In 2013, I didn't know who Edward Snowden was.
I had no idea he would become
the whistleblower responsible for the biggest leak
of top secret documents in history.
Not long after, Hollywood came calling.
This is everything I have.
They're gonna figure out what I've done.
Did you access an unauthorised program?
Despite being exiled from his home country, Snowden is now living
a relatively normal life in Moscow.
He invited me to come out here to discuss the release
of his memoirs, Permanent Record.
He's usually shy about talking about his private life but in the book he talks
freely for the first time about his relationship with his partner, Lindsay Mills.
When she came to the door in Moscow,
I mean, you said that you were braced for a slap in the face.
I mean, what would you do?
You're married, if you ran out on your wife,
and she sees you on the news …
You're now wanted and can't come home again.
And then months later,
you see her.
What would you expect?
She's so much more than I'll ever deserve.
When did you first meet?
There's like a site called HotorNot.com
and it was the most vain, basic venal thing in the world
and if you saw someone that you thought was attractive,
who was near you, you could say, I'm interested in meeting this person.
What did you rate her as?
She was a 10.
What did she rate you as?
Not a 10!
But high enough that she clicked the meet me button.
The way she was treated in the media, how do you feel about that?
Lindsay's always been a much more complex figure
than I think the media was ready to grapple with.
They saw that she had been a pole-dancing instructor
and, you know, there were videos on YouTube of her doing performances
and they were like, oh, she must be a stripper
because they reduce women to these sexualised objects.
This sort of supporting role.
They didn't look at her complexity,
they didn't look at the fact that she's a photographer,
they didn't look at the fact that she's a poet,
they didn't look at the fact that she is a political being
whose politics in fact shaped my own.
You write about when you go out in Moscow,
you change your appearance a bit by, you know,
not wearing glasses or shaving,
or wearing a scarf or a hat …
Why is it necessary to take these precautions?
Are you scared that the CIA are going to snatch you
or what are you worried about?
Well, I don't actually live that way.
Anymore.
I go around much less incognito
but you have to remember that in the 2013 moment,
I very much was a person
the most powerful government in the world wanted to go away.
They didn't care whether I went away to prison,
they didn't care about whether I went away into the ground,
they just wanted me gone.
And they wanted me no longer speaking
but I'm not going to let any kind of concern for what makes my life easier,
for what makes my life safer …
Allow me to be less free.
You've travelled around Russia now …
To what? St Petersburg?
I've been to St Petersburg, I've been to Sochi …
I love travelling, I still do, even though I can't cross borders now.
One of the things that's lost in all of the problematic politics of the Russian government
is the fact that this is one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
The people are friendly, the people are warm and when I came here
I didn't understand any of this.
I was terrified of this place because of course
they were the great fortress of the enemy, you know,
you think a CIA agent looks at Russia
and it was never my plan to be here
but with time, with open eyes, you can see that our presumptions about
a place are almost always different from the reality of it.
I went to Starbucks and there's a Krispy Kreme place …
What people don't realise about Russia
is you can get basically all the same things you can get in the United States,
they got Burger King, they got McDonald's, they got Krispy Kreme …
I've got some in the cupboard there if you want one.
The only thing they don't have in Russia, is Taco Bell.
Can you go out and converse to people in Russian? Is it good enough for that?
As long as I've been sort of alive or real, thinking, breathing, being, you know,
from adolescence onward, my life has been mediated by a screen.
So when you ask about my daily life, yeah I go out, I go to restaurants,
friends come to visit, I have great conversations
but I'm an indoor cat and that's by choice.
How big a danger is Donald Trump?
We have moved into a time
where people care much more deeply
about feelings,
than they do about facts and this is a dangerous moment for democracies
because people believe that once we have achieved and established
a free and open society, that it will remain that way
and will always be there
but the reality is,
things can backslide very quickly
and we have seen democracies fall in just a matter of a few years.
In the book you come to the conclusion that maybe legislate, talking about surveillance ...
legislative change might not happen
so maybe the best way to resist
is through sort of mass international protest,
you know, the way like Extinction Rebellion or Occupy Wall Street.
That's basically what you're advocating now …
Has that changed …?
When our political systems are being slanted to deny us influence,
when our economic systems
are being shaped to prevent us from having an equal opportunity to benefit
from the production that has been created,
we need people to recognise these problems,
to understand these problems
and then to be willing to give something up to change that problem.
This is what we're struggling with on climate,
this is what we're struggling with on so many fronts.
Yes, people can believe that mass surveillance is wrong.
Yes, people can believe that climate change is an enormous threat
facing the future not of a country but of the planet
but it's not enough to believe in something,
you have to be ready to stand for something if you want it to change.
And so that is what I hope this book will help people
come to decide for themselves.
Are you ready for this to change?