Edward Snowden, uh, welcome to the show.
-Good to be home. -Let's jump straight into the book,
because I don't know how long you have in that secret hideout
where you're doing this interview from.
-Um... -(laughs)
It's just my apartment in Moscow.
-Oh, okay. -(laughter)
Well, don't tell us where it is.
I mean, I don't want to... I don't...
Don't pull a Trump here, dude. Come on.
Um, some people call you a patriot, right?
Others believe that-that... that you're a traitor.
Do you think this book will change peoples' perceptions,
and what do you see yourself as?
Well, when I-I-I... I set out to write this book,
I wasn't trying to change opinions.
I was just trying to, uh,
tell the story of what has happened.
Um, and when I'm looking at,
like, the change of technology and everything like that,
the only way you can get people to pay attention to something
that has been in expert conversation for so long,
that's so complex, uh, is to give them characters, right?
Um, so, yeah, it's the story of my life,
but it's actually about more.
It's a dual history
of the change of technology and the change
of the intelligence community over time.
When people ask me if I'm a hero or a traitor,
uh, I say, "Look, I'm-I'm just an ordinary person.
I'm like you."
Whistleblowers aren't, uh, like...
You know, we-we... we aren't...
um... elected.
We're not, uh, exceptionally skilled.
Uh, the-the thing that-that... that puts us in place,
the thing that makes, um,
the disclosure matter are-are the facts.
It's really about what you see, rather than what you are.
-So... -Right.
We're kind of elected by circumstance.
Right, and one of... one of the things you talk about
in the book-- in fact, the first line of the book--
is you say, "I used to work for the government.
Now I work for the public."
What does that mean?
Well, I didn't realize there was a difference.
Um, I-I grew up in a federal family.
My-my father worked for the government,
my mother worked for the government,
uh, in the-the courts after she worked for the NSA.
She actually still works for the courts,
uh, and they-they, uh...
The government just sued me
-on the day this book hit the shelves. -Right.
Uh, so you could say it was... "born a crime."
-Um... -(laughter)
Touché.
-(laughter) -But, uh...
(laughs) Yeah, the-the nice thing about that,
um, is the-the book was, uh, not getting that much attention.
It was, like, uh, 25 on the charts.
And then, the government said,
"You know, we don't want you to read this book."
Uh, they said, "God, sue Snowden as fast as you can.
Do anything you can. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"
And, uh, now we're number one basically everywhere.
So you can say the attorney general is
the best hype man that I've ever had.
(applause)
The... the attorney general has come out and said
that, like, you were supposed to pass this book for review.
So as somebody who's worked in-in, um...
you know, in the defense space,
as somebody who worked with government secrets,
you were meant to submit this book to them.
And they are saying they would have passed it
if you just followed the rules.
Why didn't you follow the rules?
-(Snowden laughs) -(laughter)
Okay, well, first off, I am a noted rule follower.
-Um... -(laughter)
but, uh, while... while they are technically right,
uh, there's no oath of secrecy.
A lot of people think there's an oath of secrecy.
There's an oath of service, which is not to the Agency,
it's not to the government-- it's to support and defend
the Constitution of the United States
against all enemies foreign and domestic.
But there is a secrecy agreement,
and that's what he's talking about.
It's called Standard Form 312, and it basically says:
No, after I know all the secrets and I know where the aliens are,
um, I'm not gonna tell anybody about it.
Uh, however...
if the thing that you see, uh, in your secrecy agreement
conflicts with that oath of service,
if the thing that you see is that the government itself--
the Agency itself--
is actually violating that Constitution,
well, now you're kind of screwed.
And then if you try to explain what happened,
and if you write a book about how it happened
and-and how we get out of it,
and then you're supposed to send that book to the CIA
and let the CIA kind of edit your life story,
would you do that?
I would not.
-I can safely say I would not. -Me, neither.
Right. Uh, where do people go...
so then where do we go from here?
I mean, you-you became infamous for spilling the secrets.
You know, people now know about mass surveillance.
But now we live in a world where,
as you talk about in the book, you know,
surveillance has so many levels to it.
You have... institutions that are surveilling us.
We have private companies, as you know, surveilling us.
You see breaches from everyone, you know, Equifax to Facebook.
What can people do to protect themselves and their data?
Or is this something that we should just give up?
Well, so this is, you know, a lot of people ask me this,
and they want, like, sort of the Edward Snowden
operation security guide for, like, how I would use a phone
or how I avoid surveillance,
but, guys, uh, you don't want to live like me.
Um, you don't want to have ordinary people
fighting an arms race
against the most well resourced intelligence services
on the planet.
You don't want ordinary people trying to out-engineer
these technology companies that are basically earning
more money than anybody else on the planet.
Um, that's not reasonable. It doesn't make sense.
And then when we look at what's happening in Congress,
Congress is like, "You know, oh, we'll pass some law."
By the way, the United States
is one of the only advanced democracies
on the planet that doesn't have a basic privacy law.
Right? Everybody's like, "Oh, we've got a privacy law,
the Fourth Amendment."
Fourth Amendment's obviously very dear to me.
That's what I stood up
and really burned my life to the ground over.
But the Fourth Amendment only restricts
the operations of the federal government,
the state government.
It doesn't do squat for you against Google and Facebook.
So they say "data protection laws," right?
And we've had advances since 2013--
more communications are encrypted;
now you've got encrypted messengers.
We've got lots of ways to be safe-er, right?
But then when we talk about what all these guys are doing
and how they're monitoring all of us, um...
they say, "Well, data protection laws."
But the problem with data protection laws
is that it presumes the data collection was okay.
And that's the problem.
Um, as you might have realized,
I was flipping through your memoir before this,
because that's kind of what spies do,
-(laughter) -um, and, uh,
you wrote...
you wrote actually really movingly
about something that struck me, and it was kind of similar
to one of the chapters in my book.
Mine was called "The Boy," and it's about
how I am, um, uh, in my final position,
working directly with the tools of mass surveillance,
I can see anybody's e-mails,
I can see what you're texting back and forth.
You know, the guys that are working left and right of me
are turning their monitor to show me nudes
of the wife of one of their targets,
and, uh, they say, "Bonus."
Um... But then I see,
uh, this picture-- it was actually a video--
of a child in the lap of his father.
A-And the, you know, it's like a toddler,
they're smacking on the keyboard.
Um, and they don't realize what's going on,
but he kind of glanced at the camera,
and I felt like he was looking at me.
And this really shook me
because when we talk about surveillance,
we're talking so much about an abstraction,
-we're talking about things that don't feel real. -Right.
And when I was looking at yours, you mentioned, um,
buying a camera at some point.
There were so many times, you know,
you get an electric razor, it doesn't really bother you.
It doesn't strike you as anything criminal.
-Right, but the camera has something -But then...
inside of it that contains peoples' memories
-and their lives. -Right.
You realized that it wasn't a thing
that had been stolen, it-it was a memory.
And that was in the context of one person.
I realized that the machine--
I was a technologist in the NSA--
all of the different parts that I'd been working with,
all of the systems, they had stolen
and were stealing, not just one person's memories,
they were stealing everyone's, everywhere, all the time,
and they still are right now.
A-And so I got up out of the chair and, you know,
I didn't try to burn down the NSA.
I didn't-- I've published zero documents.
I-I gave them to journalists, and there's a long,
complicated thing in the book about how and why
and where the lines are.
Um, but I wanted not to say,
"This is the way the world should be."
I wanted to give it to you.
I-I wanted to say, "This is what's happening."
And really, guys, the question for you is,
"How do you want to live?"
We are, today, being used against the future.
We're being used against our children.
Everything we do now lasts forever.
Not because we want to remember it,
but because we're no longer allowed to forget.
So then when people read this book,
and people read through the life of Edward Snowden,
and-and what you had to do--
as you say, burn down your life to expose these secrets.
Some might say, "Well, Edward, why don't you come back
"to the U.S. and then just fight,
you know, the legal system, and prove your case?"
You know, and you've said previously
you can't do that because some of the information
you need to fight your case is something
that they would not allow you to use in court.
But you-you are at a point now where people know the name.
You know, the book is gonna be out now.
Do you think you would take your chances coming back
to the U.S. and hope that one juror
would see your point of view?
Or are you just living in Russia now forever?
Is that your life?
No. This is, this is a great question.
My-My ultimate goal will always be
to return back to the United States.
And I've told the government, actually, from year one,
that I only had one condition for returning,
and that's that I could get a fair trial.
Now, people go, "Oh, well, what's a fair trial?
What does that mean?" Um, and I-I think
that's actually not that hard of question.
There are two questions that come up in this case.
Um, one: Was the law broken?
A-And that's not actually,
really particularly the interesting question,
um, because the law in this case is simply:
Was classified information given to someone
who is not authorized to receive it?
Which is basically any journalist.
It's the public. It's you.
It's everyone who did not know
that their constitutional rights were being violated,
because that was the secret.
Um, but there's another question there,
which is, okay, if the law was broken,
was it justified? And think about this.
If you murder someone,
you can tell the jury,
"Well, they were trying to kill me.
It was self-defense."
The jury can go, "Well, yes, they did break the law.
-"Yes, they did murder someone. -Mm-hmm.
But it was justified." The government argues,
um, that you... there is no justification
for telling a journalist, no matter what.
In fact, they forbid the jury
from hearing why you did what you did.
You cannot voice this. And don't take my word for it.
Just two days ago, the day before my book came out,
um, there is a whistleblower by the name of Daniel Hale.
He's in U.S. prison right now.
He was arrested for giving documents that were classified
to journalists about the U.S. drone program.
Extrajudicial killings.
And the United States government just filed--
in the same court that they're going to charge me,
the Eastern District of Virginia--
they just put in a complaint, a filing before the judge
that said, "We demand that the court
"prohibit the jury from hearing
"and we prohibit the defendant
"from saying why he did what he did
-because it's irrelevant." -And that... Yeah.
-And so you feel... -They said the jury shouldn't be distracted
-with reasons. -Right. So...
I mean, that makes... that makes a lot of sense.
And so you're in a...
you're in a serious predicament right now.
The book is gonna come out.
Um, you know, the U.S. government's
gonna fight not...
for you to not get the money from the book.
They can't stop the book from coming out.
Uh, but you are in Russia,
where you've lived for a long time now.
You seem to be in good spirits, which is interesting
for someone who's been in Russia for this long.
(laughter)
-Like, what is that like? -Well, they don't have Taco Bell,
-but they do have Burger King. -Because, I mean, as someone
who's not a fan of surveillance, Russia's a weird place
to be enjoying your life.
-Is there something about Russia we don't know? -Yeah, yeah.
-So, this is... -Is, like... Is there...
Are there, like, cool spots in Russia
that more people need to learn about?
-Is that where Edward Snowden goes to chill? -At least...
(laughs)
So, Moscow is actually a lot more like New York
than you might think, for good and bad there.
Um, the problem is the politics in Russia.
The human rights record of Russia are terrible.
And a lot of people don't realize--
and this is extensively covered in the book--
I didn't choose to go to Russia.
-Right. -I was en route to Latin America.
Um, the United States government canceled my passport,
and then, uh, when I was trapped in the Russian airport...
Uh, I spent 40 days stuck in an airport
because I wouldn't cooperate with the Russian authorities.
I don't know what the longest layover you guys have ever had,
but 40 days, uh...
(laughs) That was not the best part
of the time I've spent in Russia.
Um, I applied for asylum
in 27 different countries around the world,
places like France, Germany, Italy, Norway.
And every time they got close, uh, to letting me come,
the United States government
would call, uh, their foreign ministry,
and it would be either then the vice president
or then the Secretary of State, and they would say,
"There will be consequences if you let this guy in.
"Doesn't matter if it's legal.
"Doesn't matter if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
"says he has a right to seek and enjoy asylum.
"Um, there's gonna be consequences.
"We're not gonna say what they are,
but there will be punishment."
And so what I ask you guys is
you would think, right, former NSA, former CIA,
like, the last place on Earth
the government would want me to be is in Russia.
Why are they working so hard to keep me here?
And I think the reality is
it's just a convenient political attack that will never go away.
Well, you are truly one of the most interesting human beings
on the planet, because you have lived
one of the most interesting lives on the planet.
But one thing that really struck me from the book
is I think a lot of people don't realize
how young and normal you are and were
before this happened to you.
Like, you're just a young guy who, like,
likes computers and plays video games.
-(laughs) -And, like,
I know that you-you actually have to pirate games
'cause you can't use a credit card
because then people can track you.
So, what-- like, what games are you--
Are you, like, a Fortnite person? Are you...
-(laughs) -Like, what-what games
-does Edward Snowden play? -I played...
I-I played Fortnite recently.
And, uh, I-I spent, like, a week on it.
And then I got really mad,
because, like, their matchmaking system, man.
They-they just put people who don't know
what the hell they're doing in
-with, like, the world's greatest pros. -(laughing)
And I'm like, "Come on. Come--"
I'm 36 years old, man.
I can't keep up with these 12-year-olds.
Well, you know what, man,
I just want to say thank you so much for your time.
Um, the book is illuminating.
Uh, I think everyone has benefited from what you've done.
Before you go though, I do have one question,
uh, to that r-- uh, to that regard.
Do you think you've made a difference?
Or do you think you've just been a big story?
Like, is our data safer?
Has the government changed its tactics?
Or was this all for nothing? You know?
Do you live in Russia for-for nothing?
There's no question, um...
And this is covered in the book. It's actually--
The-the final chapter's, uh,
sort of an overview of what's changed.
Um, there's no question.
The entire structure of the Internet has changed since 2013.
Uh, the world's biggest technology companies,
good and bad for privacy, h-have reengineered,
um, the kind of protections that we experience
that you don't even see,
uh, simply because they realized the government w-was sort of,
-uh, going in, uh, under cover of darkness -Mm-hmm.
and helping themselves to the buffet,
uh, without anybody noticing.
Our laws have changed.
Our international standards has changed.
But the most important thing--
and this is what I think people forget--
um, is you don't look,
uh, for some guy to come out of a building a-and save the world.
That-That's not how life works.
Um, what 2013 did,
the most important thing that no one can ever change,
uh, is, before 2013,
the idea of mass surveillance,
people knew it was possible.
There were technologists and academics
and people who suspected this was going on.
Um, but it was kind of a conspiracy theory,
because it was a suspicion.
And that distance
between suspicion and fact
is everything in a democracy.
That is all we have in a free society, because we--
if we can't agree on what is happening,
how can we decide
what we should do about it?
Government in a democracy derives its, uh,
legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
And the biggest problem in 2013,
uh, was that consent is only meaningful if it's informed.
And they lied to us.
Edward Snowden, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Good luck in Fortnite.
Permanent Record is available now.