YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Snowden

lines on the record: 146
first: 2019-11-01
most recent: 2019-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is really one of the major ways out of this hole that we've been dug into. The problem, the fundamental problem today is that these major tech companies have, well, let's simplify it. Mark Zuckerberg was born within one year of me. And I think when you look at technologists as a class, we are at a fork in the road. And as a class, there are people going one way and another. There is a class led by Mark Zuckerberg that is moving toward the maximalization of technological power and influence that can be applied to society because they believe they can profit by it or rightly or wrongly, they can better use the influence that their systems provide to direct the world into a better direction, right? They want the technocratic future. We're still nominally democratic, right?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for those who are interested in what changed, the last chapter of the book has a lot of detail on that. And I think actually a significant amount has changed. Strictly on the technical side, as you say, I think it's a misunderstanding to say that the revelation of mass surveillance has actually made the technical companies do this kind of thing more. I think what is misunderstood is the fact that the technical companies were already doing this before 2013, but they were doing it invisibly. We didn't understand that it was happening. They were denying that it was happening. In many cases, under the cover of government that was backstopping their lives. And as a result, we had no ability to try to resist it. We had no ability to try to reform it. We had no ability to try to create better systems that would not be so vulnerable.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second part is, despite the fact that you revealed all this, companies like Facebook, like Google, like Twitter, all of them have so much information on people now and it's been weaponized by Trump, by the Russians, by everybody. These platforms have been really turned into mass surveillance on a scale that is out in the open for people that I don't think they understand quite how much information these companies have on them. And so what you were seeking to stop was sort of taken up by a lot of these tech companies. Do you look at them that way? I mean, what's occurred is an inability to stop these platforms from doing.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, probably coming back to the United States would be my guess. But let's get to, let's say, I know we've gone a little bit over, but I'd really like to get your thoughts on, because I think the implications of you, I think about this a lot, and someone had written Edward Stone was a man who had just one thing to tell us really. He did tell it, and some listened, some believed, others didn't. The fever is now broken. Do you think you had an impact? Because one of the impacts I do think you had is the relationship between revealing the PRISM programs, the extent of them, the spying on the tech companies. I think it changed the relationship between tech companies and government, which had been rather close to make it a much less in the wake of that, I recall, the anger from tech companies didn't know quite how much they were being spied on, for example. That was a really big revelation for a lot of people in Silicon Valley. A lot of people feel it led into not being as cooperative when Russian disinformation campaigns happened and that it had destroyed relations.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Facts. When you look at one, Russia was not my choice of destination. When you look at two, I took no classified material with me. I provided everything to journalists and then destroyed my own copy. And then three, despite my best interests, I have been publicly critical of the Russian government and its record. If there are people who are not satisfied by this, It really raises the question what would satisfy them? And I think the answer is nothing.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During Russian elections, been while they are happening, tweeting videos of ballots being stuffed, evidence of corruption, when the Russian government has sought access to Russian people's means of communication, popular apps like Telegram that they were trying to get cooperate with them. I condemned it. When you see Russians protesting in Moscow, I have been defending their right to protest even when there have been crackdowns in place. And even just, you know, like two weeks ago, I had major stories in the Russian media that are only available in Russian, so they weren't covered in the US press, that are saying, you know, get rid of Snowden. He's criticizing the Russian government too much because I said the mass raids that were brought against supporters of Alexei Navalny. He's a Russian opposition leader were deeply problematic. And this is the thing. When you look at the basic...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How am I okay being in Russia given their human rights record? People do not realize that I have been very vocally publicly critical of the Russian government's human rights policies, despite the fact that it is a risky thing for me to do. The Russian government, should they choose to, could kick me out at any time. Despite that, I have criticized the Russian government and the Russian president by name for signing surveillance laws, surveillance legislation into law, that I consider to be a violation of human rights. I have”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“themselves said they believed that I acted alone. I didn't have any help. Diane Feinstein, very senior from California intelligence official, said she has never seen any evidence, any evidence at all. Remember, she has access to classified information that I was involved with Russian intelligence. And just the second part of your question, if you want to restate that about...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a result, at the end of this period, I applied for asylum in Russia, right? And they did let me in. I had one year temporary asylum. And I have continued, people don't get this, I have continued to apply it for asylum since in other countries. And when Europe welcomes me in, I will be there. But look, I mean, people have to think about what they're asking. If I was a Russian spy, why would I go to China? Why wouldn't I go directly to Russia? Why would I risk all of those other hops where I could be arrested? Why would I risk being threatened or interdicted by the Chinese or anything like that? If I was a Chinese buy, I would have left China. Like none of it makes sense. And then when you look at the actual record of people who have been involved in this whole Russian conspiracy plot from the government side, you see there's no evidence for it. The FBI...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't care if it's a proper assertion of asylum. We don't care if it's consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States themselves help draft. We see this as something that's going to make life uncomfortable for us, and they're going to be consequences. They cut trade preferences for these countries, all kinds of things to make them take it seriously. They even grounded the presidential plane of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, on the grounds of a mere rumor that I was on board because diplomatic aircraft are supposed to have diplomatic immunity, and they wouldn't let him leave the entire airspace of Europe was closed to his aircraft until the U.S. ambassador was allowed to walk through his plane with him to confirm that I was not on board. It was absolute insanity that is unprecedented in history. They had a manhunt on for me like I was the head of ISIS. It was crazy.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this trapped me in Russia. And so I spent the next 40 days in that Russian airport filing asylum claims in 27 different countries around the world. And every time one of them would get close to letting me in, the phone would ring at their foreign ministry and it would be either the vice president or it would be the secretary of the state. And they would say, look, we don't care if it's legal.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“make it a better option. Now, if you look at a flight map, which I did, you can't get from Hong Kong to Latin America without going the long way around the world, because otherwise you go over U.S. airspace, which because the U.S. has passenger manifest for every flight in the world obviously would not have been possible. So I have to do an air bridge, basically, traveling through non-extradition countries. You have to go through Russia. You have to go through Cuba. You have to go through Venezuela. And then from Venezuela, you go on to Ecuador, you go on to Bolivia, you go to Brazil, you go wherever. This was what freaked the State Department out because I think they were worried about what politically they would do if they couldn't attack the messenger and instead had to simply contend with the message, right? So as soon as they heard I had departed Hong Kong, they canceled my passport while I was in the”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I had to go. I was on route to Latin America on the way after because I saw it as basically the most neutral place. I had hoped to go to the European Union, but they were basically afraid to grant asylum. They all privately told me that they supported what I was doing. They thought it was right and appropriate, and they thought I was a whistleblower. I should be protected. But they knew that.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't understand this. People think I went to Russia. I met with journalists not in China. I met with journalists in Hong Kong, specifically because it was a no-man's land. In 2013, people thought that this was kind of weird. They went, no, you know, Hong Kong is like this appendage of China. They're all in line. But now when you look at what's happening in China where there's protests of millions of people on the street every day, people suddenly understand why it made sense.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay Oh, I'm sorry, it doesn't exist. I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. Of course, you live in Russia. I know that. I live in Russia. I even went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgia. It's my choice. Yes, I get it. I know when you're doing it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you justify that? This has been a conversation that's been going on for years. I will add one small correction. Okay. I do not live in the Soviet Union. Oh, I'm sorry. Hello, it doesn't exist. I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. Of course, you live in Russia. I know that. I live in Russia. I even went to the school of foreign service in Georgia. It's not my choice. Yes, I get it. I know when you...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a justice system, okay. We're going to get to what you're doing now. So it leads to the thing, and I want to get very quickly to what you think of tech right now. But that does lead to the idea that you travel to China, you travel to how do you push back that idea that you are not a Russian asset. You are not a Chinese asset, that this was an all part of a giant scheme, and then living in the Soviet Union, which killed journalists, which has a terrible human rights record, there you are. It colors a lot of people who might agree with you about these mass surveillance programs. How do you justify that?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying, look, if you give me a fair trial, I'll be back tomorrow. The Attorney General responded in writing and said, we promise we will not torture you. I do not think that is the fundamental basis for a justice system.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand what I'm asking. If I came back without precondition What I am saying is that whistleblowers are being treated justly in the United States. What I am saying is that it is proper and appropriate for someone who reveals criminal activity On the part of government, through someone who reveals the president is corrupt, someone who reveals an agency is breaking the law, whatever you want. That person is the real criminal, and they should have no defense whatsoever. I believe you cannot have a fair trial without having access to a reasonable defense. The government disagrees. When I've made this offer to the government,”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly no one does, but you have to understand I've just said I volunteered for a prison under single condition. I'm risking the rest of my life in jail for the government to give a very simple concession, which is to go juries get to assess whether you've got it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, under both this president, who's saying they're the enemy of the people, and under the Obama White House, which whether we like them or not, you have to understand they prosecuted more whistleblowers. I get that all other presidents combined under the espionage act. And then having looked at that, people try to tell me it would be responsible to perpetuate this system of injustice rather than to try to use my position.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I have to look at is if I return to the United States and I can't have a fair trial the same way none of these other people have a fair trial, you just go to jail, what is my responsibility to the next whistleblower? So I think when you look at Hale and Winner and Manning, when you look at the law and the way they explicitly forbid public interest defense to whistleblowers, really they forbid any kind of trial for public whistleblowers. When you look at the relationship of the White House to the press,”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I read a lot of things briefly, but they didn't go to Walmart. But the thing is, she got five or six years for single document. Now, in the case of this”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is only a question Did you provide classified material to someone who is unauthorized receiving? If yes, you are guilty. You only face a sentencing, right? And that's a question of how many hundreds of years you'll go to prison for. Remember in the case of Chelsea Manning, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Reality winner who revealed a single document to journalists about the case of an NSA assessment where she thought it was in the public interest to know that the NSA believed in the 2016 election Russian government institutions were targeting U.S. electoral infrastructure for hacking, right? And this was published. And it's funny that the media didn't cover this reality very deeply. They did went over it. Okay.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is the question. And I think it's a question of responsibility. And a lot of people look at this. There's this face the music argument. And I have had a single condition for returning to the United States to volunteer to face a trial where I almost certainly would be sentenced to face spend the rest of my life in prison under the espionage act. The only thing that I am asked from government is that they grant whistleblowers the right to tell the jury why they did what they did and for the jury to consider the question of was it justified or not justified this is the espionage act that we talked about before currently as we say there is no fair trial possible for whistleblowers because juries cannot consider whether or not it was proper and appropriate”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you look at all of this and you think about the fact that what the journalists and I were working on here is not a small potatoes thing, it is a government-wide violation of our founding documents, our founding laws that goes up and down, we had to avoid what I looked at as a technologist as single points of failure. If we were in the United States, all in the same room at the same time, and they discovered us. And I thought it was very likely, in fact, I always thought the most likely case was that I would never make it out of the United States to meet journalists. I'd be caught before I left the building or leaving the airport. But if we were in the same place at the same time, they could have stopped the story. They could have kicked in the door, arrested me, searched the journalists and all that.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I certainly would be, regardless of where I was in the world, to receive a fair trial. And I agree with him. I actually watched a documentary about him called The Most Dangerous Man in America. In the weeks and months before I made my final decision, because I wanted to learn from those who had come before me. And I wanted to do this in the most appropriate way, right? I wanted to try to, again, maximize the public benefit while mitigating any potential risks. There's always going to be risk in journalism and in open society. But can we minimize that and maximize the benefits? So this brings us to the final point, which is the single point of failure. Quite simply, I had worked for the CIA. I knew what they were capable of. We had in the United States programs of torture. We had in the United States programs of indefinite detention, secret prisons. We held people on ships.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah, no, this is a great question. And you mentioned earlier Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg is a friend of mine. We both serve on the board at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And Daniel Ellsberg has wrote opinion pieces, written opinion pieces. Daniel Ellsberg has told me personally that if he were me today, he would not have stayed in the United States. And if he were me, even if I were granted a pardon today, he would not return to the United States. Because the American justice system that he faced in the 1970s is not the same justice system that we face today. We did not have the same case law. We did not have the same processes. We did not have the same systems of solitary confinement and closed courts and classified proceedings that we have today. He does not believe that it is possible for a whistleblower in the United States who is charged under the espionage.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These guys come into government offices, they sit down at government desks, they take direction from government managers, they work on government missions, but they do not work for the government. They have access to all of this classified material. They can walk out of the building with it, and the government will never understand what they took to this day. The government says they do not know what documents were taken out of the building and provided to journalists. That should chill people, emails if they support me.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. If you want to talk about the real threats to national security, if you want to talk about the things that should scare you, it is the fact that a contractor at the time, I was a staff officer of government as CIA, right? But here, I was working for Dell, right? Dell computers. And then I was Alvin Hamilton came after that, right? Right. Not even a good computer.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody died. Terrorist attacks succeeded. Anything like that happened as a result of these stories. It would have been on the front page of the New York Times and every newspaper around the world by the end of the day. And again, six years have passed, and that's never happened.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is crucial. They have alleged that there has been harm, but there has been no evidence in six years publicly presented that there has been any damage at all. Not a single piece in six years. And you, look, you're a sophisticated person. You've been working in journalism a long time. You know we talked before about leaking and whistleblowing. Government leaks nine times a day. Look at this White House, right? And Barack Obama was feeling very much under pressure. No question in response to the revelation of these programs. Had they possessed any information?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Publish this detail or that name, it'll cause harm. And again, every case that I know of, this process was followed. And this is why in 2019 everyone who's involved in the reporting is so confident that no harm has come as a result. There's been lots of allegations. But there's been lots of allegations of President Obama.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The United States intelligence community. I then provided this to journalists. And these journalists only gain access to the material on the condition that they would agree they would publish no story simply because it was interesting, right? No clickbait, nothing that was just newsy, but could harm national security. Instead, they had to make an individual institutional judgment for every story that they were willing to stand by, that it was in the public interest to know this particular story. In all cases, that process was followed. Then, on top of that, I required them to go to the government in advance of publication, warn the government we're about to run this story, and give the government an adversarial platform, basically the right to argue against publication, to say you don't understand this program is useful. It's saving lives.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But No, so it's a great question. Just about this. And this is actually a different question than what was being asked earlier. Not why did I build the whistle, but why did I do it in this way? And it's a fair question. So once I resolved, the public needed to know this. It was a question of how to do this. And as you said, there's always a concern. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm crazy? What if I misunderstand the system? What if I'm just an arrogant jerk, basically? And my self-importance is going to create risks. This is why I work with journalists. People don't understand this because they only hear talking heads on the news. And allegations that are like third hand, the number of documents that I have revealed, the number of documents that I have published that I've disclosed is zero. What I did was I gathered evidence, a corpus of material that I believe showed unlawful, unconstitutional, or unethical behavior on the part of the”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it used to be being a Chinese asset first. Right. Oh, he's a Russian. You know, if I was in Guatemala, they'd say I'm a Guatemalan spot.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the whole thing about whistleblowing, it's not about me. It's about us, and it always is in a democracy, government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. But we all know consent is only meaningful if it's informed. And if we are denied the basic outlines of what the government is doing, we don't need to know the names of every terrorist suspect. We don't need to know the names of everybody who's under investigation. But we do need to know when the government is redefining our rights.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bottom line is how does a democracy continue when the government can lie to us, not just hide things from us, not just keep secrets. That's a different thing, but actively lie to us because that exchange with General Clapper and Wyden knew the answer to it. He submitted the questions 24 hours in advance. Clapper knew he was going to lie going in that. When he lied to Wyden, Wyden sent him a letter and asked him to amend his testimony so it told the truth. And Clapper did not. And Clapper months later, after I came forward, after journalists were able to confirm it was in fact a lie, he said, well, he wasn't trying to lie, but it was the least untruthful. It's a direct quote, least untruthful thing he could think about at the time. So he thought it was his role to lie to us, just to lie to us by the smallest measure possible. And for me, this is the thing that we miss.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we had the public losing its seat at the table, what this was about for me was not surveillance. And this is something that people don't get. Yes, I cared about the internet. Yes, I cared about mass surveillance. Yes, I thought these programs were violating human rights, both of people in the United States and around the broader world, where 95% of the human population lives.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's this conflation of conscience and arrogance. There's an argument to be made that any act of conscience is arrogance. It means you believe, you understand right and wrong. And I believe it was clear, and it was plain that these programs were unconstitutional. In some cases, they were also unlawful. They violated statute. But beyond that, there's this question of law, right? And I knew I was certain to be accused of being a criminal. But whether we're talking about proper channels, whether we're talking about mass surveillance, the law cannot determine right and wrong. And it doesn't even try. The law only determines legal and illegal, which is a very different thing from moral and immoral. And I thought about what was going to happen to the internet. I thought what was going to happen to the future.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper under oath, or rather he should have been under oath at least. And he asked some things like this.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the ones who knew about this in many cases were the ones who were most complicit in the construction and operation of the program. And so if they reveal this program, if they admit this program is a sort of wrongdoing, a kind of misconduct, they're saying that they are engaged in a kind of misconduct. And so for me, why I brought it forward, and again, it took me a long time to actually decide to do this, was I had to think about what happens if I don't? What does the future look like if nobody knows about this? Look at what was happening in the public record at the time, before I had provided any documents to journalists, we had members on the intelligence oversight committees, right? People like Senator Ron Wyden, who were questioning the most senior intelligence official in the United States.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. There weren't lots of people here, but there were many. And this did. Well, I should say it wasn't everyone, there were many, right? There were certainly hundreds of people who knew. But when you spread this over an intelligence community, where I think 1.4 million Americans hold security clearances, hundreds is not a lot.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there was nobody else. We were saying essentially, because you write this, you say, I was resolved to bring to light a single all-encompassing fact that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry. Again, why? Lots of people see this. You're not the only one unless you are, in fact, God.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The public and the courts while they do suspect there is wrongdoing going on refuse to actually hear these cases, even at the level of the Supreme Court where appeals had reached because they go, well, the plaintiffs can't prove the government is doing this because the facts are classified. The only thing that would establish these things are going on is that we granted discovery to the plaintiffs, right? This would give the people challenging the government the right to go into the government's documents and go, yes, you knew this was going on. Yes, this is a fact. Because the government is responding, their defense is we're not saying it's happening, but if it is, it's a state secret. Therefore, the court has no role in this controversy.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I saw the classified version of this report, which wasn't until Hawaii many years later in 2012, I saw that unlike what we see today when we've seen declassified versions of all these reports that have come out in the last years, normally the unclassified report is the classified report with a bunch of black bars on top of it. In that case, the unclassified report was an entirely different document that I believe, and I felt quite strongly, was intentionally written to deceive the public and probably many members of Congress because there are 535 of them and only about 30 of them get the real classified story from the intelligence committee or the intelligence community. That's if they're sitting on the committees. And this is where I started to go, all right, if Congress isn't allowed to know what's going on. If the public isn't allowed to know what's going on, if the executive is knowingly, willfully breaking the law and deceiving the Congress, and”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brings us back to official channels and whistleblowing. In the wake of that Bush-Era warrantless wiretapping program we talked about before, which formerly inside the government was classified under a code name called Stellar Wind. There was a requirement in the Protect America Act and the Pfizer Amendments Act 2008 that said there has to be an investigation into how this happened, what happened, and who knew what and when. And they did this. All the different IC components who were involved in it put together a report. And they submitted to Congress. And then they submitted an unclassified version. And that was made public. Now I had seen that and for many people who saw this, it was interesting. They talked generally about what was going on in government. They talked about these programs.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I saw how the system fit together, my concerns became more and more clear. But people want the cinematic moment. They want to think there's the golden document that changes everything and it shapes you. But the reality is this is a process that happened over years. What happened was I changed as a person the skepticism that I lacked during the Iraq war developed over a period of years simply by seeing more and more contradictions between what the government was saying and its internal emails to the entirety of the NSA and CIA workforce about why everything we're doing is completely okay and what they were saying under sworn testimony before the Congress what they were telling the public what they were telling journalists and what the actual truth was the private classified reality of the government's activities and when I got all of this and when I saw particularly in the case of an inspector general's report”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. If you are the systems administrator, you can see everything. And this should scare us when we think about it in the context of corporations, Facebook and Google. We've written about that. But in government, now I could see everything right, right. Now I can see everything everywhere.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a growing awareness of what was actually going on. As you said, most people in the building, most people in the agency, regardless of their seniority, did not understand and were actually not allowed to know how everything fit together. I was unusual because I had worked both at the Human Intelligence side and on the CIA. I had worked on the signals intelligence side at the NSA. And I had worked in a technical capacity which quite unusually, even though I wasn't at the top of the totem pole in terms of formal seniority, I was high atop heaven in terms of just raw informational power. God micro.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT