[governance] Snowden-Interview: Transcript

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Find me another country that does not engage in espionage, will you?

--srs (iPad)

> On 28-Jan-2014, at 18:15, Guru गुरु <Guru at ITforChange.net> wrote:
> 
> Specially for those who believe (or rather, who would like others to believe) that the status quo is to be preserved...
> 
> Excerpt
> 
> Mr Snowden did you sleep well the last couple of nights because I was 
> reading that you asked for a kind of police protection. Are there any 
> threats? 
> 
> There are significant threats but I sleep very well. There was an 
> article that came out in an online outlet called Buzz Feed where they 
> interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security 
> Agency and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want and 
> what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These 
> individuals - and these are acting government officials. They said they 
> would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me 
> as I was returning from the grocery store and have me die in the shower
> 
> *But fortunately you are still alive with us.*
> 
> Right but I'm still alive and I don't lose sleep because I've done what 
> I feel I needed to do. It was the right thing to do and I'm not going to 
> be afraid.
> 
> *Does the NSA spy on Siemens, on Mercedes, on other successful German 
> companies for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of knowing what 
> is going on in a scientific and economic world.*
> 
> I don't want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what 
> I will say is there's no question that the US is engaged in economic 
> spying.
> 
> 
> End excerpt
> 
> Gurumurthy Kasinathan
> Director, IT for Change
> In Special Consultative Status with the United Nations ECOSOC
> www.ITforChange.Net
> 
> 
> Source - http://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/netzwelt/snowden277_page-1.html
> 
> Snowden-Interview in English
> - 26.01.2014 23:05 Uhr - Autor/in: Hubert Seipel
> 
> Whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked the documents about US mass 
> surveillance. He spoke about his disclosures and his life to NDR 
> journalist Seipel in Moscow. 
> 
> *"The greatest fear I have", and I quote you, "regarding the disclosures 
> is nothing will change." That was one of your greatest concerns at the 
> time but in the meantime there is a vivid discussion about the situation 
> with the NSA; not only in America but also in Germany and in Brazil and 
> President Obama was forced to go public and to justify what the NSA was 
> doing on legal grounds.*
> 
> What we saw initially in response to the revelations was sort of a 
> circling of the wagons of government around the National Security 
> Agency. Instead of circling around the public and protecting their 
> rights the political class circled around the security state and 
> protected their rights. What's interesting is though that was the 
> initially response, since then we've seen a softening. We've seen the 
> President acknowledge that when he first said "we've drawn the right 
> balance, there are no abuses", we've seen him and his officials admit 
> that there have been abuses. There have been thousands of violations of 
> the National Security Agency and other agencies and authorities every 
> single year.
> 
> *Is the speech of Obama the beginning of a serious regulation?*
> 
> It was clear from the President's speech that he wanted to make minor 
> changes to preserve authorities that we don't need. The President 
> created a review board from officials that were personal friends, from 
> national security insiders, former Deputy of the CIA, people who had 
> every incentive to be soft on these programs and to see them in the best 
> possible light. But what they found was that these programs have no 
> value, they've never stopped a terrorist attack in the United States and 
> they have marginal utility at best for other things. The only thing that 
> the Section 215 phone metadata program, actually it's a broader metadata 
> programme of bulk collection -- bulk collection means mass surveillance 
> -- program was in stopping or detecting $ 8.500 wire transfer from a cab 
> driver in California and it's this kind of review where insiders go we 
> don't need these programs, these programs don't make us safe. They take 
> a tremendous amount of resources to run and they offer us no value. They 
> go "we can modify these". The National Security agency operates under 
> the President's executive authority alone. He can end of modify or 
> direct a change of their policies at any time.
> 
> *For the first time President Obama did concede that the NSA collects 
> and stores trillions of data.*
> 
> Every time you pick up the phone, dial a number, write an email, make a 
> purchase, travel on the bus carrying a cell phone, swipe a card 
> somewhere, you leave a trace and the government has decided that it's a 
> good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you've never been 
> suspected of any crime. Traditionally the government would identify a 
> suspect, they would go to a judge, they would say we suspect he's 
> committed this crime, they would get a warrant and then they would be 
> able to use the totality of their powers in pursuit of the 
> investigation. Nowadays what we see is they want to apply the totality 
> of their powers in advance - prior to an investigation.
> 
> *You started this debate, Edward Snowden is in the meantime a household 
> name for the whistleblower in the age of the internet. You were working 
> until last summer for the NSA and during this time you secretly 
> collected thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive 
> moment or was there a long period of time or something happening, why 
> did you do this?*
> 
> I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of 
> National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to 
> Congress. There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it 
> can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust 
> it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was 
> no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realisation that no one 
> else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these 
> programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is 
> doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the 
> public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were 
> allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were 
> prohibited from knowing or discussing these programmes and that's a 
> dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the 
> FISA Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority
> 
> When you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit 
> down at the desk and you realise the power you have  - you can wire tap 
> the President of the United States, you can wire tap a Federal Judge and 
> if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the 
> NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting.
> 
> *We're not talking only of the NSA as far as this is concerned, there is 
> a multilateral agreement for co-operation among the services and this 
> alliance of intelligence operations is known as the Five Eyes. What 
> agencies and countries belong to this alliance and what is its purpose?*
> 
> The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II 
> era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together 
> to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering 
> infrastructure.
> 
> So we have the UK's GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada's C-Sec, we 
> have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New 
> Zealand's DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades what 
> sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn't answer 
> to the laws of its own countries.
> 
> *In many countries, as in America too the agencies like the NSA are not 
> allowed to spy within their own borders on their own people. So the 
> Brits for example they can spy on everybody but the Brits but the NSA 
> can conduct surveillance in England so in the very end they could 
> exchange their data and they would be strictly following the law.*
> 
> If you ask the governments about this directly they would deny it and 
> point to policy agreements between the members of the Five Eyes saying 
> that they won't spy on each other's citizens but there are a couple of 
> key points there. One is that the way they define spying is not the 
> collection of data. The GCHQ is collecting an incredible amount of data 
> on British Citizens just as the National Security Agency is gathering 
> enormous amounts of data on US citizens. What they are saying is that 
> they will not then target people within that data. They won't look for 
> UK citizens or British citizens. In addition the policy agreements 
> between them that say British won't target US citizens, US won't target 
> British citizens are not legally binding. The actual memorandums of 
> agreement state specifically on that that they are not intended to put 
> legal restriction on any government. They are policy agreements that can 
> be deviated from or broken at any time. So if they want to on a British 
> citizen they can spy on a British citizen and then they can even share 
> that data with the British government that is itself forbidden from 
> spying on UK citizens. So there is a sort of a trading dynamic there but 
> it's not, it's not open, it's more of a nudge and wink and beyond that 
> the key is to remember the surveillance and the abuse doesn't occur when 
> people look at the data it occurs when people gather the data in the 
> first place.
> 
> *How narrow is the co-operation of the German Secret Service BND with 
> the NSA and with the Five Eyes?*
> 
> I would describe it as intimate. As a matter of fact the first way I 
> described it in our written interview was that the German Services and 
> the US Services are in bed together. They not only share information, 
> the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually share the 
> tools and the infrastructure they work together against joint targets in 
> services and there's a lot of danger in this. One of the major 
> programmes that faces abuse in the National Security Agency is what's 
> called "XKeyscore". It's a front end search engine that allows them to 
> look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.
> 
> *What could you do if you would sit so to speak in their place with this 
> kind of instrument?*
> 
> You could read anyone's email in the world. Anybody you've got email 
> address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any 
> computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that 
> you're tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place 
> throughout the world. It's a one stop shop for access to the NSA's 
> information. And what's more you can tag individuals using "XKeyscore". 
> Let's say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was 
> interesting or you just have access that's interesting to me, let's say 
> you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that 
> network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I 
> can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and 
> I can build what's called a fingerprint which is network activity unique 
> to you which means anywhere you go in the world anywhere you try to sort 
> of hide your online presence hide your identity, the NSA can find you 
> and anyone who's allowed to use this or who the NSA shares their 
> software with can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries 
> that have access to "XKeyscore".
> 
> *This sounds rather frightening. The question is: does the BND deliver 
> data of Germans to the NSA?*
> 
> Whether the BND does it directly or knowingly the NSA gets German data.  
> Whether it's provided I can't speak to until it's been reported because 
> it would be classified and I prefer that journalists make the 
> distinctions and the decisions about what is public interest and what 
> should be published. However, it's no secret that every country in the 
> world has the data of their citizens in the NSA. Millions and millions 
> and millions of data connections from Germans going about their daily 
> lives, talking on their cell phones, sending SMS messages, visiting 
> websites, buying things online, all of this ends up at the NSA and it's 
> reasonable to suspect that the BND may be aware of it in some capacity. 
> Now whether or not they actively provide the information I should not say.
> 
> *The BND basically argues if we do this, we do this accidentally 
> actually and our filter didn't work.*
> 
> Right so the kind of things that they're discussing there are two 
> things.  They're talking about filtering of ingest which means when the 
> NSA puts a secret server in a German telecommunications provider
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