AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has just published his memoir. It’s called Permanent Record. Democracy Now!’s Juan González and I spoke to him from his home in Moscow, Russia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ed, you say that you worked for the government and now you work for the public. Could you explain that?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Yeah. So, I think a lot of Americans, particularly younger Americans like myself, who come from a federal family — you know, my father worked for the military for 30 years before retiring, my grandfather was an admiral, my mother worked and still works for the same courts that are trying to put me in prison — you have a kind of silent association often that the government is the country, the government is the nation, the government is the people, because that’s what we are culturally being taught.

Now, there are probably a lot of your viewers who are going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up!” But I was naive. When everybody else was protesting the Iraq War, I was volunteering to fight it, because I didn’t believe that the government would lie to us. It didn’t make sense to me that a government would risk our long-term public faith in the institution of government for short-term political advantage in building support for a war.

And part of the story in Permanent Record is the evolution of a person who really has no skepticism discovering all of the contradictions in government one by one and what happens behind that veil of secrecy, top-secret classified files, that helps you understand that the government can be a good thing, it can be a bad thing, but it is always a distinct thing from the public. What the government says is in the interests of the United States is often quite different than what the people of the United States would consider to be in their interest.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to that moment or the period of time that you’re describing, your growing awareness of what was happening in the level of surveillance in the United States. Talk about where you were working and when you made your decision and the steps you took, that, well, led you to be a world-famous name today, maybe not something you intended at the time.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Yeah. So, I think everybody wants to imagine there is this cinematic moment where you discover the golden document, and it just changes everything about who you are, and you run out of the building, and you deliver it to journalists, and then there’s the happy ending — or, in the case of whistleblowing today, often an unhappy ending. But, of course, life is so much more complicated than that. The reality is, the change in a person’s fundamental beliefs can only happen over a very long period of time.

And what I realized, first in Japan, and then, finally, in Hawaii, was that the systems that I had been building throughout my career as a technologist — right? — you don’t have to work on the policy level to have an extraordinary influence in an organization today, as Juan said. I realized that all of these different components that I had been working on, in isolation — I had been working at the CIA, connecting and routing the flow of intelligence. Then I had been working in Japan, creating a backup system that made sure all of these things we were moving around, all of these secrets we were stealing, would be saved and stored and backed up, so even if a building was blown up, nothing would ever be lost. And then, finally, working at the CIA — or, rather, working at Dell for the CIA, at a very senior technical level, where I’m sitting down with the CTOs and the CIOs of the Central Intelligence Agency, trying to solve their technology problems, I am proposing to build a new private cloud system. And what this means is, all of the information that we moved around, all of the information that we saved and stored forever, can now be reached by anyone everywhere who works at this agency.

And this is where I begin to realize that each of these cogs were actually part of a larger machine, and this machine was not for the targeted surveillance that I had always believed was the purpose of the intelligence community, right? When you think about what the CIA does, when you think about what the NSA does, you are at least supposed to think that they spy on bad guys, right? Define them how you will, but they are looking at particularized people that they have a suspicion they’re engaged in some kind of wrongdoing. Well, the systems that I had built, the systems that my generation had built, had produced a system that instead spied on everyone. And this was something that was a long time coming for me to truly understand, because you have to understand the cognitive dissonance of believing that your government simply wouldn’t do something like that.

When I was in Japan, I was invited to speak at something called the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academies, a counterintelligence conference for China. This is basically where specialists from every different part of the intelligence community get together, and they talk about how China is going after us, and we try to thwart it, right? And their briefer for technology programs on how Chinese hackers were monitoring our government and our military couldn’t make it — just a accident of history. And so I get invited to slot in and speak in his place. And I spend all night pulling all the records, because I’ve got extraordinary access as a technologist to everything on our network. And I create a presentation, and I give it.

But while I’m preparing for this, while I’m looking at all of the terrible things the Chinese government is doing and planning, the Great Firewall, and really the leading edge of the kind of mass surveillance that was technically possible but the public still largely viewed as a conspiracy theory, I was still trying to convince myself that there was a big difference, which is, the Chinese government applied it to everyone, and our surveillance was just being applied to terrorists. Then, once I discovered the Stellar Wind inspector general’s report, and once I see more and more and more programs that are indiscriminate and broadly based, I realized that our surveillance programs operate on the basis of the same principles as the worst governments on Earth, because they are not controlled most strongly by law or by policy, as by possibility. And this is what drove me forward.

Eventually, I realized the U.S. government had stopped caring about what they should do, and instead were pursuing, as aggressively as possible, what they could do. And this meant every time you made a phone call, the NSA literally got a copy of it delivered to them the next day — a record of that call, not what you said on it, but that you made it, who you made it to, when it happened, where you were, when it was made. They were tracking the locations of people around the world. Just it happened across the wire, and they happened to see it, because they were creating collection platforms that meant anything that passed by their systems was, as they called, ingested, right? It was brought into our databases.

And then, all you had to do — think about it. You have every text message. You have every email. You have every web request. You know where every cellphone in the world is, because you have access to the records of where they’re located, because every cellphone, in order to function on the network, has to be paired with these cellphone towers, right? When you look at your signal bars, what is that saying? That’s just saying how far you are from the nearest cellphone tower. And all of those towers are saying, “Oh, I see this person, at this time. They’ve got this phone number. We know their billing address. They live at this location.” And when you take all of this in aggregate, what we were building and what we were trying to store, to a greater and greater distance every year, was history’s first permanent record of everyone’s life.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, you mention in the book that the government would label this “bulk collection,” terminology that obscures the reality that what it is, is massive surveillance of everyone.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Right. If you hear the term “bulk collection,” which is what you’ll hear anybody in Congress refer to the NSA’s mass surveillance program as, “bulk collection” sounds like what a garbageman does or what’s happening at, you know, a particularly busy post office. It is a euphemism in the same way “enhanced interrogation” is a euphemism for “torture,” in the same way that “detainee” is a euphemism for “prisoner,” in the same way that we use “targeted killing” instead of “assassination.” The government loves euphemisms. And we, as a public, must always be on guard against them. When they say, for example, the word “national security,” what they’re talking about is state security. They are interested in maintaining the stability of government more so than they are interested in what we actually think it to mean, which is public safety.

Now, we know this not because of, you know, what I’m saying here. In the wake of my actually coming forward and saying, “Look, people need to know about this,” working with journalists — which we can talk about in greater detail — everyone in the White House at the time, Barack Obama, the Congress, as they always do when a whistleblower comes up which implicates the powers that be in real, serious, across-the-board wrongdoing, said, “Look, this guy’s not a patriot. He’s causing harm. Don’t listen to him. It’s a lie. They don’t understand it” — whatever, anything they can do to get you to talk about me instead of talking about what they’re doing to you.

But to Obama’s credit, he appointed two different review groups to look into what these programs actually did in terms of public safety: the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology and then the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. And when they investigated the very first one of these programs that I looked at, which was investigating an authority called Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act — this is the one about those phone records I was talking about. Your phone records, every single day, were being delivered to the NSA, and it applied to everyone, doesn’t matter how innocent you are — they don’t care. And this was, of course, authorized not by a real court, but by a secret, rubber-stamp court, the FISA court. And this was a court that, by the way, was never intended, and certainly not designed, to interpret the Constitution in new and novel ways that granted new authorities to government. They were only intended to stamp routine requests for surveillance, that didn’t implicate our rights.

But when the president looked into this — and these groups had full access to classified information. They talked to the heads of FBI, CIA, NSA, everyone. By their own words, this kind of mass surveillance — well, the “bulk collection,” as they call it — never made a concrete difference in a single counterterrorism investigation. The only time it made any difference at all was in the case of a cab driver in California wiring $8,500 back to his clan in Somalia, which happened to have ties to terrorism. That’s it. They shredded the Constitution, they destroyed our lives for — they destroyed our way of life, rather, to catch a cab driver sending money home.

And even in this case, the FBI said that they would have gotten this guy anyway without the program, in a way that I think all of us can understand. Even if you have all the world’s communications in a bucket waiting for you just to run your hands through it, you have to know what you’re looking for in order to be able to pull it out. And by the time you can type in a name, an email address, a phone number, a credit card, anything to sort through that bucket with all of these systems, you have enough information to go to a judge and get a warrant, which the judge will absolutely grant, because no judge is going to go, “Oh, no, no. I’m not going to grant this counterterrorism warrant for someone who you think is funding terrorism.” Of course they will. And then they get all the same records.

Why is it, then, that they had to violate the Constitution to do this? And why is it, then, that if these programs were so necessary, if they were so vital, and if you believe that, despite all the evidence, they were effective — why didn’t they simply ask the public? You were never asked or granted a vote.

And this is why the lesson of 2013, unfortunately, I think, still has not been learned today, which is, these revelations were never about surveillance. Surveillance was the mechanism, it was the grounds for discussion. But the actual topic that was coming into conflict was democracy. What do we do when we have a model of government where the government derives its mandate — right? — from the consent of the governed, right? That’s where it gets its legitimacy from, if they go, “We voted for this.” But we’re not told what they’re doing, and so we can’t express our opinion on what they’re doing. And this, as we are seeing, is recurring today. And it will continue to recur so long as the government prefers, for fear of political criticism, to act more in the shadows than it does in the light.

AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, author of the new book Permanent Record. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “My Mind I Find in Time” by the guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson. On Wednesday, she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has just published his memoir. It’s called Permanent Record. In the book, Ed Snowden writes, “[A]s I … proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me: this, in front of me, was my future. I’m not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that way. They’re made subconsciously and only express themselves once fully formed — once you’re finally strong enough to admit to yourself that this is … the course that your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single, still-indistinct act.” Those, the words of Ed Snowden in his book, Permanent Record. When Juan González and I spoke to Ed Snowden on Wednesday from his home in Moscow, Russia, I asked him to talk about how he became a whistleblower.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, put yourself in my shoes. You’re someone who has always been, largely, a part of the structure of government. You were dependent on it. The government was what gave your parents their salaries, that fed you, that clothed you. You’re not what anyone would consider a radical. You are not a protester. And yet suddenly you see — you have an awareness. You have evidence that the government is not what you believed it to be. Now, to a lot of you, that might be like, “Well, duh.” But if you came from that position, that’s a meaningful — a meaningful change.

And now you go, “Well, how do you respond to this?” There is, of course, the political act of revolution. You know, you can try to light a match, burn the building down, go, “This is an indecent kind of program. I’m going to shut it down myself.” Or you can try to return the agency, the government, to its stated ideals, to the standard and values that the public is at least told that it represents.

And so, whistleblowing, I believe, is quite distinct from leaking. People use the terms interchangeably, but leaking is generally done for personal benefit. These are sort of the official unauthorized disclosures that government officials pick up the phone and call journalists every day and give them because it advances their policy. It’s the Deep Throat, the Mark Felt of the world, who’s just trying to get rid of his superiors so maybe one day he’ll sit in the director’s chair.

But whistleblowing is something different. Blowing the whistle is to try and provide the public information that it is in the public interest to know. But it’s fraught with risk, right? Not only do we know there is no meaningful process to protect whistleblowers — certainly, for someone in my position, because, in 2013, contractors — and I was a contractor — did not fall under whistleblower protection laws. And so, I was really paralyzed and agonizing over what to do — could I do anything? — and very much trying to talk myself out of it. But, eventually, you have to ask yourself the question: What happens if no one says anything? And the reality is, everything gets worse. If we are to keep a constitutional republic, everybody has to do their part. And it doesn’t matter who you are. What matters is what you’ve seen. What matters is what you can prove. Because it’s not about you; it’s about us.

And so, in that realization, I understood that even though I’m a technologist, so it would be quite easy for me to publish these documents myself on the internet, instead what I should do is provide them to journalists. And this was because the journalists could then actually validate these documents. They could authenticate them. They could go, “You don’t understand all of this. We can go get other sources to confirm that this is accurate. You misunderstand it. Your politics are crazy,” or whatever. I shouldn’t be the one making the decisions of what is and is not in the public interest to know. I can provide that evidence in a good-faith belief that journalists can and should do that. That’s why we have the First Amendment in the United States. That is the role that the press occupies in a free and open society, is to contest the government’s monopoly on information. And they, the press, could evaluate these documents and go, “People need to know what’s going on.” And that’s what happened.

So, I gathered material of, what I believed to be, public importance. This is evidence of official crimes, unethical behavior and unconstitutional behavior, or simply violation of rights, not just in the United States, but for the other 95% of the world that lives beyond U.S. borders. And I used my position as someone who worked at the Office of Information Sharing — it’s just another one of those funny accidents of history. I was the Office of Information Sharing. I was the sole employee in it. And I was never — I was never actually even supposed to be there. I was supposed to go to a different position, but the person, another contractor, who had been intended to go to the Office of Information Sharing, was a cut-up, and they wouldn’t be allowed in that building anymore. So they got put into the position that I was supposed to be going into, and I got slotted instead into the Office of Information Sharing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ed Snowden, talk about the decision you made in Hawaii to try to get this to a journalist, and your decision to go to Hong Kong; now your wife, Lindsay Mills, then your partner, what you told her at the time, what she understood; the difficulty of upending your life at this point; how you prepared for leaving; and then what happened next.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, you have to understand, for this kind of moment, anyone who’s considering this understands it’s an act of self-immolation. The likeliest outcome is you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison — not an exaggeration — because the government argues that telling the truth to a journalist about the government breaking the law, so long as that activity was classified, is itself a crime that is punishable by 10 years per count. And if you’re talking about hundreds of documents, thousands of documents, or even more, obviously, the sentence becomes pretty historic pretty quick.

But are you willing to risk it? How do you manage this? How do you make sure you can’t be intercepted and the story can be stopped before it ever gets out? And I believed, if there was a single point of failure at any point in the process of reporting, and if myself and the journalists were all in the same room at the same time, somewhere where the government could act, they would act. And I don’t know what the limits on that would have been. But I knew they would have used the full sum of their capabilities to try to prevent the public from learning about what they were doing. So I had to leave. This was, in my belief, the only way we could make sure the journalists get the truth out to the public.

And so I went to Hong Kong — which, it’s funny, in 2013, people thought was a sort of a crazy move. They were like, “Why Hong Kong? Hong Kong is, you know, Red China,” or something like that. They’re tools of Beijing. But when you look at Hong Kong today, where the entire population is out on the street every day resisting the government in Beijing, I think it’s actually now — would have been established why that decision made so much sense. And it’s because it was kind of no-man’s land. The Chinese government would not be free to act, at least quickly enough that they could interfere with the reporting. The United States government, of course, could not act in Hong Kong, for fear of angering the Chinese government. And so we would have room to breathe and work and get the stories out.

But that meant leaving home. That meant leaving my family. That meant leaving my partner of so many years, Lindsay Mills, the love of my life. And I couldn’t tell her what I was going to do, because if I had, she could have been charged with the same crime that I was. The FBI could have considered her an accessory to the crime. They could have seen her as involved in some kind of conspiracy to do what I was doing, which was basically aiding and abetting an act of journalism. But we can laugh about it today; however, it’s a very serious felony under U.S. laws. And so, that meant I just had to leave a note that said, “I’m going away for work. I love you.” And she found that, and, you know, she was angry, rightfully. But she had seen it before, because she had known I had been working for the intelligence services for years.

And then she learned what I had done the same time everyone else did: when I was on TV. And the thing that I will never be able to repay her for is, she said that when she saw me on TV, when she understood why I had left and she understood what I had done, despite the costs to her, she said that’s the reason that she fell in love with me. And eventually she came to rejoin me. And now we have married. I am, without a doubt, the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States. But I am striving to be one of the better husbands, because she’s so much more than I will ever deserve.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Ed, why the book now? And are you eager to come back to the United States and make your case to the American people?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, since year one, since the very beginning of this, I have had a single requirement for coming back to the U.S. And that’s not to get a pardon. That’s not a parade. But it’s a fair trial. And this brings us back to the central problem of whistleblowing that we were talking about earlier. It is completely indefensible today that a whistleblower, that tells the public, that informs the press, about a matter of unarguably profound public interest, can be charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was intended to be used against spies. And those who are accused of this have no defense. They can’t tell the jury why it is that they did what they did. And the jury can’t decide whether or not that was justified or unjustified, which is the entire purpose of a trial for something like this. This is my demand. And I think this needs to be the demand of anyone who believes in the justice system and who believes that the public has a need to know the basic facts about what the government is doing.

This law that whistleblowers are charged with, this Espionage Act, is extraordinarily rare in the U.S. It’s called a strict liability crime. And it is that strict liability crime that means you can’t tell the jury why you did what you did. Why I say this law is unusual is, even if you murder someone, you straight-up just kill someone, you can argue to the jury it was self-defense. You can argue to the jury the person had it coming. And it’s up to the jury to decide whether they believe you or whether it was just murder, plain and simple, because there are two prongs of the crime that have to be considered. Was the law broken? This is always the easiest and less interesting question. And then, two, was it justified? The government forbids that when it is the government’s own behavior that is on trial. Instead, they simply want to consider that first prong: Was the law broken? And they say, if the law was broken, the jury can’t consider whether it was justified or not, because, the government argues, there is no justification for revealing their own classified criminality. Now, obviously, I would say that has to change, because you can have a sentencing in that, but you cannot have a fair trial in that.

AMY GOODMAN: We saw what happened with Chelsea Manning, how difficult it was to hear anything she had to say in court. I mean, we played a muscled, surreptitious recording inside the court-martial, where you could hardly hear her voice. What are you demanding? What are the conditions that you would agree to, to come back to the United States?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: It’s simply that whistleblowers have the right to tell the jury why they did what they did, for the jury to consider: Was, on balance, this something that did more good than harm? Was it justified? Or was it something that should be punished with a prison sentence? That is why we have juries. That is why we have trials. And if the government is unwilling to guarantee that, well, what the government is saying is that they are not willing to grant fair trials to whistleblowers. And I don’t believe participating in that kind of system advances the interests of justice; I think that perpetuates a system of injustice.

AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. His memoir is titled Permanent Record. We’ll air Part 2 in the coming days.

And this breaking news: The House Intelligence Committee has just released a declassified version of a whistleblower’s complaint accusing President Trump of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election.