Edward Snowden: I Wish I Would Have Come Forward Sooner

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is currently doing a reddit AMA with journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who just won an Oscar for her Snowden documentary Citizenfour.

Apart from some technical difficulties (mods accidentally banning his primary account), Snowden is giving some pretty thorough answers to users questions.

Here are some of the best:

TheJackal8: Mr. Snowden, if you had a chance to do things over again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?

Snowden: I would have come forward sooner. I talked to Daniel Ellsberg about this at length, who has explained why more eloquently than I can.

Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space, but its very important:

Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back. Regardless of how little value a program or power has been shown to have (such as the Section 215 dragnet interception of call records in the United States, which the governments own investigation found never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack despite a decade of operation), once its a sunk cost, once dollars and reputations have been invested in it, its hard to peel that back.

Dont let it happen in your country.

masondog13: Whats the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?

Snowden:

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Edward Snowden: I Wish I Would Have Come Forward Sooner