Edward Snowden during his interview (Photo: Alan Rusbridger for the Guardian)NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave a video interview to the Guardian this week to discuss the state of internet privacy, the changing landscape of investigative journalism, and what his life has been like since he released the classified documents last year that exposed the U.S. government's global surveillance program. In one of the more poignant moments of the interview, Snowden spoke thoughtfully and bluntly about what his future might be if he leaves asylum in Russia and returns home to the U.S.
"If I end up in chains in Guantanamo," Snowden told his interviewers, "I can live with that."
Snowden also called on lawyers, journalists, doctors, and others who handle sensitive information to use alternative "zero-knowledge" security software and search engines that would protect confidentiality of sources and clients online better than Skype, Dropbox, or Google, for example. In some cases, he said, the big companies are actively anti-privacy, noting that Dropbox just added surveillance advocate Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors and calling them a "wannabe PRISM partner."
Technology can be useful for privacy, he said, as long as we don't "sleepwalk" into accepting new apps. "We shouldn't trust them without verifying what their activities are, how they're using our data, and deciding for ourselves whether it's appropriate where they draw the lines," he said.
Google and Skype have been useful for hosting public chats and interviews, Snowden said, but he would never rely on them in his personal life.
Currently, with a lack of reliable privacy software and the consequences of unlimited government power, journalism has become "immeasurably harder," Snowden said. The first contact with a source, "before encrypted communications are established, is enough to give it all away." He said new training for professionals who handle private information is necessary to ensure safety for the "average member of our society," particularly as technical literacy has become "a rare and precious resource."
There should be no distinction between digital information and printed or spoken information, Snowden said. "If we confess something to our priest inside a church, that would be private, but is it any different if we send our pastor a private email confessing a crisis that we have in our life?"
Before leaking the NSA documents to the public, Snowden said he first tried to address the matters that concerned him internally, asking colleagues and supervisors about the more nefarious elements of the program.
"I said, 'What do you think about this? Isn't this unusual? How can we be doing this? Isn't this unconstitutional? Isn't this a violation of rights?'" he recalled.
He was particularly worried about the fact that the many of the NSA's invasive systems were used for fun. Snowden described a troubling work environment where unlimited access to private information was regularly taken advantage of by individual employees. If the surveillance program happened to pick up a person's nude photographs, for example, co-workers would distribute them around the office, where a culture of lax supervision meant that no one was ever held responsible.
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Edward Snowden to the Guardian: "If I End Up in Chains in Guantanamo, I Can Live With That"
