Exclusive: Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare — NOVA Next | PBS

Military + Espionage

Cyber warfare used to be the stuff of sci-fi movies and military exercises. But with the advent of the Stuxnet worm, the Sony Pictures hackingwhich was allegedly carried out with the backing of the North Korean governmentand this weeks assault on German government websites, large-scale cyber attacks with suspected ties to nation states are growing increasingly prevalent.

Few people have lifted the veil on cyber warfare like Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked a massive number of documents to the press.

Highlights from Edward Snowden's interview with NOVA

Last June, journalist James Bamford, who is working with NOVA on a new film about cyber warfare that will air in 2015, sat down with Snowden in a Moscow hotel room for a lengthy interview. In it, Snowden sheds light on the surprising frequency with which cyber attacks occur, their potential for destruction, and what, exactly, he believes is at stake as governments and rogue elements rush to exploit weaknesses found on the internet, one of the most complex systems ever built by humans. The following is an unedited transcript of their conversation.

James Bamford: Thanks very much for coming. I really appreciate this. And its really interestingthe very day were meeting with you, this article came out in The New York Times, seemed to be downplaying the potential damage, which they really seem to have hyped up in the original estimate. What did you think of this article today?

Edward Snowden: So this is really interesting. Its the new NSA director saying that the alleged damage from the leaks was way overblown. Actually, let me do that again.

So this is really interesting. The NSA chief in this who replaced Keith Alexander, the former NSA director, is calling the alleged damage from the last years revelations to be much more insignificant than it was represented publicly over the last year. We were led to believe that the sky was going to fall, that the oceans were going to boil off, the atmosphere was going to ignite, the world would end as we know it. But what hes saying is that it does not lead him to the conclusion that the sky is falling.

And thats a significant departure from the claims of the former NSA director, Keith Alexander. And its sort of a pattern that weve seen where the only U.S. officials who claim that these revelations cause damage rather than serve the public good were the officials that were personally embarrassed by it. For example, the chairs of the oversight committees in Congress, the former NSA director himself.

But we also have, on the other hand, the officials on the White Houses independent review panels who said that these programs had never been shown to stop even a single imminent terrorist attack in the United States, and they had no value. So how could it be that these programs were so valuable that talking about them, revealing them to the public would end the world if they hadnt stopped any attacks?

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Exclusive: Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare — NOVA Next | PBS