I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community?

I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator,

a senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency,

a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

One of the things people are going to be most interested in,

in trying to understand who you are and what you’re thinking,

is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower

to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower.

Walk people through that decision-making process.

When you're positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for this sort of intelligence community agencies,

you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee

and because of that you see things that may be disturbing.

But over the course of a normal person's career, you'd only see one or two of these instances.

When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis

and you recognise that some of these things are actually abuses.

And when you talk to people about them, in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business,

people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them.

But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it.

And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem,

until eventually you realise that these things need to be determined by the public,

not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.

Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans?

NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible,

and it believes, on the grounds of a sort of self-certification, that they serve the national interest.

Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.

Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically.

And to do that, they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone.

It ingests them by default.

It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyses them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time,

simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.

So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government

or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so.

Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere.

Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks

and the authorities that the analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything.

But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone,

from you or your accountant to a federal judge,

to even the president, if I had a personal email.

One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is that usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously

and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope, often, is forever.

You, on the other hand, have this attitude of the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures.

Why did you choose to do that?

I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model.

When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

And if you do that in secret, consistently, you know, as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took,

it will kind of give its officials a mandate to go, "Hey, you know, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side".

But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens.

But they're typically maligned. You know, it becomes a thing of,

these people are against the country, they're against the government. But I'm not.

I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills.

I'm just another guy who sits there, day-to-day, in the office, and watches what's happening, and goes,

"This is something that's not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong".

And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, "I didn't change these. I didn't modify the story.

This is the truth. This is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

Have you given thought to what it is that the U.S. government’s response to your conduct is,

in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you?

Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA.

I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners.

You know, they work closely with a number of other nations.

Or, you know, they could pay off the triads. Or any of their agents or assets.

We've got a CIA station just up the road, and the consulate here in Hong Kong

and I am sure they are going to be very busy for the next week.

And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk,

because they're such powerful adversaries, that no one can meaningfully oppose them.

If they want to get you, they'll get you, in time.

But, at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you.

And if living, living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept –

and I think many of us are, it's the human nature –

you can get up every day, you can go to work, you can collect your large paycheck

for relatively little work, against the public interest,

and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But…

if you realise that that's the world that you helped create,

and it's going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation,

who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression,

you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is

so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

Why should people care about surveillance?

Because, even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded.

And the storage capability of the systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude

to where it's getting to the point you don't have to have done anything wrong.

You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call

and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you've ever made

every friend you've ever discussed something with

and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion

from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong

which is where we are because you travelled here.

Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here.

And specifically, there are going to be people who will speculate

that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the United States

which is China, and that what you're really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States

with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure.

So there's a couple assertions in those arguments

that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong.

The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not.

I mean, there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government.

But the peoples, inherently, we don't care. We trade with each other freely. We're not at war.

We're not in armed conflict and we're not trying to be. We're the largest trading partners out there for each other.

Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech.

People think, "Oh, China, great firewall". Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but

the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known.

The Internet is not filtered here

no more so than any other Western government.

And I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments.

If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies, or if your motive had been personal material gain,

were there things that you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn’t end up doing?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had

could, you know, suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia. You know, they always have an open door, as we do.

I had access to, you know, the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community,

and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.

If I had just wanted to harm the U.S., you know… you could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.

But that’s not my intention. And I think, for anyone making that argument,

they need to think, if they were in my position,

and, you know, you live a privileged life—you’re living in Hawaii, in Paradise, and making a ton of money—

what would it take to make you leave everything behind?

The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.

People will see in the media all of these disclosures.

They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally,

to create greater control over American society and global society,

but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things,

to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse,

until eventually there will be a time where policies will change,

because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy.

Even our agreements with other sovereign governments,

we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law.

And because of that, a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch, say that…

…because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, you know, some new and unpredicted threat,

we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it

and it’ll be turnkey tyranny.