13-05-2014, 06:45 PM
"Collect It All": Glenn Greenwald on NSA Bugging Tech Hardware, Economic Espionage & Spying on U.N.
Nearly a year after he first met Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to unveil new secrets about the National Security Agency and the surveillance state. His new book, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State," is being published today. It includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents, including new details on how the NSA routinely intercepts routers, servers and other computer hardware devices being exported from the United States. According to leaked documents published in the book, the NSA then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. This gives the NSA access to entire networks and all their users. The book includes one previously secret NSA file that shows a photo of an agent opening a box marked CISCO. Below it reads a caption: "Intercepted packages are opened carefully." Another memo observes that some signals intelligence tradecraft is "very hands-on (literally!)."
Greenwald joins us in the studio to talk about this and other new revelations about the NSA, including its global economic espionage, spying at the United Nations, and attempting to monitor in-flight Internet users and phone calls. For his reporting on the NSA, Greenwald recently won a George Polk Award and was part of the team from The Guardian that just won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
"Once people understood that this extraordinary system of suspicionless surveillance, which was truly unprecedented in scope, had been created completely in the dark, it became more than a surveillance story," Greenwald says. "It became a story about government secrecy and accountability and the role of journalism, and certainly privacy and surveillance in the digital age."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: Today we bring you a Democracy Now! special: the first of a two-day interview with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. He has just published a riveting new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. The book chronicles the inside story behind perhaps the biggest leak in the nation's history.
Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in Hong Kong last June. Days after their first meeting, Greenwald published an explosive article in The Guardian about the NSA collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily. It was the first of hundreds of articles based on documents leaked by Snowden. And more disclosures are now coming out. Greenwald's book includes dozens of previously secret NSA documents.
For his reporting on the NSA, Glenn Greenwald recently won a George Polk Award and was part of the team from The Guardian that just won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.
Glenn Greenwald came to Democracy Now!'s studios on Monday.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! Great to have you in our studio for the first time since the Edward Snowden revelations, because of concerns you had of coming into this country with threats that you could be arrested. It's great to have you here with your new book.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it's great to be here, always great to be on Democracy Now!, and particularly in person, so I'm thrilled.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go through the remarkable revelations in these documents, that you and Laura and other of these news publications have released one by one. Start with PRISM and then go on to what you think are the most significant now.
GLENN GREENWALD: The first story that we actually reported on was the bulk metadata collection program, where the NSA is collecting the telephone records of every single American every single day, so that they always know who we're calling, who's calling us, how long we speak, where we are when we talk, and the device that we use. And that was one of the reasons why the story had such a huge impact in America, was because this was not spying on Muslims in Muslim countries, which Americans are easily able to ignore or dismiss or justify, but spying on Americans domestically.
The second story which I think was probably even more responsible for the worldwide explosion was the PRISM program, because this program revealed that Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Skype and Microsoft were directly cooperating with the NSA in all sorts of extensive ways to ensure easy NSA access to the communications that take place through those companies. And the reason that was so significant is because, unlike the NSA story of 2005 that involved AT&T and Sprint and Verizon, U.S. domestic telephone companies, these Internet companies are the primary means that the entire First World, for lack of a better term, uses to communicate, and even lots of people in developing countries who are now looking to these companies as the primary means. So you're not just talking about one country; you're talking about hundreds of millions, probably billions of people around the world who use these companies. And so, to learn that the NSA had invaded these systems to such an extent made this a global story. I mean, I remember the day after we published PRISM, my email inbox was filled not just with requests for interviews from U.S. newspapers and U.S. networks, but from television outlets and newspapers all over the world, literally all over the world. And that was what made it such a global story.
And then I think every story after that, there are lots of very independent, individual significant ones, but I think what became apparent to people is that literally the mission of the NSAand this is them in their own wordsis to eliminate privacy globally. And that's not hyperbole. Literally, their institutional mandate is to collect and store and, when they want, analyze and monitor all forms of electronic communication that take place between human beings around the planet. And once people understood that this extraordinary system of suspicionless surveillance, which was truly unprecedented in scope, had been created completely in the darkI mean, no one knew about any of this, even though it had been done by allegedly democratic governmentsit became more than a surveillance story. It became a story about government secrecy and accountability and the role of journalism, and certainly privacy and surveillance in the digital age.
AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called No Place to Hide. In it, you reveal previouslypreviously secret NSA files. Why don't you go through some of those?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, one of the first set of documents that I wanted to publish, that were new, was about this NSA missioncollect it allbecause what had happened was when we first reported that Keith Alexander, the longtime chief of the NSA, went to the British version of the NSA, which is the GCHQ, and gave a speech and said, "Why can't we just collect all of the signals, all of the signals all of the time?" the NSA's claim was, "Oh, that was just an off-handed joke. You're vesting far too much significance in this comment. That was just sort of an out-of-context quip that he made." And the reality is, is that document after document after document in the NSA boasts of how "collect it all" is their driving mission. In fact, one document not only says what we want to do is collect it all; it says, our, quote, "new collection posture is collect it all, sniff it all, process it all, partner it all, exploit it all." And so I just wanted to settle that debate once and for all, that the claims that the NSA is making versus the claims that we're making don't need to be resolved based on faith, but just look at what the NSA's documents say.
There are other documents that talk about the strategic partners that the NSA has in the corporate world. In fact, they list 80 of their most significant corporate partners, that include companies like AT&T and Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, essentially the leading lights of the technological world. And we detail how they use those partnerships to access not only domestic communications, but communications all over the world. There's lots of documents that detailthat are newthat detail how the purpose of the spying system is not to detect terrorist plots or national security plots, but is overwhelmingly economic in nature. They spy on the U.N. They spy on oil companies. They spy on corporations. They are spying on behalf of the Department of Commerce, which the NSA considers one of its, quote-unquote, "customers." So that's a big part of it.
And then, one of the biggest stories that's new in the book is this program that really is quite remarkable, which is, all over the world, people buy routers and switches and servers, which are the devices that let corporations or municipalities or villages provide Internet service to large numbers of people at once, hundreds or even thousands. And there are American companies that are leaders in these products, such as Cisco. And what the NSA will do, whenever it decides that it wants to, is, once somebody orders a product from Cisco, Cisco then ships it to that person; the NSA physically intercepts the package, takes it from FedEx or from the U.S. mail service, brings it back to NSA headquarters, opens up the package, and plants a backdoor device on one of these devices, reseals it with a factory seal and then sends it on to the unwitting user, who then provides Internet service to large numbers of people, all of which is instantly redirected into the repositories of the NSA.
AMY GOODMAN: You, Glenn Greenwald, show a photo of this happening in No Place to Hide.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it's courtesy of the NSA, because what this document is, is it's an internal newsletter, where the NSA communicates with itself and essentially boasts of what it considers its, quote, "successes." And it's a very gushing, easy-to-read document that describes with excitement how they do this. And they even show pictures of them cutting open the packages and then resealing them.
AMY GOODMAN: So, they get the Cisco routerwith the knowledge or without the knowledge of Cisco?
GLENN GREENWALD: It's unclear. There's certainly no evidence that Cisco knows about this or participates in it. They could be an unwitting victim. But at the same time, Cisco is listed as one of the NSA's strategic partners, so they certainly cooperate in some way with the NSA. Whether they cooperate on this specific program or are victimized by it is something that we're not able to discern.
AMY GOODMAN: So there's a lot of people who are watching or listening or reading this right now, Glenn Greenwald, who are looking at their Cisco routers. Maybe they're in the ceiling. Maybe they're in some box somewhere. What should they be thinking or doing?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, one of the remarkable parts about this story, this specific story, is that for many years the U.S. government has been warning the world not to buy routers, switches and servers from Chinese companies, on the grounds that the Chinese government is invading these products and putting backdoor surveillance devices onto them, and saying, "You cannot trust Chinese products." And in fact, the largest Chinese technology company, Huawei, recently announced it was leaving the U.S. market, because they had been so demonized by the U.S. government that they couldn't sell their products anymore. And so, to find out that the U.S. government is doing exactly that which they've been accusing the Chinese doing
AMY GOODMAN: Or maybe saying it because they don'tthey want peoplethey want to push people in the direction of Cisco, so they can monitor?
GLENN GREENWALD: Precisely. I mean, it's not just a case of typical gross hypocrisy, right, where the U.S. government criticizes another government for doing exactly that which they're doing. That is there, of course, but it's way more extensive than that. Here, I do think that a big part of the motive in warning the world off Chinese products is so that the world will instead buy the products that the NSA can invade.
AMY GOODMAN: Any more on Cisco and the memo that the NSA had that you read about Cisco?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, there's documents in which they discuss failures in the system and how to fix that and the communications that they're losing because they're not able to operate very effectively the Cisco routers and switches, just showing some kind of daily, banal problems that arise as part of how widespread this program is.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. We'll be back with him in a minute.[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We're speaking with Glenn Greenwald, the George Polk Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize award-winning journalist, who is back in the United States after, well, almost a year since those first revelations came out from Hong Kong. His new book, out today, called, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Let's turn to Edward Snowden in his own words speaking to German television in January.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: I don't want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists, but what I will say is there's no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic spying. If there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information, and they'll take it.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Edward Snowden. Talk about economic espionage.
GLENN GREENWALD: This is a really critical point, not so much because the U.S. government has vehemently denied that they engage in economic spyingthough they haveand not so much because they've accused other countries, particularly the Chinese, of engaging in economic spying while they do italthough that, too, is truebut it shows how deceitful the U.S. government is with its own public, because they have vehemently denied to American citizens that they engage in economic spying, and yet so many of the revelations that we've managed to report on, from targeting the largest Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, that funds huge numbers of Brazilian social programs, to spying on economic conferences that take place in various regions throughout the world that are designed to negotiate financial treaties, to spying on the World Bank and the IMF and the SWIFT banking system, are all about, obviously, spying for economic gain.
And there are documents in the NSA's own archive, which we publish in the book for the first time, that simply state explicitly that a function of the NSA is to gain economic insight into what is taking place in the world. There are what the NSA calls its customers, which are the agencies within the U.S. government who submit requests to the NSA, just like any other customer would to a business, and ask it to spy on certain people. And some of those customers are the ones you would expect, like the CIA and the Department of Defense. But others are the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. Exactly as Mr. Snowden said, there are clear, ample mountains of evidence that the NSA engages in exactly the kind of economic spying that they've vehemently denied to the American people they engage in.
AMY GOODMAN: One slide presented by the NSA and GCHQ shows targets include, as you said, Petrobras, the SWIFT banking system, the Russian oil company Gazprom and the Russian airline Aeroflot. It says, "In 2009 ... Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon wrote a letter to Keith Alexander, offering his 'gratitude and congratulations for the outstanding signals intelligence support' that the State Department received regarding the Fifth Summit of the Americas." Shannon wrote, "[T]he NSA gave us deep insight into the plans and intentions of the other Summit participants." Shannon went on to name Cuba and Venezuelan governmentoh, and theCuba and the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, this was a really fascinating story, because this is part of actually what we had reported on in Brazil, and the amazing thing about the summit was that the summit was actually spearheaded by then-President Lula of Brazil, who wanted a regional summit to essentially let all of these countries who have tensions in the hemisphere band together on the one area where they can agree, which are economic contracts. And what this document showed is that Thomas Shannon, who was then at the State Department, was effusive in his praise for the NSA, essentially saying, "Thank you for letting us learn the negotiating strategy and what they were really willing to do," these other countries in negotiating these financial contracts. And we broke that story in Brazil. And at the time, very awkwardly, Thomas Shannon was the U.S. ambassador to Brazil and was sort of the person who had been taking the lead in responding to our stories there and saying, "We don't do this, and we don't do that," and then suddenly he was the one who got revealed to not only be leading and encouraging and cheerleading the spying and asking for it, but doing so specifically at an economic summit that Brazil itself had helped to organize. So it was a very awkward moment for Thomas Shannon.
AMY GOODMAN: And the response of President Dilma Rousseff? And again, this is a story you know extremely well, because you live in Brazil.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, and I did, essentially, all the reporting on the NSA in Brazil. I mean, it was really interesting because the first story we did in Brazil, with O Globo newspaper, which is a large daily in Rio de Janeiro, was about spying on Brazilians indiscriminately, the collection of two billion email and telephone events each month by the NSA. And it shocked Brazilians, but the Brazilian government wasn't particularly moved by that. But then, once we began reporting on things like the invasion of this economic summit, and particularly the targeting of President Rousseff herself, and then the targeting of Petrobras, and then finishing with the Canadian targeting of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, it became an enormous story in Brazil, to the point where President Rousseff, despite really not wanting to, was forced to cancel her state visit, her planned state visit to the White House, the first time a Brazilian leader was going to appear there, and then went to the U.N. and gave a stinging denunciation of the American spying program, while Barack Obama waited in the hallway and was next to speak. So, it was really some impressive leadership on the part of the Brazilian government, even though it took a lot of stories to get them there.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, President Obama just met with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and much of the coverage of what happened in Washington had to do with what was happening to her and her cellphone.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, it was almost ironic. The same thing that happened in Brazil happened there, which was the first story that Der Spiegel broke about the NSA story was done by Laura Poitras and several Der Spiegel journalists, and the article was about spying indiscriminately on the German population. And the Merkel government really made clear that they didn't really care about that much. They issued some meek denunciations but were very willing to ignore the story. Only once it then got reported that Angela Merkel herself was the target of surveillance did it suddenly become a serious issue. But that has now created real difficulties in the U.S.-German relationship because of the history of spying abuses in Germany, both under the Nazi regime, but especially the Stasi regime.
AMY GOODMAN: No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald, also includes a letter from a high-level Australian official asking the U.S. government to help it spy on Australian citizens.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, this is a big part of the story, which is, if you listen to these governments, in response to the stories that we've been reporting, what they'll say is, "Oh," to their own citizens, "you don't need to worry, because there's all these restrictions on how we can spy on you. Yes, we can spy on the rest of the world as much as we want. But," these governments say, "when it comes to you, our wonderful citizens, we have all kinds of legal restrictions." And yet, what this document shows, that's being published for the first time, is that what these governments will do is they will ask their surveillance partners to spy on their own people for them and then give them the fruits of that surveillance so they can learn everything that they want to know about their own population while pretending to abide by the legal restrictions that have been imposed on them.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Glenn Greenwald, a lot of people are happy that in planes you can increasingly get access to the Internet. Can you talk about your new revelations in this book, GCHQ and NSA, their access to the Internet in planes?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, you know, the reason why I published this story was because it reveals so much about how these agencies think. And, you know, the documents demonstrate that there have been tenshundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars spent to make certain that the NSA and the GCHQ can listen to any in-flight cellphone calls that they want, from those phones that are embedded on the seats in front of you, and, more importantly, to be able to monitor all Internet activity that takes place over the wi-fi service of a commercial jet. And they didn't do this because there was a case where someone on a plane plotted something that they weren't able to monitor. They're not doing it because there are specific, targeted concerns. The reason they're doing this is because they are obsessed with the idea that there might be some place on the planet that you can go for a few hours and communicate without their being able to monitor what it is that you're saying. That shows the institutional mindset, which is there should never be a moment where you can develop the capability to go and speak without their surveillance net. And that's the reason why they targeted airplanes as the one place left in the world, other than in person in the middle of nowhere, that you can actually speak or do things without their knowledge.
AMY GOODMAN: One NSA chart that you have lists some of the countries whose embassies and consulates were targeted by the NSAthe countries, as you mentioned, Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, the EU, France, Georgia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, Venezuela, Vietnamand also lists the methods of collection. And you can explain some of themcomputer screens, sensor collection of magnetic emanations. Go on from there, including jumping the air gap.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right, I mean, this isthe reason this document is so significant is because, as you can see, you know, we took some of the names of the countries that were on that list out, which were the ones that you would expect them to be targeting. But these are the lists of countries that are democratically elected, for the most part, and allies of the United States. And these are buildings that are supposed to be sacred. They're consulates and embassies in the United States that are a crucial part of diplomacy, of the ability of nations to communicate with one another and have diplomatic relations. And what the list shows is that for pretty much every single one of these buildings, the NSA has invaded the communication systems and is collecting the information that take place, even with some really extreme tactics, like, for example, an air gap computer is a computer that is used that never connects to the Internet, the idea being that you can work with very sensitive documents on this computer, and since you never connect to the Internet, it's almost impossible for someone to know what you're doing. We use that as journalists all the time when we work on these documents. And the only way to, quote-unquote, "jump the air gap," meaning to actually invade those computers, is to physically go into the computer itself and implant a surveillance device within it covertly. And what this document shows is that the NSA is doing even that kind of invasive, stealth surveillance on its allies in their own consulates and embassies, even breaking into their offices and implanting surveillance devices within the machine. That's the extreme lengths to which the NSA goes for spying that has always been deemed essentially illegitimate.
AMY GOODMAN: Computer screens?
GLENN GREENWALD: Computer screens, computerto be able to monitor what it is that they're doing on their computers.
AMY GOODMAN: Magnetic emanations?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, these are ways of essentially figuring out what a computer is doing, tapping into how it functions, and then being able to suck all the data up.
AMY GOODMAN: Customs?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I'm not sure what that is, actually. We've asked several experts. It could be, you know, some tactic that people aren't aware of.
AMY GOODMAN: And the document you include from October 3rd, 2012, about the NSA targeting of, quote, "radicals"?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you've had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover's abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, "threats." That's the nature of power, is to regard anybody who's a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, "We don't yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse." And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we're working on and that I promise you is coming.
But there has already been reporting that shows thatthe document, for example, in the book that shows the NSA plotting about how to use information that it collected against people it considers, quote, "radicalizers." These are people the NSA itself says are not terrorists, do not belong to terrorist organizations, do not plan terrorist attacks. They simply express ideas the NSA considers radical. The NSA has collected their online sexual activity, chats of a sexual nature that they've had, pornographic websites that they visit, and plans, in the document, on how to use this information publicly to destroy the reputations or credibility of those people to render them ineffective as advocates. There are other documents showing the monitoring of who visits the WikiLeaks website and the collection of data that can identify who they are. There's information about how to use deception to undermine people who are affiliated with the online activism group Anonymous. So there are lots of
AMY GOODMAN: No mention of Occupy?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right, no mention of Occupy, which hardly means that it wasn't done. It could be by other agencies. It could just be documents that were not among the ones Edward Snowden collected. But it certainly is the case that they are targeting people who engage in similar kinds of political activism for surveillance targeting.
In his new book, "No Place to Hide," journalist Glenn Greenwald provides new details on Edward Snowden's personal story and his motivation to expose the U.S. surveillance state. "The stuff I saw really began to disturb me. I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill," Snowden told Greenwald about his time as a National Security Agency contractor. "You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening."
Greenwald joins us in studio to describe the inside story of the man behind the NSA leaks. "The fact that this individual with no power was knowingly risking everything in his life for a political cause, and really ended up changing the world, I think is a remarkable lesson for everybody," Greenwald says. "It's certainly something that's inspired me and has shaped how I think about things and probably will for the rest of my life."
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose new book, just out today, is titled No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This is a clip of Edward Snowden during his recent TED Talk, when he was asked by Chris Anderson about the risks he took in exposing the NSA's surveillance programs.
In his new book, "No Place to Hide," journalist Glenn Greenwald provides new details on Edward Snowden's personal story and his motivation to expose the U.S. surveillance state. "The stuff I saw really began to disturb me. I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill," Snowden told Greenwald about his time as a National Security Agency contractor. "You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people's Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening."
Greenwald joins us in studio to describe the inside story of the man behind the NSA leaks. "The fact that this individual with no power was knowingly risking everything in his life for a political cause, and really ended up changing the world, I think is a remarkable lesson for everybody," Greenwald says. "It's certainly something that's inspired me and has shaped how I think about things and probably will for the rest of my life."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose new book, just out today, is titled No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This is a clip of Edward Snowden during his recent TED Talk, when he was asked by Chris Anderson about the risks he took in exposing the NSA's surveillance programs.
CHRIS ANDERSON: Most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviouslyyou know, you heard what happenedwhat the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is. And there was a story in BuzzFeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. Howhow are you coping with this? Are youhow are you coping with the fear?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: You know, it'sit's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what can I do for the American people. I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, "Hey, this is not appropriate."
AMY GOODMAN: Now, let's be clear: That's Edward Snowden giving a TED Talk, not in person, because he has political asylum in Russia right now, very concerned that if he came to the United Stateswell, as you say in your book, Edward Snowden was inconceivably calm in Hong Kong and felt profoundly at peace with what he had done. You write, "He once joked, 'I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo.'" Talk about who Edward Snowden was and is. What is his background? You reveal things in this book that most people haven't talked about before.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, to me, this is, you know, from my own personal experience, probably the most stunning part of the story, isand it's what I spent a long time in Hong Kong trying to figure out and investigate, through asking him questions and then thinking about, as welland I still think about itwhich is: What would lead a seemingly ordinary 29-year-old, with his entire life ahead of him, someone very well adjusted, by all appearances, with a good job and a very good income and a great career and a girlfriend who he loves and a family who's supportive, to give up his entire life to literally risk decades, if not the rest of his life, in prison, not to enrich himself or to extract vengeance on somebody, but in pursuit of a political ideal, to confront an injustice that he believes is taking place? What actually takes place in someone's mind and in their spirit and in their soul that leads them to engage in such an obviously self-sacrificing act? I mean, that's a really hard, but important question to think about. And what really struck me most about him was that he grew up as a son of, essentially, familya family that worked for the federal government. His father was in the Coast Guard for 30 years. I think you could describe him as lower middle class. He grew up in a very kind of ordinary home. He actually didn't even finish high school, because he never was fulfilled by high school, despite how obviously intelligent he is. But he's somebody who is just very ordinary. I mean, he didn't have family wealth or family connections or any prestige or position or power.
AMY GOODMAN: And he grew up where?
GLENN GREENWALD: He grew up in Virginia, essentially. And he was born in North Carolina and then grew up in Virginia. And, you know, he was somebody who was instilled with the sort of traditional conceptions of patriotism, as well. I mean, after he didn't finish high school, the first thing he did was enlist in the U.S. Army, because he wanted to go fight in the Iraq War, which he thought was a noble endeavor. He had believed the propaganda that the war was about liberating the Iraqi people. And he got to basic training and was disillusioned when, he said, the officers training them were talking a lot about killing Arabs and very little about liberating anybody. But even then, he devoted himself to working at NSA and CIA and
AMY GOODMAN: But wait, in this
GLENN GREENWALD: working for the U.S. government.
AMY GOODMAN: In this training, he broke his legs.
GLENN GREENWALD: He broke both of his legs, which is the reason why he ended up not going to the Iraq War. He very easily could have. But even back then, you know, it's interesting. You can look at that, in one sense, as wellhe had this incredible journey where he did this amazing reversal, because he was so patriotic, in that traditional sense of how it's conceived of, that he was ready to go fight in the Iraq War, and then, 10 years later, he becomes this major whistleblower. To me, they're really the same kind of act. They grow out of the same sort of way of thinking about the world. And that is that he was willing to sacrifice his own life in 2003 to enlist to go fight in the Iraq War, because he felt it was his moral duty to help people who were being oppressed, and 10 years later, that's essentially the same thing that he did: He sacrificed his liberty and his life in order to help people who he thought were being oppressed. It really comes out of the same moral code. And the fact that this individual with no power was knowingly risking everything in his life for a political cause, and really ended up changing the world, I think is a remarkable lesson for everybody. It's certainly something that's certainly inspired me and has shaped how I think about things, and probably will for the rest of my life.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, so he worked forwell, he washe went into the military. And then, talk about how he ends up being an NSA contractor, how he ends up working for Booz Allen Hamilton.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there's this fascinating dilemma in the American national security state, which is that they've built this enormous apparatus. And in order to have it function, you need huge numbers of people. And, unfortunately for the NSA, the only kinds of people who are really capable of thriving in this environment, which requires, you know, very advanced and detailed knowledge of how the Internet works, are people who have grown up in the Internet culture, who tend to be quite young and often very anti-authoritarian. And so, they're essentially recruiting from people who are kind of inclined to become hackers, rather than officials in the national security state apparatus. And they try and recruit these people and convert them to think the way they need them to think. And obviously it's not always successful, which is why you've had this kind of series of whistleblowers, often very young, these people who end up being quite rebellious.
But, you know, Snowden was sort of poorly adjusted. I mean, he hadn't found his place in the world as a young man. I mean, he didn't finish high school, which was a disappointment to his parents and to himself. And right away in this environment, he thrived, because he has an incredible facility with programming and cryptography and the Internet, and so he was promoted very rapidly. His skills were very quickly recognized. And heeven though he had no high school degree, he went from working as a security guard at the NSA, which was his first job, at aliterally, an NSA building, some random building at the University of Marylandto being vested with increasing levels of responsibility and access.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. You said at an NSA building at the University of Maryland.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there's a covert facility at the University of Maryland that looks, to all appearances, on purpose, to be a University of Maryland office or
AMY GOODMAN: In College Park?
GLENN GREENWALD: In College Parkthat in fact is covertly an NSA facility. And it has the cooperation of administration officials, which are obviously government employees, because it's a public school. And that was the first facility at which he worked.
AMY GOODMAN: Can students freely go in and out?
GLENN GREENWALD: I don't know the details. I just know that it's a secure building, which is why he was hired as a security guard to work there.
AMY GOODMAN: So Edward Snowden was there as a guard.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, literally a security guard wearing a uniform and a little makeshift badge. I don't think he had a gun, but he had, you know, the rest of the kind of indicia of being a security guard.
AMY GOODMAN: How does he end up working at Dell?
GLENN GREENWALD: He, you know, advanced through the national security state. He actually got clearance. And once you get security clearance, it means that there's all kinds of job openings available for you. He spent three years working directly for the CIA in Geneva, became disillusioned with the CIA, and then decided to shift to the NSA. And because so much of our national security state is now privatized and outsourced, what it means to go work for the NSA usually means that you're going to work for some huge corporation, like Booz Allen or Dell, General Dynamics, all sorts of other corporations that have contracts with the NSA. And so, he ended up at Dell working actually for the CIA. By this point, he had pretty much
AMY GOODMAN: But how does that work? Dell is a private corporation, most people think, so how, if you're working at Dell, are you working for the CIA?
GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, this isyou know, it's the same way that if you want to go fight in the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or go be part of the drone program in Yemen or Somalia, you can go and work for the U.S. government and be a government employee, but the morethe easier and certainly the more lucrative way is to go to work for Blackwater or for corporations that have contracts. And this is a vital point of the story, is that so much of what we consider to be the U.S. government and military and intelligence functions are now in the hands of the private sector. The private sector does most of the work. I think it's something like 75 percent of the $75-billion-a-year NSA budget is actually money that goes directly into the coffers of private corporations. And we hear all this stuff about how everything is so well controlled, there's transparency, there's oversight. None of these mechanisms and controls apply to the private sector that really is running the vast bulk of the national security state, which is why Edward Snowden, despite being a private employee of a private corporation, had access to all these vast NSA systems, because there's no division anymore between what we think of as the public realm, which is the government, and the private corporations that own it and that run it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Glenn Greenwald, talk about why Edward Snowden leaves Dell, what he feels he can't do there, and ends up at Booz Allen.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it was really, I think, at Dell when he first decided that he was willing to kind of cross this line and become a whistleblower. He had thought about it back in Geneva, when he was at the CIA, and for a variety of reasons, including his belief that the election of Obama would result in the curbing of some of these abuses, he thought it wouldn't be necessary to do. And then, once he saw that Obama was actually not just continuing, but in some cases escalating a lot of these policies, he said he kind of realized that leadership is about acting as an example to others, rather than waiting for others to act. And so, he pretty much committed mentally while at Dell to becoming a whistleblower, and so he started thinking about what documents do I need to tell the story that need to be told. And he was able to access a lot of them there. He had accessed some of them previously at NSA positions and then decided there were some documents that he could access only by getting this particular job at Booz Allen that was part of a facility where these documents existed in Hawaii. And so he purposely sought out that job to kind of complete the picture that he thought the world should see.
AMY GOODMAN: And why was this so important to him? What was he coming to realize working at Dell with the CIA?
GLENN GREENWALD: One of the things that he told me was like a turning point for him was he had an NSA job in Japan, whereand this was the job right before Dellthat he said he was able to watch the real-time surveillance being fed by drones, in which you could see an entire village in a place where America is not at war, like Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan. And you could see literally little dots of people and what they were doing, and then you would have intelligence about who they were and who they were calling and this vast picture that was able to be created of them by not even physically being in the country. And the invasiveness and the extent of that surveillance, he said, was something even he, working inside this community, had no idea even existed. And
AMY GOODMAN: He was watching a village before it was struck by a drone?
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, these were surveillance drones, typically. And so, it wasn't even necessarily that the drones were killing people, though a lot of times they did. That was the reason for putting these villages under surveillance, was to decide who to kill. But he could watch just how much the U.S. government covertly could put entire populations under a microscope. And the fact that this had been done without any democratic debate or without his fellow citizens knowing about it was extremely alarming to him. And the more he came to see just how ubiquitous this system of suspicionless surveillance was, the more compelled he felt not to keep it a secret.
AMY GOODMAN: And not only the drone surveillance, but watching people type every letterexplain what that was.
GLENN GREENWALD: There is a certain kind of what the NSA calls "malware," which is essentially a virus that enters your computer. And there's all kinds of ways they can get that virus onto your computer. They can induce you to click on a link by sending it to your email, that once you click on it will inject that virus into your system. They can send you a file that, once you open, by calling it "urgent banking notice," you openor "tax notice," you open the file, and the opening of that file injects this virus. Or they can physically access your computer and put it in that way. And once that virus is there, they, as they call it, own your computer, which means that they can literally see every keystroke that you enter. And one of the documents we published said that they had done this to 50,000 machines. The New York Times thereafter reported that it was 100,000. And then we, just about a month and a half ago, at The Intercept reported that it was millions of machines they're preparing to do this to. And so, he would be able to watch the outcome of this malware, where people, without any idea that their machines had been infected, were having every keystroke that they entered, every Google search, every website they clicked on, every email they sent or opened or read, every chat in which they engaged, read by an analyst thousands of miles away. And he found that deeply disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that place in the videotape that you first posted at The Guardian, that Laura filmed, where he talks about the kind of typing that he could see.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: 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 that 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.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Edward Snowden. A federal judge or the president of the United Statesand this, of course, is what the Obama administration at first completely denied.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And the Obama administrationand I say this really advisablywas knowingly lying to the public when they denied the truth of what he had said. And, you know, this was in the very first week, and that was explosive claim, and the NSA had no idea what evidence we had, so they couldthey thought they could lie with impunity. And then we ultimately published documents, and I publish on purpose a lot more in the book, that demonstrate exactly what analysts are capable of doing. And what they're capable of doing is exactly what Edward Snowden said, which isthe phrase that describes what the NSA is attempting to do and is close to doing is their own phrase, which is "collect it all." They want to collect and store the entire Internet, literally every email, every chat, every Google search, every website that you click on.
And they then have the capability, using programs that all of these NSA analysts can access and use, including Edward Snowden, even though he was a private corporation employee, to literally, in a simple form that's extremely easy to useyou just enter the email address that you want to read emails from, you click on a drop-down menu of, quote, "justification"this person's a terrorist, this person is an agent of a foreign powerand then the database returns to your desk all of the emails from the selector, the email address, that you've just asked for. It is literally that easy. There's no supervisor who has to approve it. There's very little auditing that takes place even after the fact. When they do discover what looks like an unjustified search, they just kind of concoct a reason to cover it all up that it's being done. And what he said an NSA analyst can do, which is eavesdrop and read the communications of any person, including even the president, is exactly what the system has been constructed to enable.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm going to interrupt for a minute, because you talked about him working at Dell, you talked about him working as a security guard and, of course, at Booz Allen. What about at the Defense Intelligence Agency? In fact, he was teaching others.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it was fascinating. You know, you can know that the media is unbelievably unreliable in all sorts of ways when, you know, you're just watching them kind of from a distance. But when you're in the middle of a story, you realize the extreme extent to which that's true. And almost instantly, the entire U.S. media decided to depict him as this kind of idiot and knave, this low-level IT guy who just kind of stumbled into these documents. And I knew from the beginning that the reality was exactly the opposite. He was a very highly trained cyber-operative who had been not only trained in the highest levels of cyber-attack and cyberdefense; he was trained as a hacker to invade other countries' systems and to protect the United States. But he advanced to the level where he was training other operatives in how to protect information, but also how to steal it from other places.
AMY GOODMAN: He's training government operatives.
GLENN GREENWALD: Government operatives inside the United States national security state about how to do these sorts of things. And so he was a very sophisticated operative who had been trained, essentially, how to steal information. And there was an irony there that he was now being charged for espionage, when it's really the NSA that's doing the espionage, stealing all the time. And they had trained him to steal from other governments, but not from their own. And so, right away it was clear that he was going to be the number one most wanted fugitive in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, all of that is to say that the government knew exactly who he was once he revealed himself.
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I mean, theyI mean, onceI believe that they did not know, prior to that article being published, who the source of thisthese documents were. It took them a while to get up to speed and just up and running and to realize the magnitude of it. So I think he did reveal himself to the government. I don't think they knew by then who he was. But, of course, once he then identified himself, they knew exactly who he was, what his capabilities were and what they had trained him in.
AMY GOODMAN: This is President Obama speaking on Charlie Rose last June. This was weeks after Edward Snowden had revealed some of what he knew.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails.
CHARLIE ROSE: And have not.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, andunless theyand usually it wouldn't be "they," it would be the FBIgo to a court and obtain a warrant and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way, when we were growing up and were watching movies, you know, you want to go set up a wiretap, you've got to go to a judge, show probable cause.
AMY GOODMAN: That's President Obama in June, weeks after the first revelations came out. Glenn Greenwald?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, it'sof all the statements that have been made by the government that have been false, I think that one is the most deliberately and starkly false. There was a scandal in 2005 that The New York Times revealed and won the Pulitzer Prize for, which was that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Americans without obtaining warrants from the court. And in 2008, the Congress, a bipartisan Congress, supported by President Obama, then Senator Obama, enacted a new law, the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the purpose of which was to legalize the essence of that Bush program. And what the law said was that the NSA has the power to listen in on the telephone conversations of Americans or read their emails without a warrantwithout a warrantwhenever they are speaking to a foreign national. So, all the time, the NSA listens to the telephone calls of Americans or reads their emails without going and getting a warrant, completely contrary to what President Obama said.
And then, the other aspect of it, as well, is that the FISA court is a well-known joke. It was created in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee uncovered decades of surveillance abuses, and the government had to find a way to placate American anger. And what they said was, "Oh, don't worry. We're going to create this court that from now on the government has to go to to get permission." And they created the court to be the ultimate rubber-stamping court. It meets in secret. Only the government is allowed to appear. And so, as a result, by design, this court almost never rejects any request for surveillance. So, even to the extent what President Obama said was truthful, in the limited sense that it was, it's extremely misleading, because there's very little oversight on the system.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass