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Your phones
By
Czar Donic
This is really getting pretty strange. I had always assumed that the phones were tapped in many circumstances, going back to the pre-wireless age. One way to make certain whether your phone was tapped was to notice whether you always got a clear, clean, line. If there was no problem with your phone and everything went fine, it was tapped. Otherwise, you could not be sure.
There were other instances. For example, Dick Gregory, back when he practiced as a comedian, said he was sure his phone was tapped. When a heckler shrieked at him "how do you know?" He smirked and said, "Anytime a black man, in this country, can owe $18,000 to the phone company and they don't cut it off, it's tapped!" Case closed.
He also stopped many airplane jokes, the fear of flying stuff. All he said was "In this Capitalist country, if I'm on a bit of machinery that costs 3 million dollars, it's safe."
Of course, now much has changed. Phones are wireless that means the signals can be plucked out of the air and large airline companies skimp atrociously on maintenance and personnel so "save costs". Also, it is cheaper to let a few flawed planes crash rather than to spend all that money to recall them. There is no Ralph Nader to go after them.
The entire history of 9/11, Bin Laden, The Bushes, and so on is available at the "blogspot" site and can be found in the keywords listed in the left hand column, so I'm not going to go over that again. Also, you can get a pretty good overview with the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 done by Michael Moore and available on CD. In short, it was a made to order crisis to limit the Bill of Rights (all of them.)
Well, not to drag this out any further, here is the interview with Edward Snowden that gives us a pretty good idea of what is happening to us:
* * *
From Democracy Now:
As a whistleblower complaint filed against President Trump rocks Washington and threatens Trump's presidency, one of the world's most famous whistleblowers, Edward Snowden, joins us from Moscow, Russia. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Snowden alleging that his newly released memoir, "Permanent Record," violates the nondisclosure agreements he signed with the federal government when he was a National Security Agency employee. The Justice Department also argued that they are entitled to all of Snowden's book profits. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and Juan González speak with Snowden about the lawsuit.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As a whistleblower complaint filed against President Trump rocks Washington and threatens Trump's presidency, we spend the hour with one of the world's most famous whistleblowers, Edward Snowden. Six years ago, Snowden leaked a trove of secret documents about how the United States had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on Americans and people across the globe. He gave the information to reporters. In May 2013, Snowden quit his job as an NSA contractor in Hawaii and flew to Hong Kong, where he met three reporters — Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill — who began publishing a series of articles exposing the NSA and the surveillance state.
Snowden was then charged in the United States for violating the Espionage Act and other laws. In order to avoid being extradited to the United States, he attempted to fly from Hong Kong to Latin America, transiting through Moscow. But Snowden became stranded in Russia after the U.S. revoked his passport. He has lived in Moscow ever since.
Edward Snowden has just published his memoir. It's called Permanent Record. He writes about what led him to risk his life to expose the U.S. government's system of mass surveillance.
Juan González and I spoke to him from his home in Moscow Wednesday. We talked about his book, his work as an intelligence contractor, the ongoing debate about privacy rights online, and the latest news from Washington where a whistleblower complaint against President Trump has helped push House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry. I began by asking Ed Snowden about the Justice Department's new lawsuit against him, claiming his memoir violates nondisclosure agreements he signed with the CIA and National Security Agency. I asked him to respond to the Trump administration's threat to seize the proceeds from the book because he didn't submit the manuscript for review before it was published.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: Oh, well, I mean, in general, everyone can see what this is. The United States government, largely the intelligence community, agencies within it, very much don't want to see books like this published. Any kind of true and honest accounting of the actual facts of the government's unlawful or potentially unconstitutional behavior is always going to cause some friction.
And the first thing they go to is what they call a secrecy agreement. Now, this is not an oath of secrecy. A lot of people think it is. When you first join the CIA, you do swear an oath, but it's not an oath of secrecy. It's not to the agency. It's not even to the government. It's not to the president. It's an oath of service, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against, as we all know, all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So, this raises the question, of course, of what do you do when your obligations come into conflict. To what do we owe a greater allegiance, the Constitution or the Standard Form 312, the classified nondisclosure agreement? My belief is the Constitution prevails in that kind of conflict.
Now, the government is saying, because I signed this agreement, regardless of whether it's right or wrong, or regardless of whether the book has any classified or does not have any classified material in it — and, by the way, it doesn't, at least not anything that's unpublished, not already published in newspapers around the world — they go, "All right, well, we're going to take all the money for it." And this is because — not that they go — the Department of Justice, when they brought this complaint, they were very clear, very precise, to say, "We're not banning the book. We're not trying to stop publication." And they couch it in language that makes it appear like this was a choice they made, that they were being generous. But the reality is that they couldn't, because they're forbidden from doing so by the First Amendment. All they can do is go after the money. And we simply just have to remember that financial censorship is still censorship. But that doesn't bother me, because I didn't write this book to make money.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean that they have sued you? What effect has that had on your book?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: It's actually a funny story. We were at about number 25 on the charts. It had been a pretty quiet launch, because a lot of the more corporate media in the United States doesn't really want to talk about things like whistleblowing — well, until this week. And so, it sort of went under the radar. And then, the very day of the launch, about four or five hours afterwards — we could see the hour-by-hour metrics of how the book was doing — we went from number 25 right up to number one. So, you could say the attorney general is really the best frontman for this book that I could possibly ask for.
AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the HuffPost ran an ry Far headlined "The Trump whistleblower Scandal Is Proving Edward Snowden Right." In the piece, Nick Baumann writes, quote, "Now, a whistleblower inside the intelligence community is trying to do what Snowden claimed he couldn't. So far, that person has been effectively silenced by the Trump administration's refusal to provide the complaint to Congress as required by law. It's possible that the administration will eventually comply with its legal obligations. But the political system has already sent a clear signal: Even intelligence community whistleblowers who follow the law can't be confident their concerns will be heard." Can you respond to this, and the decision you made to go a very different route, Ed?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: How best do we inform the public, whether we are government employees, whether we are contractors working in the intelligence community, whether we are ordinary citizens who witness serious wrongdoing? What can we do? And particularly, what happens when we start being burdened by all of these nondisclosure agreements?
This case that we see before us today is, I think, actually quite clear-cut. It's one of the simplest cases and simplest controversies we've seen in a while, because we're talking about what appears to be, at least as alleged in the press so far, is a single exchange, a single complaint, about a particularized thing, and it doesn't threaten the institutions of power broadly. This is about the activities of an individual.
And what we see in the system that's been built today for whistleblowing is you're told there are proper channels that you go through, and you'll be safe if you do this. You will be heard, and your complaints will be investigated, and any improprieties that are borne out by the facts will be corrected.
We know historically this is not the case. There have been academic articles published for years — and there was actually one just published today — looking back through previous cases of, for example, NSA whistleblowers who did go through this process, and they had their lives destroyed. They lost their careers, they lost their homes, in some cases they lost their families, because of the stress and retaliation and consequences they face. Some of them lost their freedom. Chelsea Manning right now is sitting in prison. We have had so much mistreatment of whistleblowers here.
And the question that we have to ask is: Why? Don't we need, as a public, to understand what the government is doing? And does not the press require access to sources and evidence of what the government is actually doing behind closed doors, which it might not think is comfortable for the public to know, but certainly it serves the public interest for the people to know?
And so, in this context — right? — we now have someone who's coming forward. And the reason I say this is so clean-cut is, more than any other factor, what academics find when they look at what's wrong with the whistleblowing process in the United States today is your outcome is entirely determined by the centers of power and how they respond to it.
Now, we have three branches in our government, as everyone knows: You've got the White House, you've got the Congress, and then you've got the judiciary. Well, in my case, in the case of most of the consequential whistleblowers of the last decades, even going as far back, actually, as Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, they have been reporting failures that cross the branches. It's not about an individual; it's about policy, broadly, that was put forward by the executive, it was backstopped or ignored by Congress, and the courts refused to evaluate the legality of it.
In this case, it's quite different. And this is the reason I think, although this whistleblower is absolutely being mistreated by this White House, and this White House is doing absolutely everything it can to stop this person from communicating what the public needs to know to the public in a meaningful way, so that we can evaluate it — I do not think they will succeed, because in this case the White House is in isolation and, in a meaningful way, in opposition to the Congress that feels their prerogatives are being stepped on by this. And that's quite unusual in the context of whistleblowing. Typically, we see all three branches of government aligned against the whistleblower. In this case, because the at least alleged bad behavior is so bright-line clear, and because the White House is trying to deny Congress access to the complaint, more so than the public itself, I think there are enough people who will go to bat for whoever this person is, that they will end up all right. And that's actually a wonderful thing. It's not enough, and whistleblowers are today and will remain, unfortunately, a vulnerable class, until we fix the broader system.
But the most alarming part of what we see in the treatment of this person today by the White House is what every White House does. They try to make the conversation not about the allegations. They try to make the conversation about the source of the allegations. They want to talk about the whistleblower rather than the government's own wrongdoing. And we need to have access to the facts, and we need to hear this person out, because it doesn't matter the provenance of an allegation. What matters is the proof of it. Is what this person is alleging to be true in fact true? And if it is, what are we going to do about it? Who they are does not matter. Whether or not the allegations they are leveling are true matters absolutely.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What's your perspective on the raging debate in Europe over the right to be forgotten, the privacy — greater privacy protections that the European Union is attempting to institute?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, these — it's called the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, in Europe, that is a major step forward in that we now have advanced democracies that are trying to recognize, essentially, a kind of ownership right in records about us. Now, it's crude, it's simplistic, it's too parochial. It doesn't work in a meaningful way yet. But, theoretically, it holds the potential for enormous fines for the internet giants in the world if they misbehave and abuse the public as a class.
As you say, one of the primary sort of ideas behind this is a right to be forgotten, which is, you can demand from a company, basically, an understanding of all the records they have on you, and you can demand that they delete them, in some cases. And this actually is a tremendously beneficial thing.
The problem is, and where the hard — the sharp end of this conflict comes into view is: Well, what about public figures? What if this is someone who is engaged in corruption? What if this is a politician who is trying to bury a scandal? Can they go to a newspaper and go, "You have to remove this article about me"? Of course, they cannot and they must not be able to do that. That is still a legal struggle in Europe today, to figure out where to find that line.
But I think we, as average people, understand quite well the difference between a private citizen and a public official. These terms mean something to us. We are supposed to know everything about the people who wield the most power in society. And they are supposed to know very little about us, who have very little influence over the direction of the future, because privacy is about power. It's about influence.
And this is what we have been robbed of over these last decades. The government increasingly has tried to change this paradigm, and this is the ultimate result of systems of mass surveillance, by which I mean sort of this dragnet interception of everyone's communications, regardless of whether you're actually suspected of any wrongdoing or you're simply getting caught up with everyone else. And this is that governments are increasingly aggressive in asserting different kinds of secrecy privileges, whether it's the actual state secrets doctrine, which they use to defend classified information, or what we see in this case of the whistleblower who's the talk of the town this week, which is, the government actually does not seem to be especially concerned about classified information here. Of course, they nod toward that. But if you look at the analysis, they're actually arguing — they're more concerned about executive privilege. This is where internal White House deliberative processes don't need to be shared externally. They can say, "We can guard these from public view."
But the bottom line of this is, increasingly, we're living in a time where, whether we're talking about governments or whether we're talking about Google and Facebook, the institutions of greatest power in the world today are increasingly able to shelter their behaviors from our view, at the same time they know more about us, our families, our communities and our societies than any government has in any previous time.
AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, speaking from his home in Moscow, Russia. His memoir, Permanent Record, is out.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, you mention in the book that the government would label this "bulk collection," terminology that obscures the reality that what it is, is massive surveillance of everyone.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: Right. If you hear the term "bulk collection," which is what you'll hear anybody in Congress refer to the NSA's mass surveillance program as, "bulk collection" sounds like what a garbageman does or what's happening at, you know, a particularly busy post office. It is a euphemism in the same way "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for "torture," in the same way that "detainee" is a euphemism for "prisoner," in the same way that we use "targeted killing" instead of "assassination." The government loves euphemisms. And we, as a public, must always be on guard against them. When they say, for example, the word "national security," what they're talking about is state security. They are interested in maintaining the stability of government more so than they are interested in what we actually think it to mean, which is public safety.
Now, we know this not because of, you know, what I'm saying here. In the wake of my actually coming forward and saying, "Look, people need to know about this," working with journalists — which we can talk about in greater detail — everyone in the White House at the time, Barack Obama, the Congress, as they always do when a whistleblower comes up which implicates the powers that be in real, serious, across-the-board wrongdoing, said, "Look, this guy's not a patriot. He's causing harm. Don't listen to him. It's a lie. They don't understand it" — whatever, anything they can do to get you to talk about me instead of talking about what they're doing to you.
But to Obama's credit, he appointed two different review groups to look into what these programs actually did in terms of public safety: the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology and then the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. And when they investigated the very first one of these programs that I looked at, which was investigating an authority called Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act — this is the one about those phone records I was talking about. Your phone records, every single day, were being delivered to the NSA, and it applied to everyone, doesn't matter how innocent you are — they don't care. And this was, of course, authorized not by a real court, but by a secret, rubber-stamp court, the FISA court. And this was a court that, by the way, was never intended, and certainly not designed, to interpret the Constitution in new and novel ways that granted new authorities to government. They were only intended to stamp routine requests for surveillance, that didn't implicate our rights.
But when the president looked into this — and these groups had full access to classified information. They talked to the heads of FBI, CIA, NSA, everyone. By their own words, this kind of mass surveillance — well, the "bulk collection," as they call it — never made a concrete difference in a single counterterrorism investigation. The only time it made any difference at all was in the case of a cab driver in California wiring $8,500 back to his clan in Somalia, which happened to have ties to terrorism. That's it. They shredded the Constitution, they destroyed our lives for — they destroyed our way of life, rather, to catch a cab driver sending money home.
And even in this case, the FBI said that they would have gotten this guy anyway without the program, in a way that I think all of us can understand. Even if you have all the world's communications in a bucket waiting for you just to run your hands through it, you have to know what you're looking for in order to be able to pull it out. And by the time you can type in a name, an email address, a phone number, a credit card, anything to sort through that bucket with all of these systems, you have enough information to go to a judge and get a warrant, which the judge will absolutely grant, because no judge is going to go, "Oh, no, no. I'm not going to grant this counterterrorism warrant for someone who you think is funding terrorism." Of course they will. And then they get all the same records.
Why is it, then, that they had to violate the Constitution to do this? And why is it, then, that if these programs were so necessary, if they were so vital, and if you believe that, despite all the evidence, they were effective — why didn't they simply ask the public? You were never asked or granted a vote.
And this is why the lesson of 2013, unfortunately, I think, still has not been learned today, which is, these revelations were never about surveillance. Surveillance was the mechanism, it was the grounds for discussion. But the actual topic that was coming into conflict was democracy. What do we do when we have a model of government where the government derives its mandate — right? — from the consent of the governed, right? That's where it gets its legitimacy from, if they go, "We voted for this." But we're not told what they're doing, and so we can't express our opinion on what they're doing. And this, as we are seeing, is recurring today. And it will continue to recur so long as the government prefers, for fear of political criticism, to act more in the shadows than it does in the light.
AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, author of the new book Permanent Record. We'll be back with him in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "My Mind I Find in Time" by the guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson. On Wednesday, she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has just published his memoir. It's called Permanent Record. In the book, Ed Snowden writes, "[A]s I … proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me: this, in front of me, was my future. I'm not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that way. They're made subconsciously and only express themselves once fully formed — once you're finally strong enough to admit to yourself that this is … the course that your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single, still-indistinct act." Those, the words of Ed Snowden in his book, Permanent Record. When Juan González and I spoke to Ed Snowden on Wednesday from his home in Moscow, Russia, I asked him to talk about how he became a whistleblower.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, put yourself in my shoes. You're someone who has always been, largely, a part of the structure of government. You were dependent on it. The government was what gave your parents their salaries, that fed you, that clothed you. You're not what anyone would consider a radical. You are not a protester. And yet suddenly you see — you have an awareness. You have evidence that the government is not what you believed it to be. Now, to a lot of you, that might be like, "Well, duh." But if you came from that position, that's a meaningful — a meaningful change.
And now you go, "Well, how do you respond to this?" There is, of course, the political act of revolution. You know, you can try to light a match, burn the building down, go, "This is an indecent kind of program. I'm going to shut it down myself." Or you can try to return the agency, the government, to its stated ideals, to the standard and values that the public is at least told that it represents.
And so, whistleblowing, I believe, is quite distinct from leaking. People use the terms interchangeably, but leaking is generally done for personal benefit. These are sort of the official unauthorized disclosures that government officials pick up the phone and call journalists every day and give them because it advances their policy. It's the Deep Throat, the Mark Felt of the world, who's just trying to get rid of his superiors so maybe one day he'll sit in the director's chair.
But whistleblowing is something different. Blowing the whistle is to try and provide the public information that it is in the public interest to know. But it's fraught with risk, right? Not only do we know there is no meaningful process to protect whistleblowers — certainly, for someone in my position, because, in 2013, contractors — and I was a contractor — did not fall under whistleblower protection laws. And so, I was really paralyzed and agonizing over what to do — could I do anything? — and very much trying to talk myself out of it. But, eventually, you have to ask yourself the question: What happens if no one says anything? And the reality is, everything gets worse. If we are to keep a constitutional republic, everybody has to do their part. And it doesn't matter who you are. What matters is what you've seen. What matters is what you can prove. Because it's not about you; it's about us.
And so, in that realization, I understood that even though I'm a technologist, so it would be quite easy for me to publish these documents myself on the internet, instead what I should do is provide them to journalists. And this was because the journalists could then actually validate these documents. They could authenticate them. They could go, "You don't understand all of this. We can go get other sources to confirm that this is accurate. You misunderstand it. Your politics are crazy," or whatever. I shouldn't be the one making the decisions of what is and is not in the public interest to know. I can provide that evidence in a good-faith belief that journalists can and should do that. That's why we have the First Amendment in the United States. That is the role that the press occupies in a free and open society, is to contest the government's monopoly on information. And they, the press, could evaluate these documents and go, "People need to know what's going on." And that's what happened.
So, I gathered material of, what I believed to be, public importance. This is evidence of official crimes, unethical behavior and unconstitutional behavior, or simply violation of rights, not just in the United States, but for the other 95% of the world that lives beyond U.S. borders. And I used my position as someone who worked at the Office of Information Sharing — it's just another one of those funny accidents of history. I was the Office of Information Sharing. I was the sole employee in it. And I was never — I was never actually even supposed to be there. I was supposed to go to a different position, but the person, another contractor, who had been intended to go to the Office of Information Sharing, was a cut-up, and they wouldn't be allowed in that building anymore. So they got put into the position that I was supposed to be going into, and I got slotted instead into the Office of Information Sharing.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ed Snowden, talk about the decision you made in Hawaii to try to get this to a journalist, and your decision to go to Hong Kong; now your wife, Lindsay Mills, then your partner, what you told her at the time, what she understood; the difficulty of upending your life at this point; how you prepared for leaving; and then what happened next.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, you have to understand, for this kind of moment, anyone who's considering this understands it's an act of self-immolation. The likeliest outcome is you'll spend the rest of your life in prison — not an exaggeration — because the government argues that telling the truth to a journalist about the government breaking the law, so long as that activity was classified, is itself a crime that is punishable by 10 years per count. And if you're talking about hundreds of documents, thousands of documents, or even more, obviously, the sentence becomes pretty historic pretty quick.
But are you willing to risk it? How do you manage this? How do you make sure you can't be intercepted and the story can be stopped before it ever gets out? And I believed, if there was a single point of failure at any point in the process of reporting, and if myself and the journalists were all in the same room at the same time, somewhere where the government could act, they would act. And I don't know what the limits on that would have been. But I knew they would have used the full sum of their capabilities to try to prevent the public from learning about what they were doing. So I had to leave. This was, in my belief, the only way we could make sure the journalists get the truth out to the public.
And so I went to Hong Kong — which, it's funny, in 2013, people thought was a sort of a crazy move. They were like, "Why Hong Kong? Hong Kong is, you know, Red China," or something like that. They're tools of Beijing. But when you look at Hong Kong today, where the entire population is out on the street every day resisting the government in Beijing, I think it's actually now — would have been established why that decision made so much sense. And it's because it was kind of no-man's land. The Chinese government would not be free to act, at least quickly enough that they could interfere with the reporting. The United States government, of course, could not act in Hong Kong, for fear of angering the Chinese government. And so we would have room to breathe and work and get the stories out.
But that meant leaving home. That meant leaving my family. That meant leaving my partner of so many years, Lindsay Mills, the love of my life. And I couldn't tell her what I was going to do, because if I had, she could have been charged with the same crime that I was. The FBI could have considered her an accessory to the crime. They could have seen her as involved in some kind of conspiracy to do what I was doing, which was basically aiding and abetting an act of journalism. But we can laugh about it today; however, it's a very serious felony under U.S. laws. And so, that meant I just had to leave a note that said, "I'm going away for work. I love you." And she found that, and, you know, she was angry, rightfully. But she had seen it before, because she had known I had been working for the intelligence services for years.
And then she learned what I had done the same time everyone else did: when I was on TV. And the thing that I will never be able to repay her for is, she said that when she saw me on TV, when she understood why I had left and she understood what I had done, despite the costs to her, she said that's the reason that she fell in love with me. And eventually she came to rejoin me. And now we have married. I am, without a doubt, the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States. But I am striving to be one of the better husbands, because she's so much more than I will ever deserve.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Ed, why the book now? And are you eager to come back to the United States and make your case to the American people?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: So, since year one, since the very beginning of this, I have had a single requirement for coming back to the U.S. And that's not to get a pardon. That's not a parade. But it's a fair trial. And this brings us back to the central problem of whistleblowing that we were talking about earlier. It is completely indefensible today that a whistleblower, that tells the public, that informs the press, about a matter of unarguably profound public interest, can be charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was intended to be used against spies. And those who are accused of this have no defense. They can't tell the jury why it is that they did what they did. And the jury can't decide whether or not that was justified or unjustified, which is the entire purpose of a trial for something like this. This is my demand. And I think this needs to be the demand of anyone who believes in the justice system and who believes that the public has a need to know the basic facts about what the government is doing.
This law that whistleblowers are charged with, this Espionage Act, is extraordinarily rare in the U.S. It's called a strict liability crime. And it is that strict liability crime that means you can't tell the jury why you did what you did. Why I say this law is unusual is, even if you murder someone, you straight-up just kill someone, you can argue to the jury it was self-defense. You can argue to the jury the person had it coming. And it's up to the jury to decide whether they believe you or whether it was just murder, plain and simple, because there are two prongs of the crime that have to be considered. Was the law broken? This is always the easiest and less interesting question. And then, two, was it justified? The government forbids that when it is the government's own behavior that is on trial. Instead, they simply want to consider that first prong: Was the law broken? And they say, if the law was broken, the jury can't consider whether it was justified or not, because, the government argues, there is no justification for revealing their own classified criminality. Now, obviously, I would say that has to change, because you can have a sentencing in that, but you cannot have a fair trial in that.
AMY GOODMAN: We saw what happened with Chelsea Manning, how difficult it was to hear anything she had to say in court. I mean, we played a muscled, surreptitious recording inside the court-martial, where you could hardly hear her voice. What are you demanding? What are the conditions that you would agree to, to come back to the United States?
EDWARD SNOWDEN: It's simply that whistleblowers have the right to tell the jury why they did what they did, for the jury to consider: Was, on balance, this something that did more good than harm? Was it justified? Or was it something that should be punished with a prison sentence? That is why we have juries. That is why we have trials. And if the government is unwilling to guarantee that, well, what the government is saying is that they are not willing to grant fair trials to whistleblowers. And I don't believe participating in that kind of system advances the interests of justice; I think that perpetuates a system of injustice.
AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. His memoir is titled Permanent Record. We'll air Part 2 in the coming days.
And this breaking news: The House Intelligence Committee has just released a declassified version of a whistleblower's complaint accusing President Trump of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election.
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