{"id":48571,"date":"2014-10-13T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48571"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:38","slug":"edward-snowden-speaks-a-sneak-peek-at-an-exclusive-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/edward-snowden-speaks-a-sneak-peek-at-an-exclusive-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Snowden Speaks: A Sneak Peek at an Exclusive Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently met with the courageous whistleblower for over three hours in Moscow for a wide-ranging conversation on surveillance, technology and politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Stephen<\/a>

Stephen F. Cohen, Edward Snowden and Katrina vanden Heuvel<\/p><\/div>\n

On October 6 [2014], Nation<\/em> editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and contributing editor Stephen Cohen sat down in Moscow for a rare and wide-ranging conversation with Edward Snowden, whose courageous actions exposing the extent of warrantless surveillance of millions living in the United States by the NSA have sparked a critical, unprecedented and transformative debate about mass surveillance.<\/p>\n

Among other issues, they discussed the price Snowden has paid for speaking truth to power, his definition of patriotism and accountability, how his experience has changed his view of US history and his frustration over America\u2019s political system. What follows are a few passages from their conversation. A longer edited version will be published in a forthcoming issue and at TheNation.com.<\/p>\n

Katrina vanden Heuvel<\/strong>: The Nation<\/em>, many years ago, did an issue on patriotism and asked about a hundred people\u2014how do you define patriotism? You\u2019ve been called many names, and you\u2019ve been called a patriot, but how do you, personally, define patriotism?<\/p>\n

Edward Snowden<\/strong>: So, in terms of patriotism, I would say that what defines patriotism, for me, is the idea that one elevates\u2014or they act to benefit\u2014the country, right? That\u2019s distinct from acting to benefit the government, and that distinction, that\u2019s increasingly lost today. You\u2019re not patriotic, just because you back whoever is in power today. You\u2019re not patriotic because you back their policies. You\u2019re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people in your country, in your community, in your family, those around you.<\/p>\n

And sometimes that means making hard choices, choices that work against your own personal interest. You know, people sometimes say I broke an \u201coath of secrecy,\u201d that was one of the early charges leveled against me. But it\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You\u2019re asked to sign a civil agreement, called \u201cStandard Form 312,\u201d which basically says, if you disclose classified information they can sue you, they can do this, that and the other. And you stand at risk of going to jail. But you are also asked to take an oath, and that\u2019s the oath of service. The oath of service is not to secrecy; it\u2019s to the Constitution\u2014to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That\u2019s the oath that I kept, that James Clapper and Keith Alexander did not.<\/p>\n

Stephen Cohen<\/strong>: You signed that?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: You raise your hand, and you give the oath in your class when you \u201con-board.\u201d All incoming officers are made to do it when you work for the Central Intelligence Agency. At least, that\u2019s where I took the oath\u2014as well as another in the military.<\/p>\n

But \u201cwhistleblowing,\u201d as a label, calling someone a whistleblower, I think that does them\u2014it does all of us\u2014a disservice, because it \u201cotherizes.\u201d Using the language of heroism, calling Dan Ellsberg a hero, you know, all these people who made great sacrifices\u2014what they have done is heroic\u2014but to distinguish them from the civic duty they have performed by saying they are heroes excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to stand up and say when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, when we witness the people in power abusing that power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to stand up and say something, or we are party to that bad action.<\/p>\n

KvH<\/strong>: In light of your personal experience\u2014the risks you\u2019ve taken, you\u2019re sitting here in Moscow. When you think of a young man or woman who might want to take comparable risks, do you think your experience encourages or discourages that?<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: I think when you compare my example to the example of Chelsea Manning\u2014who revealed the Iraq war logs, which showed that there were attacks against civilians, whether intentional or unintentional, that had been concealed by the military; the fact that there were people being held indefinitely that classified documents had said did not represent a threat to anyone or any state or any government anywhere but were instead being held for intelligence purposes and would never face any charges against them. You know, these are the kinds of things voters in a democracy need to know in order to make meaningful choices. But when they were brought forward\u2014regardless of your opinion on how it was done or whether it could\u2019ve been done better or if it was a good or bad thing\u2014Manning got thirty-five years in prison. Meanwhile, I\u2019m still free. I talk to people in the ACLU office in New York all the time. I\u2019m able to participate in the debate. I\u2019ve been able to campaign for reform, and I\u2019m just the first to come forward in the manner that I did and succeed.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a danger when governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation; they delegitimize not just their systems of government, not just their systems of justice, but the very legitimacy of their government. Because when we bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly intended to work in the public interest, we deny them the opportunity, the ability, to even mount a public-interest defense. The espionage charges they brought against me, for example, explicitly deny the ability to make a public-interest defense. There were no whistleblower protections that would\u2019ve protected me\u2014and that\u2019s known for everybody who\u2019s in the intelligence community. There are no proper channels for making this information available when the system fails comprehensively.<\/p>\n

The government would assert that individuals who are aware of serious wrongdoing in the intelligence community should bring their concerns about these programs to the ones most responsible for that wrongdoing, and rely on those people to correct the problems that those people intentionally authorized. It\u2019s clear that doesn\u2019t work. We see in the case of Thomas Drake, who brought forward serious evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in the government and the mass surveillance programs, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis and other whistleblowers in the past, going all the way back to Dan Ellsberg. The government is not concerned with damage to national security because in each of these cases, damage did not result.<\/p>\n

At the trial of Chelsea Manning, the government could point to no case of specific damage that had been caused by a massive revelation of classified information. The charges are a reaction to the government\u2019s embarrassment more than genuine concern about these activities, otherwise they would substantiate what the harms were. We\u2019re now more than a year on from the NSA revelations, and despite numerous testimony before Congress, despite tons of off-the-record quotes from anonymous officials who have an axe to grind, not a single US official, not a single representative of the United States government has ever pointed to a single case of individualized harm caused by these revelations. This, despite the fact that Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, said this would cause grave and irrevocable harm to the nation.<\/p>\n

KvH<\/strong>: Are you looking forward to Laura Poitras\u2019s movie [Citizenfour<\/em>]? I think it is going to have a big impact.<\/p>\n

ES<\/strong>: She\u2019s very impressive. Of all of the journalists that I\u2019ve worked with, she was actually the most conscious of operational security out of anybody. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because she had spent time in the war zone or what. But she was very rigorous in how she followed everything, and that was really encouraging. It\u2019s rare for me to meet somebody who can be more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of <\/em>The Nation. She writes a weekly web column for <\/em>The Washington Post. Her blog “Editor’s Cut” appears at thenation.com. She is the author of <\/em>The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in The Age of Obama (Nation Books, 2011). She is also the editor of <\/em>Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover<\/em>\u00a0and co-editor of <\/em>Taking Back America–And Taking Down The Radical Right.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton\u00a0University. His\u00a0<\/em>Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War\u00a0and his <\/em>The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin are now in paperback.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recently met with the courageous whistleblower for over three hours in Moscow for a wide-ranging conversation on surveillance, technology and politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}