Mary – Who am I?

Did you sleep well the last couple of nights because I was reading that you ask for a kind of police protection? Are there any threats?
There are significant threats, but I sleep very well. There was an article that came out in an online outlet called BuzzFeed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon for the National Security Agency, and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want.
And what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals, and these are acting government officials, they said 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.
Unfortunately, you're still alive with us.
Right, but I'm still alive, and I don't lose sleep because I've done what I feel I need to do. It was the right thing to do, and I'm not going to be afraid.
The greatest fear I have, and I quote you, regarding this disclosure, is nothing will change. That was one of your greatest concerns at the time.
But in the meantime, there is a vivid discussion about the situation with the NSA.
They don't mean America, but also in Germany and in Brazil, and President Obama was forced to go public and to justify what the NSA was doing on the new crunch.
What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of circling the wagons of government around the National Security Agency.
Instead of circling around the public and protecting their rights, the political class circled around the security state and protected their rights.
What's interesting is, though that was the initial response, since then we've seen a softening, we've seen the president acknowledge that when he first said,
we've drawn the right balance, there are no abuses. We've seen him and his officials admit that there have been abuses.
There have been thousands of violations of the National Security Agency and other agencies authorities every single year.
It's the speech of Obama recently, the beginning of the serious regulation.
It was clear from the president's speech that he wanted to make minor changes to preserve authorities that we don't need.
The president created a review board from officials that were personal friends from National Security Insiders, former deputy of the CIA,
people who had every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best possible light.
But what they found was that these programs have no value, they've never stopped the terrorist attack in the United States,
and they have marginal utility at best for other things. The only thing that the Section 215 phone metadata program,
actually it's a broader metadata program, a bulk collection, bulk collection in its mass events,
program was in stopping or detecting an $8,500 wire transfer from a cab driver in California.
And it's this kind of review where insiders go, we don't need these programs. These programs don't make us safe.
They take a tremendous amount of resources to run, and they offer us no value, but we can modify these.
The National Security Agency operates under the president's executive authority alone.
You can end or modify or direct a change in their policies at any time.
Every time President Obama did concede that the NSA collects and stores trillions of data,
every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a purchase,
travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe the card somewhere, you leave a trace.
And the government has decided that it's a good idea to collect it all, everything,
even if you've never been suspected of any crime. Traditionally, the government would identify a suspect,
they would go to a judge, they would say, we suspect he's committed this crime, they would get a warrant,
and then they would be able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the investigation.
Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality of their powers in advance prior to an investigation.
You started this debate.
Michael Smedden is, in the meantime, a household name for the visitor blower in the age of the Internet.
We're working till last summer for the NSA, and during this time you've collected secretly thousands of confidential documents.
What was the decisive moment, or was there a long period of time, or something happening, why did you do this?
I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper,
directly lie under oath of Congress. There's no saving in intelligence community that believes it can lie
to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.
Seeing that really meant, for me, there was no knowing back.
Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this.
The public had a right to know about these programs.
The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name,
and that which the government is doing against the public.
But neither of these things, we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed to know.
Even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programs,
and that's a dangerous thing.
The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA court, which is a sort of rubber stamp of the wordy.
When you are on the inside, when you go into work every day, when you sit down at the desk,
and you realize the power you have, you can wiretap the President of the United States,
you can wiretap the federal judge, and if you do it carefully no one will ever know
because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self-reporting.
We're not talking only of the NSA of science, this is concerned.
There is a multilateral agreement for cooperation among the services,
and this alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes.
What agencies and countries belong to this alliance, and what is this purpose?
The Five Eyes Alliance is sort of an artifact of the post-World War II era,
where the Anglophone countries of major powers banded together to sort of cooperate
and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.
So we have the UK's GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada's CSAC,
we have the Australian Singles Intelligence Directorate, and we have New Zealand's DSD.
What the result of this was over decades and decades
was sort of a super-national intelligence organization
that doesn't answer to the laws of its own country.
In many countries, as in America too, the agencies like the NSA are not allowed
to spy within their own borders on their own people.
So the Brits, for example, they can spy on everybody but the Brits,
but the NSA can contact surveillance, and they can't.
So at the very end they could exchange their data,
and it would be strictly following the law.
If you asked the governments about this directly, they would deny it,
and point to policy agreements between the members of the Five Eyes,
saying that they won't spy on each other's citizens.
But there are a couple key points there.
One is that the way they define spying is not a collection of data.
The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data on British citizens,
just as the National Security Agency is gathering an enormous amount of data on U.S. citizens.
What they're saying is that they will not then target people within that data.
They won't look for U.S. citizens, British citizens.
In addition, the policy agreements between them that say British won't target U.S. citizens, U.S. won't target them.
British citizens are not legally binding.
The actual memorandums of agreement state specifically on that,
that they're not intended to put a legal restriction on any government.
There are policy agreements that can be deviated from or broken at any time.
So if they want to spy on a British citizen, they can spy on a British citizen.
And then they can even share that data with the British government
that is itself forbidden from spying on U.S. citizens.
There's sort of a trading dynamic there.
But it's not open, it's more of a nudge of wink.
And beyond that, the key is to remember that the surveillance and abuse
doesn't occur when people look at the data.
It occurs when people gather the data in the first place.
How matter is the cooperation of the German secret service BND with the NSA in the past?
I would describe it as intimate.
As a matter of fact, the first way I described it in a written interview was that
the German services and the U.S. services are embedded together.
They not only share information, the reporting, the results from intelligence,
but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure they work together against joint targets and services.
And there's a lot of danger in this.
One of the major programs that face abuse in the National Security Agency is what's called XT-Score.
It's a front-end search engine that allows them to
look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.
What could you do if you would sit so to speak on their blades with this kind of instrument?
You could read anyone's email in the world.
Anybody you've got an email address for, any website you can watch traffic to inform,
any computer that an individual sits at,
you can watch it, any laptop that you're tracking,
you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world.
It's a one-stop shop for access to NSA's information.
And what's more, you can tag individuals using XT-Score.
Where, let's say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting.
Or you just have access, that's interesting.
So you work in a major German corporation.
And I want access to that network.
I can track your username on a website, on a forum somewhere.
I can track your real name. I can track associations with your friends.
And I can build what's called a fingerprint,
which is network activity unique to you.
Which means, anywhere you go in the world,
anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, hide your identity,
the NSA can find you.
And anyone who's allowed to use this, or who the NSA shares the software with,
can do the same thing.
Germany is one of the countries that has access to XT-Score.
It sounds rather frightening.
The question is, does the NSA deliver dot-pads of Germans to the NSA?
Whether the BND does it directly, or knowingly,
the NSA gets German data.
It's provided, I can't speak to, until it's been reported,
because it would be classified.
And I prefer the journalists to make the distinctions,
and the decisions about what is public interest and what should be published.
However, it's no secret that every country in the world
has the data of their citizens and the NSA.
Millions and millions and millions of data connections from Germans,
going back to daily lives, talking on their cell phones,
sending SMS messages, visiting websites, buying things online,
all of this ends up at the NSA.
And it's reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it,
in some capacity, now whether or not they actively provide the information,
I should not say.
The BND basically argues, if we do this,
right, so the kind of things that they're discussing there are two things.
They're talking about filtering of ingest,
which means when the NSA puts a secret server
in a German telecommunications provider,
or they hack a German router and they divert the traffic
in a manner that lets them search new things,
they're saying, if I see what I think is a German talking to another German,
I'll drop it. But how do you know?
You could say, well, these people are speaking the German language,
this IP address seems to be from a German company to another German company,
but that's not accurate, and they wouldn't dump all of that traffic,
because they'll get people who are talking to an interest,
who are actively in Germany using German communications.
So realistically, what's happening is when they say there's no sign on Germans,
that they aren't being taken in or stolen,
what they mean is that they're not intentionally searching for German citizens.
And that's sort of a... fingers crossed kind of back promise,
it's not reliable.
What's about other European countries like Norway and Sweden,
because we have a lot of, I think, underwater cables flowing through the Baltic Sea?
So this is sort of an expansion of the same idea.
If the NSA isn't collecting information on German citizens in Germany,
are they, as soon as it leaves German borders?
And the answer is yes. Any single communication that transits the internet,
the NSA may intercept at multiple points.
They might see it in Germany, they might see it in Sweden,
they might see it in Norway or Finland, they might see it in Britain,
they might see it in the United States.
So let's come to our southern European neighbors then.
What's about Italy? What's about France? What's about Spain?
It's the same deal worldwide.
That's the NSA, spy on citizens, on recidives,
on other successful German companies,
to have the advantage of knowing what is going on in the scientific and the economic book.
I don't want to preempt the editorial decisions of journalists,
but what I will say is there's no question that the US is engaged in economic spying.
If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests,
not the national security of the United States,
they'll go after that information and locate it.
There is this old saying, you do whatever you can do.
So the NSA is doing whatever is technically possible.
This is something that the President touched on last year,
where he said just because we can do something,
and this was in relation to tapping Angela Merkel's phone,
just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should.
And that's exactly what's happened.
The technological capabilities that have been provided
because of sort of weak security standards in internet protocols
and cellular communications networks
have meant that intelligence services can create systems that see everything.
Nothing in like the German government more than the fact that the NSA
taped the braver term of the term turns the micro over the last 10 years, obviously.
Probably this invisible surveillance was connected with a known heist
and was not connected with a kind of watery, shady, terrorist background.
Obama now promised to stop snooping on natural,
which raises the question, did the NSA type already
previous governments into the greatest chances
and when did they do that and how long did they do this for?
This is a particularly difficult question for me to answer
because there's information that I very strongly believe is in the public interest.
However, as I've said before, I prefer for journalists
to make those decisions in advance, review material themselves,
and decide whether or not the public value of this information
outweighs the sort of reputational cost
to the officials that order the surveillance.
What I can say is we know Angela Merkel
was monitored by the National Security Agency.
The question is, how reasonable is it to assume
that she's the only German official that was monitored?
How reasonable is it to believe that she's the only prominent German face
who the National Security Agency was watching?
I would suggest, it seems unreasonable
that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German leadership,
that they would overwatch Merkel and not her aides,
not other prominent officials, not heads of ministries,
or even local government officials.
How does a young man from Elizabeth City
in North Carolina, 30 years old,
get in such a position in such a sensitive area?
That's a very difficult question to answer.
In general, I would say you highlight the dangers
of private eye surveillance.
I would say you highlight the dangers
of privatizing government functions.
I worked previously as an actual staff officer,
a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency,
but I've also served much more frequently
as a contractor in a private capacity.
What that means is you have private for-profit companies
doing inherently governmental work,
like targeted espionage surveillance,
compromising foreign systems.
And anyone who has the skills
who can convince a private company
that they have the qualifications to do so
will be empowered by the government to do that.
You're sitting red-eyed during the night
at the age of 12, 15, and your father was knocking on your door
and saying, switch off the light, it's too late now.
Did you get your computer skills from that side?
Right, I definitely have had, shall we say,
a deep informal education
in computers and electronic technology.
They've always been fascinating and interesting to me.
The characterization of having a parent
is something I would say is fair.
If one looks to the public data of your life,
one discovers that you obviously wanted to join
in the 2004 Special Forces to fight in Iraq.
What did motivate you at the time?
And did you ever get to Iraq?
No, I didn't get to Iraq.
One of the interesting things about these Special Forces
are that they're not actually intended for direct combat.
They're what's referred to as a force of multiplier.
They're inserted behind any lines.
It's a SWAT that has a number of different specialties in it.
And they teach and enable the local population
to resist or to support U.S. forces
in a way that allows the local population
a chance to help determine their own destiny.
And I felt that was an inherently noble thing at the time.
In hindsight, some of the reasons that we went into Iraq
were not well-founded, and I think it deserves everyone involved.
In 2007, the CIA stationed you
with a diplomatic covering in Geneva and Switzerland.
Why did you join the CIA, by the way?
I don't think I can actually answer that one.
In many ways, I think it's a continuation
of trying to do everything I could
to prosecute the public good in the most effective way.
And it's in line with the rest of my government service
where I try to use my technical skills
in the most difficult positions I could find in the world
in the CIA off of that.
If you don't make Special Forces, CIA, NSA,
it's not actually the description of a human rights activist
or somebody who becomes a whistleblower after this.
An individual is embedded in the government.
No matter how faithful to the government they are,
no matter how strongly they believe
in the causes of their government, as I did during the Iraq war,
people can learn,
people can discover the line between
appropriate government behavior and actual wrongdoing.
And I think it became clear to me
that that line had been crossed.
Contracting culture of the national security community
in the United States is a complex topic.
It's driven by a number of interests
between primarily limiting the number
of direct government employees at the same time
as keeping lobbying groups in Congress
typically from very well-funded businesses
such as Booz Allen Hamilton.
The problem there is you end up in a situation
where government policies
are being influenced by private corporations
who have interests that are completely divorced
from the public good in mind.
The result of that is what we saw at Booz Allen Hamilton,
where you have private individuals
who have access to what the government alleges
were millions and millions of records
that they could walk out the door with at any time
with no outtown billy, no oversight, no audit,
and the government didn't even know it on.
Many of the intelligence communities suspect
you made a deal.
The chief of the task force investigating me
as recently as December said that their investigation
had turned up no evidence or indications at all
that I had any outside help or contact
or made a deal of any kind into a complex one mission.
I worked alone. I didn't need anybody's help.
I don't have any ties.
I'm working with the public to American journalists
who are reporting on American issues.
If they see that as treason, I think people really
need to consider who do they think they're working for.
The public is supposed to be their boss, not their enemy.
Beyond that, as far as my personal safety,
I will never be fully safe until these systems have changed.
After the revelation, none of the European countries
really offered you a sign up. Where did you
apply in Europe for a sign up?
I can't remember the list of countries with any specificity
because there were many of them, but France,
and Germany were definitely in their ass, was the UK.
A number of European countries, all of whom, unfortunately,
One reaction to the NSA snooping is in a very moment that countries like Germany are thinking
to create national internets and attempt to force internet companies to keep their data
in their own country and just disappear.
It's not a stop the NSA.
Let's put it that way.
The NSA goes where the data is.
If the NSA can pull text messages out of telecommunication networks in China, they can probably manage
to get Facebook messages out of Germany.
Ultimately, the solution to that is not to try to stick everything in a walled garden.
Although that does raise the level of sophistication and complexity of taking the information.
It's also much better simply to secure the information internationally against everyone
rather than trying to let's move the data.
Moving the data isn't fixing the problem.
Securing the data isn't the problem.
President Obama and the very moment that we're talking about is that we're not going
to be able to do that.
And it's not that the NSA doesn't care too much about the message of the leak.
And together with the NSA, they do care very much more about catching the messenger in
that context.
Obama asked the Russian president several times to extubate you but they're not.
It looks that you will stay till the rest of your life probably in Russia.
How do you feel about Russia in that context?
And is there a solution to this problem?
I think it's becoming increasingly clear that these leaks didn't cause harm.
In fact, they serve the public good.
Because of that, I think it'll be very difficult to maintain sort of an ongoing campaign of
prostitution against someone who the public agrees, serve the public interest.
The New York Times wrote a very long comment and demanded currency for you.
The headline?
President Obama should tell his aides to begin finding a way to end Mr. Snowden's
certification and give him an incentive to return home.
Did you get a call in between from the White House?
I've never received a call from the White House and I'm not waiting by the phone.
But I would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can bring this to a conclusion
that serves the interests of all parties.
I think it's clear there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful.
There are times throughout history that 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.
All this is, in the very moment, not quite convinced of that because he said he had a
chance for three felonies and I quote, if you, Edward Snowden, believe in what you
did, you should go back to America, appear before the court with an iron maker case.
Is this the solution?
It's interesting because he mentions three felonies.
What he doesn't say is that the crimes that he's charged me with are crimes that don't
allow me to make my case.
They don't allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince the
jury that what I did was to their benefit.
The Espionage Act was never intended, it's from 1918, it was never intended to prosecute
journalistic sources, people who are informing the newspapers about information that's a
public interest.
People who are selling documents in secret to foreign governments, who are bombing bridges,
who are sabotaging communications, not people who are serving the public good.
So it's, I would say, illustrative that the president would choose to say someone should
face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.