Edward Snowden: US would have buried NSA warnings forever
“If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”
Edward Snowden, the source of National Security Agency leaks, has insisted that he decided to become a whistleblower and flee America because he had no faith in the internal reporting mechanisms of the US government, which he believed would have destroyed him and buried his message for ever.
One of the main criticisms levelled at Snowden by the Obama administration has been that he should have taken up an official complaint within the NSA, rather than travelling to Hong Kong to share his concerns about the agency’s data dragnet with the Guardian and other news organisations. But in an interview with the New York Times, Snowden has dismissed that option as implausible.
“The system does not work,” he said, pointing to the paradox that “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.” If he had tried to sound the alarm internally, he would have “been discredited and ruined” and the substance of his warnings “would have been buried forever”.
Snowden, 30, conducted the interview with the New York Times over the past few days, communicating from Russia, where he has been granted a year’s asylum, with a Times journalist in New York via encrypted email. He took the opportunity to try to quash several of the most widely aired criticisms of his actions.
He disputed speculation that he had run the risk of China and Russia gaining access to the top secret files. He said he was so familiar with Chinese spying operations, having himself targeted China when he was employed by the NSA, that he knew how to keep the trove secure from them.
As for Russia, he revealed that he had left all the leaked documents behind when he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow. He told the New York Times he had decided to hand over all the digital material to the journalists he had encountered in Hong Kong – Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, and the independent filmmaker Laura Poitras – because to hang on to copies would not have been in the public interest.
“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of materials onward?” he said, adding: “There’s a zero per cent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”
Snowden’s comments about his lack of faith in the internal mechanisms for sounding the alarm within government go to the heart of the dichotomy within the Obama administration’s policy towards whistleblowers... read more:
