Snowden: I don’t have a cache of state secrets

NSA leaker Edward Snowden said it would be suicide to keep a doomsday cache of state secrets, and claims the agency is fabricating how much information he really possesses.

Who would set up a system that incentivizes others to kill them? he told Vanity Fair in an interview published in the May issue.

Of the 1.7 million documents that Snowden was reported to have taken, he said the figure is simply a scare number based on an intentionally crude metric: everything that I ever digitally interacted with in my career.

Look at the language officials use in sworn testimony about these records: could have, may have, potentially. Theyre prevaricating. Every single one of those officials knows I dont have 1.7 million files, but what are they going to say? Snowden continues. What senior official is going to go in front of Congress and say, We have no idea what he has, because the NSAs auditing of systems holding hundreds of millions of Americans data is so negligent that any high-school dropout can walk out the door with it?

Snowden, a high school dropout who joined the military in 2004, reflected on his decision to leak the documents.

Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away, because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating, he said. But theres a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And Im no longer alone.

Who would set up a system that incentivizes others to kill them?

Though NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, who ran the internal investigation of Snowden, claims that the former NSA contractor made no formal complaints, Snowden says that he addressed his privacy concerns to the NSA multiple times before dropping the bombshell revelations via a self-selected group of journalists and collaborators scattered throughout the world last year.

The NSA at this point not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the NSAs lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail, Snowden says.

He issues a dare, too.

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Snowden: I don’t have a cache of state secrets