Edward Snowden: Obama Made Mass Surveillance Worse

So you're in this position where you have this information and you know that these surveillance systems are in place and they're unconstitutional and you feel this deep responsibility to let the American people know about this. What makes you take the leap? So this is covered extensively in the book because it took a long time. I would imagine. People you know yeah right exactly people like to think it's like a cinematic moment where I find this golden document like the Stellar Wind Report and that's the closest thing to a smoking gun right that exists. But look if you found that you can read that later look at that and like imagine yourself being like oh I'm gonna go outside on the courthouse steps and wave this thing and burn my life to the ground burn my family to the ground I'm never gonna be work again I'm going to jail for the rest of my life. The question is what would it take for you to light a match and burn your life to the ground? For a long time. Too long. The answer was nothing. And I'm ashamed of that. It took me so long to get over that hump because I was waiting for somebody else to do it. When I saw people like Ron Wyden on this when I saw people like the court case that I showed before where people were actively challenging these programs right journalists had the scent of it and you know there are a lot of people who are gonna be in you know the YouTube comments or whatever go oh I knew this was happening. No you didn't. Bill Bimini. You had Bill Bimini. He initially was the one that came out and spoke about this issue. So yeah Bill Bimini is part of shall we say the group of early NSA whistleblowers who came with Thomas Drake, Bill Bimini, Kirk Wiebe I believe in Ed Loomis and these guys all got their doors kicked in you know they got harassed by the FBI. Tom Drake who was a senior executive at the NSA this guy who had a lot to lose was charged under the same law as the Espionage Act and these guys were doing it earlier during the Bush administration. Some of them were talking to the journalists that you know maybe it's alleged I don't want to put them on the spot maybe they deny maybe they don't leave that to them. But somebody somewhere was informing this reporting right that got into the New York Times about the Bush era warrantless wiretapping program and eventually journalists put this out there people knew these capabilities existed. But yeah then there's the person in the YouTube comments who's like oh we knew all about this it's nothing new and the thing is you can know about some programs and not know about others. You can have a suspicion you can know with a certainty that this stuff is capable or is possible the capability exists. You can know that the government has done this stuff in the past you can know they are likely to do it again. You can have all these indications you can have like the Jewel versus NSA case that's run by the EFF which is about the AT&T or it's about AT&T setting up secret rooms in their telecommunications facilities where they basically drag all the fibers for their domestic internet communications and like phone communications into a room that's purpose built for the NSA and then they bring it out. But AT&T denies it's the NSA. The NSA denies that these things happen or that are done at all right and so this is the context you say you know and you know let's put it the other way maybe you do know right maybe you are an academic researcher maybe you're a technological specialist maybe you're just somebody who reads all the reporting and you actually know you can't prove it but you know this is going on. But that's the thing in a democracy the distance between speculation and fact the distance between what you know and what you can prove to everybody else in the country is everything in our model of government because what you know doesn't matter what matters is what we all know and the only way we can all know it is if somebody can prove it if you can prove it and if you don't have the evidence you can't prove it and of course when we talk about the earlier stuff right like this a more corporatized media they've got a thousand incentives not to get involved in this stuff they need access to the White House they need these officials to sit down with them and give interviews right that's constant content that they need that's access that they need they need to be taken seriously they need to be you know admitted debriefers it is a codependent relationship and yet rather and so the only way to make sure people understand this broadly is if we all work together right if we collectively can establish a corpus of evidence right a body of facts that is so large and so persuasive it overcomes the natural and understandable resistance of these more corporatized media groups it overcomes the political and partisan sort of loyalties that all of these political factions in the country do where they go you know it's my president even if I don't like this stuff even if I don't agree with this stuff I don't want to say it exists I want to deny it until it's proved you know in HD on video you know signing the order to do this that or the other because otherwise there's a chance my guy might not get reelected and that's the only way this kind of stuff can happen and the sad fact is the opportunities that we have to prove this like the moments in history where we do prove something anything beyond a reasonable doubt are so few and so rare that they almost always only come from whistleblowers and I think that's one of the problems that we have particularly in the climate movement did look ever go ahead I'm sorry did you take any comfort from knowing that Obama when he was running for office and in his hope and change website he had provisions to protect whistleblowers and provisions to to reward people right I mean do you remember all that mean it was eventually redacted or eventually deleted it from the website that's appeared it from yes but that was a big part of his program or what he was running on was that when people were exposing unlawful activity he was going to protect those people did that did you take any comfort in that? Well Obama also during his campaign said he campaigned actively against the warrantless wiretapping the Bush administration because remember Bush is in the scandal the height of this on 2007 you know the elections coming up right after and he's going Obama's saying you know that's not who we are that's not what we do and yet within a hundred days of him becoming a president now he's sitting in that chair rather than extinguishing these programs he embraces them and expands why do you think that is more entrenched I think it's actually again what we talked about earlier first thing every time a new president comes into the White House they get their clearances right they get read into all this stuff during the campaign they get clearances and they get written on stuff but when they finally become president right now they're the only people who can sign what these are called the covert action findings and things like that which are basically you know the intelligence community wants to assassinate somebody they want to run this illegal program here there or everywhere and they can't do it because they're executive agencies without that top level executive sign-off and so they got to open the vest right they got to get these guys on side and basically every president since Kennedy they have been successful in what they call fearing up where as soon as they come in they lead you read you the litany of horribles and they go these are all the threats that we're facing and let's be real it is a dangerous world it's not just all made up bs some of it is right where it's inflated it's not that it's completely false but they make it sound more serious than it actually is but there are real bad people out there who are trying to do real bad things and you have just gone through a hellish election because our our electoral politics are so diseased and now after you've crawled through fire you're already thinking four years ahead you know how how do i stay in this seat and these guys are basically saying if you don't do x y and z this is going to fall on your lap and the implication which i don't think they actually say but every president knows is these guys can undermine you to death if you've got the ic against you right they can stonewall you they can put out stories that are going to be problematic for you every day your presidency um and it's not that it's necessarily going to going to cast you out of the white house but it's a problem that as a president you very much don't want so in the most charitable interpretation of this you've got a new guy coming in in obama's case this is a pretty young guy um doesn't focus in this kind of national security foreign policy stuff throughout his earlier career he's more interested in domestic policy and always has been that's actually one of the positive things to say about barack obama um he's just trying to make things better at home and now suddenly they go look you need to worry about this country you need to worry about this group that you've never heard of you need to worry about you know this technology you need to do all this stuff uh and the only reason we can tell you this stuff and the only thing dividing america and the abyss are these terrible terrible terrible programs right that are in fact wonderful things because they keep back the darkness and so here's here's the the real problem every president hears that and every president you know first off they've got so many other things to do is they just kind of nod their head and they'll go i'll deal with this later in my administration and this is one of the ironies uh when i come came forward in 2013 right this is now barack obama second term president uh one of the responses that they had to the mass surveillance scandal was yes we think they went a little too far this is after the initial thing where they went nobody's listening to your phone calls you know uh just made a data right nobody nobody can have uh perfect privacy and also have perfect security so we gotta sort of divide a line here between the constitution and you know what the government wants to do um but they said uh we were gonna get to it we knew these programs were problematic but if they just gave us more time we would have fixed them maybe it's true right seems awful convenient in hindsight that throughout the entirety of the first term well it seems like what you would say if you got caught right right right um but look uh in if we're being the most generous uh that we are here the president is briefed on real and legitimate threats and they scare the hell out of them i'm sure um and we can we can all imagine being there right those those of us who remember what the world was like post 9 11 fear is a powerful thing but the guys who are doing that briefing they're no longer scared of it because they've been dealing with this for years this is the oldest thing they've given this briefing times before you know when we talk about people talk about the deep state right they they they talk about it like some conspiracy of lizard people it's not that it's something much simpler the deep state is simply the career government it's the people who are in the same offices who outlive and outlast presidencies right they've seen republicans they've seen democrats they don't really care and they give that same briefing again and again and they get good at it they know what they want they know what this person's saying uh whereas the president they don't know who these people are uh these people have been there before the president they're going to be there after the president and so they give this very effective very fear-inducing speech and then they follow it up with their asks which are really demands um just politely provided and anyone in that position who is not an expert on this stuff who is not ready for this uh uh sort of trade-off and who you have to understand as a career politician is entirely used to the horse trading game right and going i'll deal with this later or not now or uh what are the this the cost benefit here and the intelligence community goes if you give us what we want no one will ever know about it because it's classified it's obviously the easy answer and maybe uh barack obama honestly did want to get to this later but what we can say today is uh for all the good that may have been done in that white house this is an issue where the president went through two full terms and did not fix the problem but in fact made it worse his