Edward Snowden on America and Russia’s Diplomatic Woes

I wanted to talk about you, like where you are right now in your life and how you're handling this. Because you've been in exile for how many years now? It's been more than six years now. Six years. Six years. In June of 2013. Yeah. I mean, well, actually I left May. What is life like? I mean... Are you in constant hiding? I mean, what are the issues like? In the beginning, my operational security level, as we would call it, was very high. I was concerned about being recognized. I was concerned about being followed. I was concerned, really, about very bad things happening to me because the government made it very clear that from their position I was the most wanted man in the world. They literally brought down the president of Bolivia, his aircraft, and would not let it depart as it tried to cross the airspace of Europe, not even the United States. They wouldn't let it leave until they confirmed I was not on board. So yeah, that made me a little bit nervous. But you can't live like that forever. And although I was as careful as I could be, I still lived pretty happily because I was an indoor cat to begin with. I've always been a technologist. I've always been pretty nerdy. So as long as I have a screen and an internet connection, I was pretty happy. But in the years past, my life has become more and more open. Now I speak openly, I live openly, I go out, I ride the Metro, I go to restaurants, I go to walks in the park. How often are you recognized? So this is a funny thing, is I'm almost never recognized. One of those things is I don't give Russian interviews because I don't want my face all over the news, which is nice because it just allows people to sort of forget about my face and I can go about my life. But it's one of the weird things that I'm recognized a couple times a year, even when I'm not wearing my glasses, in a museum or a grocery store or something like that or out on the street, just by somebody who I swear, like these people are, you might have read a story about them, like super-recognizers, the people who just have a great memory for faces because I can be like a wear and a hood and like a jacket, it can have a scarf around my face like in the winter and like you can barely see my face and they'll come up to me and they're like, are you Snowden? And I'm like, whoa. What do you say? That's pretty impressive. I'd say, yeah. It's nice to meet you. And yeah, I've never had a negative interaction from being recognized. But for me, because I'm a privacy advocate, I would much rather go unrecognized. I don't want to be a celebrity. But the other thing is I'll get recognized in computer stores. And I think there's just like a mental association where people are like their brain, when it's cycling through faces that it recognizes, it's going through like the subset of nerdier people or something like that when you're in a computer store. Because for whatever reason, I'm recognized much more frequently when there's some kind of technological like locusts. So you're living freely. You had to learn Russian? Did you learn it? Yeah, I mean, my Russian is still pretty crappy to my great shame because all of my life, all of my work is primarily in English. Right. Now, you've talked about returning home if you could get a fair trial. Is that a feasible thing? A fair trial for someone like you? Is that such a? Well, is that? Yeah. Is that even possible? It's a good question. I mean, look, if we're being frank, I think all your audience knows the chance of me getting a fair shake in the Eastern District of Virginia, a couple miles from the headquarters of the CIA, is probably pretty slim because that's where they draw the jury pool from. But my objection here is on a larger principle. What happens to me is less important. If I spend the rest of my life in jail, that's less important than what I'm actually requiring the government to agree to, which is a single thing. They say face the music, face the music. And I'm saying, great, let's pick the song. The thing is the law that I've been charged under, the one that all these whistleblowers have been charged under, Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower who is in prison right now, going through a trial that is precisely similar to what I would be facing. His lawyer is asking the court or telling the court that we want to tell the jury why he did what he did, that the government is violating laws, the government is violating human rights, that these programs are immoral, that they're unethical. This is what motivated this guy to do it. And the jury should be able to hear why he did what he did. And the jury should be able to decide whether that was right or wrong. And the government has responded to this whistleblower argument basically saying, we demand the court forbid this guy from breathing the word whistleblower in court. He cannot talk about what motivated him. He cannot talk about what was revealed, why it was revealed, what the impacts and effects were. He can't talk about whether the public benefited from it or was harmed by it because it doesn't matter. Now, this might surprise a lot of people because to a lot of us, we think that's what a jury trial is. We think that's what a fair trial is. But the Espionage Act that the government uses against whistleblowers, meaning broadly here the sources of journalism, is fairly unique in the legal system in that it is what's called a strict liability crime. A strict liability crime is what the government considers to be basically a crime worse than a murder. Because if you murdered somebody, like if you just, I don't know, beat Jamie with the microphone stand right now, you would be able to go to the court and say it was self-defense. You felt threatened. You were in danger for your life. Even if you weren't, even if you obviously weren't, even if you were on tape, you could still argue that. And the jury could go, you're full of crap. And they could convict you. But if you were, in fact, acting in self-defense, and if the jury did, in fact, believe you, they could take that into consideration in establishing their verdict. Strict liability crimes forbid that. The jury is not allowed to consider why you committed a crime. They're only allowed to consider if you committed a crime. They're not allowed to consider if the murder was justified. They're only allowed to consider if the murder took place. The funny thing in this case is that the murder that we're talking about is telling the truth. The Espionage Act, in every case, is a law the government exclusively uses against people who told the truth. That's what it's about in the context of journalism. They don't bring the Espionage Act against people who lied, and they would use fraud or some other statute. They say the government is arguing in the context of whistleblowing that telling a important truth to the American people by way of a journalist is a crime worse than murder. And I believe, and I think most Americans would agree, this is fundamentally, indefensibly wrong. And so my whole argument with the United States government since the very beginning was, Ben, I'll be back for jury trial tomorrow, but you have to agree to permit whistleblowers a public interest offense. It doesn't matter whether they are a whistleblower or not. It's just they argued. It's the jury that decides whether they are a whistleblower or not. They have to be able to consider the motivations of why someone did what they did. The government says we refuse to allow that because that puts the government on trial, and we don't trust the jury to consider those questions. Wow. So you have had these conversations then, so this has been discussed. Oh, no, this is from the Obama administration. There's been no contact since the Trump administration because the government basically, when they got to this point, they went, we have no good argument against this, and we will never permit this to happen. And again, I just want to make clear this is not speculation. This is not me thinking. This is actively happening in the case of Daniel Hale right now. I hope you guys can pull up a graphic for it because this story just at the papers, like two or three weeks ago, I'm saying the government is forbidding this guy from making this argument. So you're seemingly in a state of limbo then. They're not actively pursuing you. It seems that if you're able to move around freely, they haven't discovered where you are. You're just free to live your life. You... Well, yeah. Yeah. These things where, you know, whether they know where I am or whether they don't know where I am, where I put my head on the pillow, it doesn't matter so much. I'm in Russia, right? And we should lean into that because I think people, they hear Russia particularly in the context of today's news and you see like what people are saying about Tulsi Gabbard and things like that. Any kind of association, any time your name appears in the same sentence, same paragraph, same story as the word Russia, it's considered a negative thing now. And don't get me wrong, I've been a long time critic of the Russian government. I just actually had a major story written about me in a Russian state news outlet called Ria Novosti. You guys could probably pull it. It's only in Russian though. That's saying because I spoke favorably about a member of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, which I wasn't even speaking positively about this guy. I was saying, look, I think people have a right to express their opposition in a country and they should be able to do that without fearing retaliation in the future because the background here is this opposition figure has been a long time thorn in the Russian administration side. And they've just suddenly, magically been accused of being foreign agents or something like that. And so everyone connected to this, which is like a big civil society body, had their doors like simultaneously kicked in across the country and they're being investigated for some kind of corruption or something. It doesn't even matter. And I said I opposed that just like I was tweeting footage of ballot stuffing in the Russian elections, just like I've criticized the Russian president by name. I've criticized Russian surveillance laws. So many things again and again and again and again and again. But yeah, so look, it does not make my life easier to be trapped in a country that I did not choose. And people don't remember this. I was actually en route to Latin America when the US government canceled my passport, which trapped me in Russia. And for those who are interested again, I wrote an entire book that has a lot of detail on this. But yeah, it's difficult to be basically engaged in civil opposition to policies of the United States government at the same time as the Russian government. And it's a hard thing. It's not a happy thing, but I feel like it's a necessary thing. The problem is nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to engage in that kind of nuance. Nobody wants to consider those kind of conversations in the current world. People believe, and this is actually one of the worst things that Western media does in the context of discussing Russia, is they create this aura of invincibility around the Russian president. They go, you know, this guy's calling all the shots. He's pulling all the strings. You know, this guy's in charge of the world. And that's very useful for the Russian government broadly because they can then take that and replay that on their domestic media and they go, look how strong we are. The Americans are afraid of us. The Chinese are afraid of us. Everybody's afraid of us. The French are afraid of us. We are strong, right? There's no question that Russia's going to be interfering in elections. There's no question that America's going to be interfering in Russian elections, right? Nobody likes to talk about this. And again, I need to substantiate that now that I've said that. I've got an old note that I've signed a billion times. The New York Times published a story in the wake of, you know, this contested 2016 election where they looked into the history of electoral interference in Russia and the Soviet Union. And they found in roughly 50 years, 36 different cases of election interference by Russia or the Soviets, right? This is not a new thing. This is something that always happens because that's what intelligence services do. That's what they think they're being paid for, which is a sad thing, but it's a reality because we aren't wise enough to separate covert action from intelligence gathering. But in that same study that they found 36 different cases by the Russians and the Soviets, they found 81 different cases by the US. And this was published by Scott Shane and the New York Times and both the Washington Post as well. But this is the thing. There is a way to criticize the Russian government's policies without criticizing the Russian people who are ordinary people who just want to have a happy life. They just want to do better. They want the same things that you do, right? And every time people go, oh, Russia, Russia, Russia. Every time people go, Russia bad. Every time they go, Russia's doing this, they go, Russia's doing that. Russian people who have nothing to do with the government feel implicated by that. Do you feel like you're in charge of Donald Trump? Do you want to have Donald Trump's legacy around your neck? And then people go, oh, well, you could overthrow Donald Trump. You could overthrow Putin. Can you? Really? Is that how it works? So, yeah, I mean, look, I have no affiliation. I have no love for the Russian government. It's not my choice to be here. And I've made it very clear I would be happy to return home. Is there any concern that they would deny you visa? I mean, how are you staying there? It's a good question. So I have permanent residence. People think I'm under asylum, but I'm no longer under. It's like a green card now. It's got to be renewed every three years. So, yeah, sure, it's possible they could kick me out. And this was what the story I was telling you about before in Russian media was. They were saying, you know, the Russian government should take some action against me, or I shouldn't be welcome here. They should go home because why is he criticizing the Russian government, right? When they're the people who are keeping their hands away? Is that like the Russian version of Fox News? Is that what they have over there? I don't know enough about Russian media to tell you. I think it's supposed to be more like a Reuters or Associated Press, but the hell if I know. But the thing is this. What's the alternative? Right? Yes, the Russian government could screw me, but they could screw me even if I didn't say anything. And so should I shut up and be quiet in the face of things that I think are injustices because it makes me safer? Well, a lot of pragmatic people will say, yeah, they say you've done enough. They say you've done your part. You know, they say whatever. Be safe, live long, be happy. But I didn't come forward to be safe. If I wanted to be safe, I'd still be sitting in Hawaii making a hell of a lot of money to spy on all of you. Right? And nobody ever would have known about this. The system would have gotten worse. But the system, the world, the future gets worse every day that we don't do something about it. Every day that we stay silent about all the injustices we see, the world gets worse. Things get worse. And yeah, it's risky. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. But that's why we do it. Because if we don't, no one else will. All those years I was sitting, hoping for someone else to come forward, and no one did, right? That's because I was waiting for a hero. But there are no heroes, right? There's only heroic decisions. You are never further than one decision away from making a difference. It doesn't matter whether there's a big difference. It doesn't matter if it was a small difference because you don't have to save the world by yourself. And in fact, you can't. All you have to do is lay down one brick. All you have to do is make things a little bit better in a small way so that other people can lay their brick on top of that or beside it. And together, step by step, day by day, year by year, we build the foundation of something better. But yeah, it's not going to be safe. But it doesn't matter. Because individually, it's not me, whoever you are, that's the Iron Man. I don't care if you're the biggest doomsday prepper with cans full of beans. If the world ends, it's going to affect you. We make things better. We become safe together, right? Collectively, that is our strength. That is the power of civilization. That is the power that shapes the future. Because even if you make life great for you, you're going to die someday. You're going to be forgotten someday. Your cans of beans are going to rot someday. You can make things safer. You can be more careful, right? You can be more clever, and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the end of the day, you have to recognize if you're trying to eliminate all risks from your life, what you're actually doing is eliminating all possibility from your life. You're trying to collapse the universe of outcomes such that what you've lost is freedom. You've lost the ability to act because you're afraid. That's a beautiful way to put it. That's a beautiful way to put it.