Edward Snowden : Why the U.S. Congress will support
the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower

"If in fact he believes that what he did was right then like every American citizen he can come here appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case."

LL: That's former U.S. President Barack Obama. In August of 2013 talking about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden had just revealed how U.S. intelligence was doing surveillance on a massive scale around the world.

"I signed an executive order, well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information, that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community for the first time. So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions."

LL: Today a number of critics aren't so sure the protections described by President Obama actually exist. A case in point, they say, is the whistleblower who raised red flags about President Trump's communication with the president of Ukraine. The redacted version of the complaint has now been released. The whistleblower in question did go through the proper channels but the findings had been stifled by administration officials. Edward Snowden has written about his own experience as a whistleblower in his new book Permanent Record. And we reached him in Moscow for a Canadian exclusive interview. Just a note though this interview was recorded yesterday.

LL: What do you think of the whistleblower story that is now gripping Washington?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: What we saw in this process is this person has done - as far as we are publicly aware of the facts being reported so far - has done everything the right way. They've gone to the inspector generals. Inspector generals have confirmed the allegations seem to be credible and I believe they've said that there's some sense of urgency there. And this has gone up to the higher level whole intelligence community inspector general. This is the office of the Director of National Intelligence. And here, something strange happened. Here, the inspector general for the office of the Director of National Intelligence put a hold on the report and intercepting it before it could go to Congress. Told us whistleblowers as far as we understand now - and again facts are scarce because this case is progressing quite rapidly - that he couldn't go and talk to Congress about this and his complaint could not be provided to Congress based on advice by the White House and the Department of Justice, implying something that that's quite unusual in this case. Typically they say state secrets right. This information is classified. We have to make sure we redact this. It can't be handed over. I mean they always do this. This is sort of argument one. But we saw an argument to here which is a little bit different something called executive privilege. And what they're actually worried about is saying that the Congress shouldn't be allowed to hear that sort of process based deliberative information from from inside the White House. Congress, to their credit - this is extremely rare and U.S. whistleblower history - basically leapt out of their chair and said, you know, how dare you. What is this all about? Because this whistleblower's doing something a little bit unusual but strategically is quite wise and is the reason I think, for the first time in really decades of history on this matter, we might have someone who is actually protected by the failing whistleblower protection process in the United States. And I would argue from the public's perspective, we don't care who this person is. We don't care whether they're partisan or not, despite what President Donald Trump is saying they're very aggressively raising questions about is this person. Do they know the facts? Are they partisan? Or are they throwing in you know with his political opponents? The public should not and honestly must not, care about the provenance of whistleblowers allegations because it's not where they come from that matters. It's what is the proof for the allegations? Are they true?

LL: I'm wondering though as you watch this from your perch in Moscow, does what's going on now make you feel more validated in your decision to go to the press, rather than then trying to make it work through channels?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Actually no because I wasn't waiting for additional evidence. The fact that whistleblowers are a persecuted class under the laws of the United States is not a fact it's in contention by any serious person. Right. Of course there are politicians, there're national security officials. There are presidents that are being currently accused of wrongdoing themselves who will disagree and say this proper channels there's methods there's ways to go about this. But look we've got 50 years of history that says if you reveal the government is doing something wrong the government is not going to thank you for it. They're going to retaliate for it. And this is why we have this conversation about whistleblower protections where we're trying to increase them. Rather than feeling a sense of vindication, what I feel here is a sense of optimism that this may be, because it's such a simple clear bright line case of an individual alleging wrongdoing by another individual. We actually have some records, some transcripts of the calls and things in place it's very easy to fact check. And because it does not indict the system of power itself more broadly. Right. This doesn't also put Congress itself in-- [cross talking].

LL: So you're saying it in a sense there's less at stake because it's a narrower case.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Right. There's very much at stake for the president. Right. But there's far less at stake for this system. And so I think we actually will see this whistleblower protected and that's a precedent we very much need in the United States.

LL: All right you have good experience of this. And you join the NSA the National Security Administration, had a very high level security clearance. You started to realize that the NSA was involved in some highly questionable surveillance programs. But 2011 was a key year, what happened that year that set you on the course to become a whistleblower?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Well what I had seen over the course of my work at the CIA, at the NSA was just bits and pieces of how the whole system worked because that's how the intelligence world functions. It's this principle, I'm sure you've all heard of from movies, called need to know. And the idea is if you don't need to know something no one tells you and you're not supposed to go looking. So you work in offices and you eat lunch every day with everybody in office b but you have no idea what office B really does. I mean this is to say throughout my career I had been working routing and connecting the flows of intelligence. Then eventually I end up in Tokyo Japan. And here I am now proposing new systems for backing up all of this information that we're collecting moving around the world, because of experiences I've had on the field seeing embassies get burned out during protests and things like that. And I want to make sure everything that we worked so hard to collect doesn't get lost. And then later I'm working as a senior technologist for Dell. And this was when I start seeing - particularly when I come across the inspector general's report about something called the Stellar Wind program shortly thereafter this - that my entire career had actually been the service of building a system that I did not realize at the time I was building; the first system of mass surveillance. This is a system that does not watch criminals. It does not watch terrorists. It watches everyone simply because it's cheap and easy to do any communication we see. We intercept. We store. We sort through. We search programmatically, algorithmically and we try to save these things for as close to forever as is technically possible. And now I'm working for the NSA Hawaii. Through an accident of history at a little place called the office of information sharing. This is a system which basically shares information to different employees depending on their accesses, depending on their projects. The thing they're supposed to work on but in order to do this I have to have access to everything. I have to become the centre of this new network. Everything flows through me. And it's here where I see the full picture of everything. It's here where I see a classified inspector generals report on a program called Stellar Wind. That's the code name. The actual classified inspector general's report that I read, you can read yourself, it was published in The Washington Post. If you look for it online. Here I saw something extraordinary and unusual I'd never seen it before. The classified and unclassified documents were entirely different reports. The classified story of what actually happened, how the United States government had, at the direction of the president, set out to violate the Constitution, our basic laws, and continued to do so for years with the explicit knowledge of a very few members of Congress but some members of Congress.

LL: And that was the moment when you say I think I need to get this out. And what follows and I would encourage listeners to read this - it's quite extraordinary - about how you went about collecting all of the top secret information, getting it out from where you were actually working. Can you tell us briefly about about the way you actually managed to get the information out? Because I think maybe a lot of people have seen the film, the movie. But tell us how you did that.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Imagine you are one of the only guys who now knows everything that you do on the Internet is being watched. Every phone call you make is having records made of it. Just right now when you're when you're listening to us on the radio. If you have a phone in your pocket, if it's the seat beside you in the car, if it's writing your per screens off but the phone is still on. It is constantly screaming into the air all the time saying 'Here I am. Here I am. Connect me'. Now you have to talk to journalists. You have to get in touch with people who work on national security reporting issues. Wow you're working at NSA. Going into the office every day, without tripping the system, without implicating yourself and without getting caught and basically thrown in prison for the rest of your life before the public ever learns about why. That's what I called a single point of failure. If there's any point in the process where I could be caught, journalists could be caught, the information could be caught before it was basically being handled in a manner that could not be stopped. That was the end of the story. No one would ever know what had happened and I would go to jail for the rest of my life. So I set up a system in my car using a method called war driving. This is where you put a little G.P.S. sensor that's magnetic on the roof of your car. You just stick your hand out the window like you were putting flashing lights on the top of it or something and then you run the USB cable from it down through the window toward a laptop. And laptop is running a special software called Kismet which is ironic because it's a nod toward destiny. And it's a very powerful Wi-Fi adapter, just like a normal Wi-Fi adapter but extremely strong with a very large antenna. And then I began driving and what all of this complexity does is it listens just like your cell phone is streaming into the air it's listening for every wireless access point; the one in your house, the one at Starbucks, the one at the ball, every access point, everywhere is shouting. And now I was listening and when I was listening for was to create a map of all the access points on the island that I could reach that didn't have cameras around them that I could get to plausibly and sit for a while I write to journalists. It were unlocked. They were open that didn't require a password or they had such a weak password that I could let myself in. And now I could use anonymous routing networks. I could send encrypted emails. I could reach out to these journalists and persuade them. Please please find a secure way of talking to me so I can tell you something that's very important. One of the funny things about this story is that the first journalist that I reached out to him, Glenn Greenwald, reaching out anonymously. He doesn't know my name. He doesn't know I work at the NSA or anything like that, just some person on the Internet contacts him says 'hey I've got a huge story you need to know this but I can't tell you until you start using encryption software'.

LL: And he doesn't know how to do it.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Right and he doesn't know how to do it and he doesn't he's a busy guy. He doesn't have time to learn. So he's like Yeah yeah yeah I'll do it I'll do it I'll do it. And weeks tick by and he never response. And so I go to someone. Else I go to Laura Poitras who works with him on the freedom the press Foundation's board and has actually done a documentary just recently in The New York Times on a previous NSA whistleblower and had herself fallen under suspicion and been targeted by the U.S. surveillance state. And so this is one of these things the story almost didn't happen because the first journalist couldn't figure out how to speak securely on the Internet. Fortunately they did and now we all know just how much we are being watched.

LL: This is this idea that you're driving around the island and you're holding on to all of this information by yourself. You're not even telling your, then girlfriend now wife, Lindsey about what you're doing. And eventually you leave and all you leave is a note for her. What was that like for you?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: It was it was horrible. I mean this is the most isolating part of the entire process. Anyone that I told this secret who did not immediately call the FBI and say Help help. Someone's going to talk to a journalist would themselves be accused of sharing my crime. If I had told my partner Lindsey of many years the FBI would have said she was an accessory to the crime. She was a part of a conspiracy. And so I felt perhaps more alone than I ever have at any point in my life here. And poor Lindsey came home to a note that said I have to leave for work. I'll be gone for a while. Basically, I love you. And she'd seen this before because of course I worked undercover and she understood what my work generally leaves like. So she thought I was just going on what we call a TDY, temporary duty to some foreign location.

LL: And then she didn't hear anything from you until she saw headlines.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Yes. She was actually sitting with one of her friends I believe when I came on TV. She learned about me at the same time as everyone else and that's you know one of the most terrible things you can do to a person. And the thing that I say about her she's got the greatest character that I've ever known. Because, look, at that made me the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States.

LL: Maybe the world.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Precisely right. Yes it was competitive ranking. Well I think there's a lot of ladies who wouldn't forgive me and they'd be right. But she turned to her friend and she actually said that's the reason that I fell in love with him.

LL: And so let's bring this up to present day. There are still those who are saying your actions hurt U.S. intelligence gathering that they put the national security of the United States in danger. How do you respond to that?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I think it's great. I love when people say things like that because the easiest response is to say. Show me. And this is the thing that remember now we're not in 2013 and 2013 it was understandable, even for the president to go look this is risky behaviour, you know, this could create risks. You know maybe the journalists are going to handle this right. Maybe Snowden's got it wrong. Nobody knows anything about it because it's happening every day and it's just so fast that it scares people. But I had been under investigation by my government, and by your government, by every other government since 2013. And despite there being a ton of reports published no one has to this day ever shown a single bit of evidence that there has been any harm either to national security broadly or to especially any individual particularly. And you know you see these guys go out on shows and they repeat the talks and they say these kind of things. But if you can't show any evidence of harm after more than six years it's because that harm does not exist.

LL: Six years later, as you said, six years of living in a country that you never intended to end up in, living in a country with a political system that you do not particularly approve of. Do you ever think you will go back to the United States?

EDWARD SNOWDEN: I do. I've made it quite clear and for those who are curious there's a long portion of the book about how I ended up in Russia despite my very best and in fact continuing efforts. But I've had a single demand in negotiations with my government since the very first year under Barack Obama for returning. And I'm not asking for a pass or a parade or a pardon. All I've asked is that they guarantee the right to a fair trial, in a fair trial, and I think anybody would agree to this, there are two questions that a jury has to consider. One, was the law broken? And this is the standard point of entry for any trial. Two, if the law was in fact broken, was that breach of law. Justified? And this is where the government says, oh no, that should be part of trial, all that should be forbidden. In fact the laws that the Obama White House charge me under, specifically and intentionally, forbid the jury from considering that question. The espionage act is what's called a strict liability crime which means the jury doesn't care whether what you did was good or bad. They're prohibited from doing this. And I want to just point out how toxic that is to the idea of a fair trial and how extraordinary that is. If you murdered someone you could go before the jury and they would let a murderer argue. Well it was in self-defence. The jury doesn't have to go along with it. The jury can say no we are not persuaded by that. But that is a question for the jury to decide not the government. And under the Espionage Act, under the laws of the United States today, fair trials are absolutely prohibited because juries are prohibited from considering the question of whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

LL: So I guess the answer to the question is you're not coming back anytime soon.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Well I mean that depends. Is it unbelievable. Is it unimaginable to you that we can offer fair trials in the United States to whistleblowers? Right now sadly we know the answer is yes. But things can change.

LL: Edward Snowden we will leave it there. Thank you very much for your time.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Thank you so much. Stay Free.

LL: Edward Snowden's new book is called Permanent Record. He was in Moscow. The CBC News is next. Then, lots of promises this week in the federal election campaign from carbon emissions to pharmacare to money for retrofits. We'll find out how it's playing with voters when we reconvene our national affairs panel. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

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