Snowden: US has put too much emphasis on cyber-offense, needs defense

Edward Snowden, in his interview with James Bamford for PBS' NOVA.

NOVA/ PBS

In an on-camera interview with James Bamford for an upcoming episode of PBS' NOVA, Edward Snowden warned that the US Department of Defense and National Security Agency have over-emphasized the development of offensive network capabilities, placing the US' own systems at greater risk. With other countries now developing offensive capabilities that approach those of the NSA and the US Cyber Command, Snowden believes the US has much more at stake.

The raw transcript of the NOVAinterview showed Snowden in full control, to the point of giving direction on questions and even suggesting how to organize the report and its visual elements. Snowden frequently steered questions away from areas that might have revealed more about NSA operations, or he went into areas such as White House policy that he considered "land mines." But the whistleblowereloquently discussed the hazards of cyber warfare and the precariousness of the approach that the NSA and Cyber Command had taken in terms of seeking to find and exploit holes in the software of adversaries. In fact, he says the same vulnerabilities are in systems in the US. "The same router thats deployed in the United States is deployed in China," Snowden explained. "The same software package that controls the dam floodgates in the United States is the same as in Russia. The same hospital software is there in Syria and the United States."

Video from the NOVA interview.

Some of the interview, which took place last June in Russia, possibly foreshadowed the cyber attack on Sony Pictures. Snowden said that the capabilities for cyber attacks such as the "Shamoon" malware attack in 2012 and other "wiper" attacks similar to what happened toSony Pictures were "sort of a Fisher Price, babys first hack kind of a cyber campaign," capable of disruption but not really of creating long-term damage. But he said more sophisticated organizations, including nation-state actors, are "increasingly pursuing the capability to launch destructive cyber attacks as opposed to the disruptive kinds that you normally see online...and this is a pivot that is going to be very difficult for us to navigate."

"I dont want to hype the threat," Snowden told Bamford. "Nobodys going to press a key on their keyboard and bring down the government. Nobodys going to press a key on their keyboard and wipe a nation off the face of the earth." But Snowden emphasized that the US should be focusing more on defending against adversaries than trying to penetrate their networks to collect information and do damage.

"When you look at the problem of the US prioritizing offense over defense, imagine you have two bank vaults, the United States bank vault and the Bank of China," Snowden explained. "The US bank vault is completely full. It goes all the way up to the sky. And the Chinese bank vault or the Russian bank vault or the African bank vault or whoever the adversary of the day is, theirs is only half full or a quarter full or a tenth full." But because the US has focused on being able to break into other networks, he said, it has made its own technology vulnerableand other countries can use the same vulnerabilities to attack the US' networks.

"Were opening ourselves up to attack," Snowden said. "Were lowering our shields to allow us to have an advantage when we attack other countries overseas, but the reality is when you compare one of our victories to one of their victories, the value of the data, the knowledge, the information gained from those attacks is far greater to them than it is to us because we are already on top. Its much easier to drag us down than it is to grab some incremental knowledge from them and build ourselves up."

The most valuable piece of infrastructure for the US that is at risk, Snowden said, is the Internet itself. "We use the Internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day," he explained. "If an adversary didn't target our power plants but they did target the core routers, entire parts of the United States could be cut off... and we would go dark in terms of our economy and our business for minutes, hours, days. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash."

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Snowden: US has put too much emphasis on cyber-offense, needs defense