.
This is not in controversy, right?
This is not a radical claim.
These claims have been asserted by our courts, the federal courts, even at the appeals level.
They've been asserted in the Congress's own reports for things like the torture program.
These are foundational threats to our system of government.
And the most dangerous thing here is the fact that when they do break the law, when they do violate our rights, no one goes to jail for it.
No one even sees the inside of the courtroom for that.
It's only the people who contest these abuses who go to jail.
The only man who's gone to prison for the CIA's torture program is the man who revealed it, John Kiriaku, on a news program.
And so when you ask, do we need these things?
It's very easy, I think, for somebody on the outside to go, okay, maybe we should get rid of these.
Maybe we should rethink the system.
But for me, I think about all my colleagues that were at the NSA, at the CIA, on the working level, right?
We're not talking about the senior officials.
We're not talking about General James Clapper, who lied under oath on camera to Congress and the American people.
I'm talking about the people who come in every day, and they honestly are trying to make America safe.
They are trying to protect people's lives.
They are trying to prevent foreign adversaries from damaging the United States, our policies, our interests.
And I think more often than not, they do a good job.
Now, some people would go, even if they do, that's impermissible because the means by which they go about this violate our laws or our values or whatever.
But that's not, I would argue, for me to say.
I did not come forward to tell people how to live.
Effort vs. Impermissibility00:04:44
I did not come forward to reshape and restructure the United States government.
I simply wanted to return public information to public hands so that voters could decide for themselves what we want our future to look like.
Edward, I'd like to ask a question about whether or not you think we're making any progress.
You know, it's, what, four, three, four years now since you've made your revelations about what was really going on.
And we do know, and we hear more about the Espionage Act, which was written in 1917, leading up to World War I.
And I think from that time up until Obama, there were three people that were prosecuted under Obama.
There were, you know, eight, I think, and now I guess we're up to about 10.
So that is alive and well, and they're using it and going in the wrong direction.
But you've made an effort.
There's been a few who have made a sincere effort in Washington trying to rein in some of this activity that's going on.
And I may have an opinion, but I'm closer to the situation.
But you have a unique position.
Where you stand and what you have gone through, do you see that, wow, I sure wish we could have done a lot more.
This didn't work out so well.
Or can you say, well, at least we're reaching some people.
Maybe we're making some progress in this revelation has been very beneficial.
Where do you stand on that?
Well, it's really a question between solutionism and incrementalism, right?
It's the question of can one person truly sort of change everything, sort of save the world through a particular mechanism, particular act, particular decision.
And I think that's maybe asking too much of the individual.
Instead, what we want to look for are people, many individuals across time, space, distance, authority, capability, whatever, everybody in every walk of life to pick up and lay down a single brick upon which others can build, right?
We want to lay a foundation for progress that together, accretively, we can accumulate the change that we need until we eventually have built something that will allow us a home that will withstand sort of the pressures of a world that is ultimately a large contest for control.
Whether we're talking about our government, other governments, our adversaries, or our friends, right, people are playing this great game of influence.
And we have to be able to make sure that this world is serving our interests to the best that we're able to do.
Now, this raises the question of, okay, did anything change?
And I think actually everything changed.
The most important difference is not the laws on the books, right?
It's not what's written in a policy document or some regulation somewhere in some secret agency.
We didn't fight a revolution for the right to some obscure policy process.
We fought a revolution for our basic rights, for our rights to know and to sort of shape the future.
And I think when we know what's going on, we can at least make better decisions for ourselves.
We may not be able to change the direction of government immediately.
We may not even be able to do it in the medium term or possibly even the long term.
We can start asking questions about do we need government to operate in these ways?
And if they're operating in ways that are contrary to our values, to our rights, to what America is supposed to represent, how can we start to build new structures, new communities, bonds of fraternity, technologies, sciences that go, all right, if the government cannot be trusted to be a good actor in this space, to act in good faith in defense of the rights of people around the world, maybe we should simply take that authority from them.
And that may not be possible through laws, right?
Because ultimately law is just paper.
It's letters on a page.
Laws cannot protect us.
The Constitution cannot protect us.
Rather, it is incumbent upon people to protect the laws, people to protect the Constitution.
It is we that give it power.
It is we that give it force, right?
And we can do the same thing by revoking our mandate and creating more direct measures, more direct mechanisms for going, all right, if you guys are going to spy on our communications everywhere, no matter how many courts say this is a problem, no matter how many courts say this is inappropriate, no matter how many people say this is questionable, this is not what we ask you to do, then we're simply going to make it impossible for you by going to physical laws, right?
Why We Criticize Surveillance00:08:44
Math, because no amount of violence, no amount of force is ultimately going to solve a math problem.
And these sort of universal laws, maybe step by step is not going to solve anything, right?
Let's not be utopian.
Let's not be solutionist here.
But step by step, working together, sharing our views, connecting our values, we can create spaces, more bricks, that when laid together, create a defense of rights that can be relied upon even in historic moments when law cannot be.
As you know, probably Edward Dr. Paul has been pretty critical of Trump as a candidate and a president.
That's no secret.
So it's certainly been a lot of opposition to him.
However, we can't help but marvel.
We were just doing it before the show at this sort of anti-Russia hysteria that has gripped the United States.
It seems to be, it seems to have no fact around it, but it's accepted as conventional wisdom that not only did the Russians hack our elections, but they're hiding under our beds and coming at us.
I, frankly, have not seen anything like it since I was a little kid in the 70s.
But is it something that you've noticed over there?
Or can you comment on what's happening to our society?
Well, look, nobody needs my viewpoint to know what's in the air.
Everybody can see it.
Everybody can feel it.
I don't actually remember the Cold War.
I was too young.
But look, the bottom line is that there are structures in society that always need an enemy.
That is the motivating force on which to justify budgets and everything else.
Now, that doesn't mean that every one of these claims is unreliable or false.
In fact, I personally, I think the Russians probably did try to hack the DNC.
There have been references from the NSA.
They haven't shown any hard evidence, but reports that their conclusions say this was actually the fact.
And I worked counter-cyber at the NSA, my last position.
I know they absolutely have the capabilities that they could see these kind of things.
And it wouldn't be a surprise because every government interferes in every other government's elections every time.
That's what they do.
That's why you pay intelligence services.
So, yeah, I mean, I think we see a lot of tension around the world today, for better or worse.
But the question is, where are we going?
Are we going in the direction of more conflict and strife and war or more peace and cooperation?
Our policies should always be built, I think, and designed upon how we can resolve these things to make this a better world for the United States, for Americans, and ultimately for everybody.
And look, if people are trying to go after us and we're going after them, and there's no way to resolve these tensions, that's a fundamentally dangerous dynamic.
And we need to think about what we can do to arrest it.
We're going to have to finish up.
I do have one more question, and I'm going to backtrack a little bit because I keep thinking about the kind of decision you had to make a couple years ago.
I was wondering whether it came quickly over long periods of time.
Did you have friends that you could consult with?
Did you discuss it?
And was there something that was the crowning blow?
You said, I've watched this.
I have to do something.
Just a little bit of insight into the deliberation with yourself to make a major decision like you made.
Yeah, these things never happen quickly.
Everybody wants to see sort of a Hollywood moment where, you know, the person's going in one day and they're completely normal sort of buy the books.
And then the next day, you know, some dramatic turnabout and they burn their life to the ground.
But this is something where, particularly, you know, you sign up for this.
You go through polygraphs.
You get clearances.
I worked undercover overseas for the CIA out of MSIS.
I worked undercover overseas as a contractor for the NSA in places like Japan.
You know, I've been all over the intelligence community.
And I believed in the value of the work we were doing, right?
There are actual terrorists out there and we do need to catch them.
Now, whether or not intelligence agencies are the best way to go about doing that, that's practically what we're doing right now.
And sometimes it does help.
So when you think what takes somebody from that over time is more and more exposure to evidence that that's not really what this is about, that that's a smaller part of the mission rather than a core part of the mission.
And the bottom line is I found evidence again and again as I went to deeper and deeper levels of government, higher and higher levels of clearances, that these programs were never about terrorism.
That's the public justification for them.
They're about economic espionage.
They're about diplomatic manipulation.
They're about social influence.
They're about power.
President Barack Obama appointed two independent commissions in the wake of the disclosures of 2013 to look at these programs revealed and go, are they actually real?
Are these allegations true or false?
Should we keep these programs?
Are they effective?
The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
Neither of these groups was staffed with sort of hippie liberals.
Again, it's the former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell type staffing these.
And they found that these programs of mass surveillance had never stopped a terrorism attack in the United States, despite more than 10 years of operation.
And when we see things like that, and remember, you're on the inside, and publicly, you see the news saying something completely different.
You see the politicians saying something completely different.
You see the most senior intelligence official in the United States, General James Clapper, raising his right hand and saying, no, we don't do that.
We don't intercept communications from millions of Americans no matter what.
And you know that's false.
You talk to your office mates and go, you know, is this right?
Is this what we should be doing?
And they go, no, but keep your head down.
You know what happens to people who speak up.
And we all have a level of this kind of cognitive dissidence that we can accept, a level of injustice, of inhumanity, of incivility that we can accept in the daily world that we can sort of internalize and suppress.
And then we have one step more.
And I did find one document after having read so many of these documents, so many of these conversations of the years that built my skepticism.
And this was the secret, top secret Inspector General's report into a program called Stellar Wind, which was the Bush administration's mass surveillance program, the warrantless wiretapping program of everyone in the United States.
And in 2006, part of this had been revealed in the New York Times after they sat on it through the election to make sure it didn't sort of jeopardize the Bush administration's chances, which mind you, did actually change our history because that was a very tight election.
And the president said, we're changing this, we're changing the laws it's authorized under, we're changing its operations, we're cutting this down, you don't have to worry about this anymore, nothing to see here.
But the secret truth was they only revealed one half of the program, which they rebranded as the terrorist surveillance program, or TSP.
There was another half, the still secret half called the PSP or the President's Surveillance Program that was never publicly acknowledged.
And this had grown into the kind of dynamic that we see and still live with today, where every American's communications, right, regardless of whether you've done anything wrong or regardless of whether you're suspected of any crime, can be intercepted and sort of passed through these MSA systems.
Every day, it's happening right now for everyone.
Every time you make a phone call, every time you make a purchase, every time you go online, it's going through these systems.
And the government says, well, don't worry about it.
If you're not doing anything wrong, we're not going to pull it out of the bucket and look at it.
It's just passing through our filters.
We're just sifting it, right?
But we need to remember that the Fourth Amendment, and this was really what motivated me, does not prohibit just unreasonable seizures of our communications, or sorry, unreasonable searches of our communications.
It also prohibits unreasonable seizures of them.
The minute they take our communications off the wire and pass it through their systems, and we haven't done anything wrong.
They haven't sought a warrant, an individual warrant for that particular interception.
Unreasonable Searches Filtered00:00:40
I argue, and I strongly believe, that that's a violation of America's values.
Edward, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
I consider this a fantastic interview and very enlightening.
And by the way, you know, in September, our Institute for Peace and Prosperity is going to follow up on this, and we're going to try to honor and visit and discuss this very issue.
I hope we can get back with you.
Possibly you could participate in that conference in September.
Well, thanks so much, Dr. Paul.
I appreciate it, and I look forward to it.
Very good.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in for this very special interview.