Published today, 16:00
Suddenly he opens the door. Saturday magazine Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin had a unique encounter with the whistle-blower who gained admirers all over the world but is threatened with life imprisonment in the home country, he wanted to save.
Suddenly he opens the door. Saturday magazine Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin had a unique encounter with the whistle-blower who gained admirers all over the world but is threatened with life imprisonment in the home country, he wanted to save.
Edward Snowden hold the phone to room service, while he shouts into the room .
– How do you like meat?
Ad:
– medium rare, I answer.
– What do you want to drink?
– Water.
– With or without gas?
– With carbonic acid.
– Wait.
Ad:
He laughs.
– It is actually more. Vegetables or mashed potatoes?
– vegetables.
Old Soviet Union’s former choice of two left shoes are decades over Russia. On the way here, I walked past the Cyrillic script that does not require any studies of Russian in order to be able to interpret them. McDonald’s, Starbucks, World Class gym, Michael Kors and United Colors of Benetton – a universal coding language that makes everything understandable whether the signs sitting in Moscow, Stockholm, San Francisco or Bangkok. Anyone who believes to be able to assess the totalitarian tendencies of opinion and expression and the rule of law in a country based on the standard of the cars, restaurant supply or Stella McCartney’s latest spring collection will fool himself.
Poverty visible. Lack of democracy do not.
Edward Snowden calling in a food order.
I look out the hotel room window where traffic has begun to thicken. If now you can do it in a city where traffic is always is so dense that it is quicker to go.
Not very long ago I was sitting and photographer Lotta Härdelin at the agreed meeting place where we would meet a contact , which would then bring us forth, and wondered if something had happened.
For several months, I emailed back and forth in encrypted messages through intermediaries and lawyers.
In the end, a date and informed that we would go to Moscow where further instructions would follow.
Here we are , in a subdued Russian hotel lobby. There is no plan B, and everything feels insecure and nervous. The last weeks have been marked by security concerns and the overall need for control has now been reduced to waiting and still powerlessness in a cream-colored armchair.
In the morning we have been told that we are at 12:45 will be on the a hotel that has been pointed out to us in a big Moscow Map. We were told to quiet highlight that we understood.
Now we are afraid that we nodded too soon.
– Are you sure it was here he pointed to?
12:45 becomes 13:00, which is 13:25.
What if we’re sitting in the wrong place.
After a while we take up the map and looking for buildings and hotels that might be confused with the place as we sit on. The mobile phones we have in accordance with the instructions provided in our hotel and so is our contact person. None of us can reach the other if something has gone wrong and there is no plan B.
The lobby is full of Russian soldiers. Men with low center of gravity stepping in and out of the lifts with graduations on the chest and in her eyes.
After a while, we order tea and croissants to try to blend in. Everywhere we think we see the mysterious hotel staff and guests who do not fit. As we have fallen into a Roy Andersson movie where you do not have a clue about the extras are actors or actors are extras.
A woman sitting and shooting in our direction. A man standing by a pillar and talking strangely long as your mobile phone.
We laugh, saying to each other that we are paranoid.
Since popping the plug is finally up.
The contrast when we finally stand outside the actual venue surprise by everything suddenly feels obvious. Any concern that the interview will be canceled or that something will happen – broken bones, vomiting disease, visa problems – is blown away.
Edward Snowden opens the door. I sit on the sofa. In some strange way, it feels like this is a place that one would be able to slip past the Wednesday any time to talk.
The reality is of course more complicated.
Since Edward Snowden June 2013 went out as whistle-blower behind the top-secret documents that revealed America’s mass surveillance of its own citizens, he has been one of the world’s most hunted men. Back in the US, he could be sentenced to life in prison.
Russia, who just would have been a stopover on the way to Cuba, is so far the only country which has granted him asylum. Something that made the country became the only safe place in the world for him.
Two and a half years has passed since then. Edward Snowden – who has become a symbol of freedom of expression, an icon, a face without a body who has spoken on the big screens above link – receiving us with a disarming smile and a notepad in hand.
If you ask immediately what we want to eat. And looks so relaxed in black shirt and three-piece suit that he makes it feel like something you could go out and jog. If the desire now fell on.
“In the past, people who have been forced into exile lost its influence in the political debate. The technology has förändratdet. Exile that approach does not really work anymore “
Do you have it good?
He smiles.
– It is difficult for me to talk about life in Russia for what I say, then it will be used against me by those who criticize me home. If I say something good about Russia, you know, “it’s not hell,” so they say “he has fallen in love with the Kremlin,” or something similar. If I say something bad’s the same thing when they say “oh, he hates it in Russia, he is unhappy.”
– Generally, I try not to talk about it.
I say that I have heard that he is alive as an indoor cat in Russia.
On the other hand, it is understood life as an indoor cat in Hawaii too, where you lived before. How much has life changed?
– Indoor Cat thing is voluntary, that is how I have always lived. In Hawaii, it happened occasionally that my girlfriend dragged me out of the house, out of the paradise that Hawaii actually is. But most of the time I spend in my head or on the Internet. I’m not the kind of person who has to go out to go anywhere. I’d rather have a conversation or thinking, planning or creating something. People are different, that is how I live my life. It is actually amazing because thanks to my lifestyle because I live so much on the Internet, so I work more now than I did before. And I have more influence.
– But it is clear that I have paid a price: I can not go home.
What do you miss the most?
– My family. As for most. But I’m very happy with the choice I have made. I can still see my family when they come to visit. I can communicate with anyone, anywhere. I speak regularly at the most prestigious universities in the US, in front of students who really care about these issues.
– Previously, people who have been forced into exile lost its importance and influence in the political debate. Therefore, exile has been a popular strategy when it comes to dealing with political dissidents, regardless of whether it has been about the Soviet Union, who have deported the writer that they did not like, or American dissidents in Cuba. The technology has changed that. Exile that approach does not really work anymore.
– This is something that I’m really thinking of when I think of the future. How I can help activists and dissidents, who have something to say, who want to contribute? To demolish these walls and say it does not matter where I am, my voice will continue to be heard anyway. This is something extremely powerful that has begun to threaten governments.
September 29 this year, he posted his first post on Twitter: “Can you hear me now?” “Hear you tell me now? “And the people did. In a short time was Edward Snowden up in 1.5 million followers. Himself he follows only one – the NSA’s official account. A gallows humor that also shines through in many of his posts.
In one of the early, he wrote “Thanks for the welcome. And now there is water on Mars! Do you think there’s passport checks at the borders? Asks for a friend. “
When the former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden hinted that Snowden would be killed in Moscow, he wrote” He used to be more fun “and posted a picture of those two smiling together.
Meanwhile seen his pathos evident in the questions that concern not only mass surveillance without democracy issues in general. After Kunduzattacken in October – when the US bombed a hospital in Afghanistan – he commented continuously. Sent further information on that “Not one of our staff have reported some fighting inside the hospital area before US air strike,” tweeted screenshots with quotes from the Geneva Convention and wrote that it was necessary for an independent investigation.
Edward Snowden says the most important thing about social media is that you can get things right.
– You can take a story and cite the most relevant, make people pay attention to whether there is something that is missed or if there is someone who trying to mislead the public. You can get the facts. It is valuable.
Are you living for American or Russian time here in Moscow?
– For two nights ago I went not to bed until half past four , a couple of days before I got into bed first 9:30 in the morning, I have been busy the last few months when I have worked with organizations like the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. Almost everything I do – my contacts, my work – is in English, which prevents me from learning Russian. But it is difficult when they are eight or ten hours. When they want me to talk at nine o’clock in the evening Eastern Standard Time in the United States, it is four o’clock in the morning here in Russia. But I am generally a night owl. It is quiet, not much traffic. It is easier to live.
Edward Snowdens first Twitter Posts alluded to a famous commercial for the major US phone company Verizon, which a man in different environments, with a mobile phone against your ear, asked he was heard. The first Snowdenstoryn, published in June 2013 showed that the US safety authority NSAhade access to all of Verizon’s data about their customers.
Later, people have put together Verizon advertisement with another famous campaign on the net. Verizon guy who says, “Can you hear me now?” And Obama responds: “Yes, we can.”
Once Edward Snowden one of those who believed in Barack Obama, who ran on a promises of change and “history’s most transparent administration”. He celebrated whistleblower as “noble” and “courageous” and explained that it would be no monitoring of the “US citizens who are not suspected of any crime, no more tracking citizens who have done nothing other than to protest a misguided war, no breach of the law when it is not convenient. ” With the support of the Spy Act, he then chased government leaks with renewed strength and the Obama era has indicted eight people – far more than in any other previous administrations in US history.
Do you get vote?
Edward Snowden laughs.
– It teaches us to notice. I will certainly try!
It is about the symbolic value, he says.
– I will post it. It is not so that it will be counted in a major way because it is such a small percentage coming in that way. But that’s not the point. The point is the action.
Have you decided what you are going to vote for?
– No, not yet.
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?
– Haha. If … No, I will not say anything. There is infected.
I ask if he saw the Democratic presidential candidate debate the other night. Senator Bernie Sanders took Edward Snowden in defense and said that he has played an important role when it came to spread knowledge to the American people. Hillary Clinton, however, said he violated US law and stealing important information that had “fallen into the wrong hands.”
This is also what Edward Snowdens critics claim. Documents can be routed to the Russians and the Chinese, and that he should come home to the US and take their punishment for what he has done, rather than to live in a country like Russia, and becoming dependent on Putin. That he should have taken the fight at home rather than flee.
Personally, Edward Snowden said he knows exactly how many documents he had with him when he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow: Zero. To avoid all risks, he had already handed over all materials to the journalists who published the revelations.
– I watched the debate live. But it was actually very encouraging. In 2013 they called for me to be hanged, they used words like “traitor” and the expression “blood on their hands”. But as far as I could hear, no one in the panel using the kind of words now. In just two years, it is a pretty amazing change.
He says it took 30 years before it was changed to Daniel Ellsberg, one of the most famous whistle-blowers through the ages who leaked secret documents about the Vietnam War in the 1970s .
President Barack Obama has welcomed the debate on the monitoring by Snowdens revelations, but you have also said that the publications of documents has “damaged the United States and our intelligence assets, there was a way for us to bring these conversations without causing such damage. “In the Democratic presidential candidate debate spoke Hillary Clinton the same way about an American system that have a tradition of protecting the whistleblower.
– The American tradition regarding whistleblower is to bury them, says Edward Snowden.
– Hillary Clinton was also scolded the press for that. They wrote that she was completely wrong out there, both legally and historical and rhetorically, because it is obvious that it is not true.
whistleblower Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning – who supplied WikiLeaks with secret documents – can all testify to this. But there’s more.
2007 performed the FBI agents called dawn raids in the people who worked or had worked for the NSA and who had tried to blow the whistle on a mass surveillance which they felt had run amok. A man was DOG-TIRED of the shower with a gun to his head before his family. Another opened the door and soon had the house full of black-clad agents in Kevlar vests that searched the home until well into the evening. A senior manager within the NSA, Thomas Drake, had his home ransacked, his passport was withdrawn and he lived under the threat of 35 years in prison for four years, accused the Spy Act. He lost his job, his pension and put everything he owned to a lawyer. Today he works at an Apple store in Maryland and have been able to observe that the only one that was investigated and prosecuted, after he tried to talk to his superiors about the mass surveillance, was himself.
This was all of people who had dedicated their lives to the US government. Many of them had worked in intelligence for the NSA for over 30 years. What they protested against was that the US has monitored its own citizens despite the fact that the US Constitution says that all Americans should be able to live in “safe in the knowledge that their person, houses, papers and possessions are protected against unfounded scans.”
There were also people outside the NSA who were trying to tell. A lawyer at the Justice Department sneaked a day down at the lunch and phoned a reporter for The New York Times from a pay phone downstairs in the underground. After a call from the FBI asked for his dismissal.
A woman in the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee had his house raided by the FBI at six o’clock in the morning that she had asked questions about the program.
The recurring problem : there were no documents, there was no proof.
Edward Snowden has previously talked about the NSA, Thomas Drake importance.
You have said that if there had not been someone like Drake …
– … it would not have been able to be an Edward Snowden. He did everything according to the rules when he tried to raise the alarm. We see this in game theory, in sociological studies, that for every round that people play a game, then there is something new that they learn. They change their strategies and when they play the tenth round, it’s very different from how they played the first.
And you learned of Drake …
– And also by Manning. I saw how the government reacted. What happens when one’s asking you to report violations of the law to those who have given orders that you should commit these crimes against the law?
Was it the mass surveillance or lies about it that upset you the most ?
– In early 2013, when I still had a chance to repent, I saw how James Clapper (director of national intelligence) raised his hand and swore to tell the truth: “Collectors’ NSA into any kind of information about millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? “” No sir, they do not. Not consciously. “.
– To lie in such a context is a crime.
The year before that, the NSA, Keith Alexander has been debriefed before Congress. His response was the same. Collects the NSA in Americans’ e-mail? No. Oversees the NSA routinely Americans’ phone conversations? No. Google searches? No. Text? No. Amazon Orders? No. Bank statements? Yes.
Edward Snowden not only knew that they lied, but also that the scale was much larger than anyone could imagine. During a 30-day total NSA more than three billion individual conversations just from the US communications system. 97 billion emails and 124 million phone calls across the world, just over a month’s time.
In their own desktop could Edward Snowden intercept anyone – ordinary individuals, someone’s auditor, a federal judge – as long as he had a private email address.
– Becoming a whistleblower’s not about who you are. It’s about what you have seen. Whistleblower chosen by the circumstances. It’s about people who see something that thinks and that finally act. But it takes several years, when I first saw things, I had a hard time believing it. I grew up in the shadow of the NSA, my mother worked for the state, my father and my grandfather worked for the military. I could not imagine that the government would lie to us. But in the end, you realize that the evidence is so clear that they can not ignore any longer.
– When I sat on the NSA and talked with my colleagues, we saw how Thomas Drake case was going on in the media, and …
You were talking about it at work?
– Yes, you know, “it sucks to be the the guy” . When I decided – I knew that these programs was wrong and thought about going out with that – I wanted to assure myself that I was not crazy. So I showed it to my colleagues and my supervisor – documents such showed that we collected about Americans in the United States than we did on the Russians in Russia – and said that this is in fact incomprehensible.
And you felt safe to talk about it at work?
– Yes, it’s like everyone else, they have their hunt groups. It’s not that someone at NSA is a villain, not sit there and think about how they can destroy democracy. There are good people to do evil things because they think they do it for good reasons. It is the purpose that justifies the means.
So it is no secrecy culture?
– Yes and no. When you talk to your colleagues, you do so in confidence in safety. You are alone with them. You say, “What do you think about this? Do you think this is right? This is the insane. “Meanwhile, your vision is limited. You do not know what is going on in the office next to you, it’s an office without names only letters and numbers. You do not think about how your part fits into the larger picture.
– I had a position that gave me a rare asset, I had a backup power called privac, privileged access. I could see across all borders and saw the whole picture, which most people could not do. And when I talked to my colleagues about it, they became distressed, while they immediately said: “Do not say anything to anyone about this. You know what happens to these guys. If you say anything about this, they will destroy you. “
When Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked” The Pentagon Papers “in 1971, decided to become a whistleblower, it was about 7000 pages of classified material that would smuggled out of the office. Night after night he copied page after page on a Xerox machine who just managed a page at a time and who also took plenty of time when it did. To save time ended Ellsberg after a while to fold down the lid, while he wondered if he would be blind, or end up in jail first.
Edward Snowden did not run their documents through a photocopier. Certain things have become easier over the years, while other things are just as difficult. The risk of being discovered. And blackening the campaigns will later.
Daniel Ellsberg was so worried that his children would hate him because he felt he had to try to explain why he did what he did.
Edward Snowden laughs and nods.
– I even believe that his son helped him to copy. But you can as far as I know, do not judge a child under the Spy Act.
He says it would have been different if he had told his girlfriend or his family. It would have made them accomplices. So all he did was leave a note in the house on Eluting Street in Hawaii, where he lived with his girlfriend, that he would be away at work.
– The problem is that one can not say anything . I had arranged it in such a way that my family could cut all ties and condemn me if everything went bad. And I was okay with it, I was ready to accept it.
Whistle blowing of something he did for his own sake, he says. He has never seen it as a self-sacrificing deed.
– I saw something and realized that one must believe in something. And if you believe in something, you must also be able to bear it. I do not believe in self-sacrifice as ideology. If a society expects people to set themselves on fire, they will very soon discover that it is difficult to find volunteers. I do not believe in altruism. It can be good sometimes, but not in extreme cases. This was something that made me feel good, I could feel proud of it.
“My girlfriend did indeed, for she said ‘That’s why I fell in love with you.’ But she was defintivt angry. For good reasons. “
The entire life.
– Yes, even though life would be short. I turn to the hero thing, because it only leads to that kind of thinking that “we are waiting for Superman.” People who say “we need a hero, but it’s not me,” and “all those people made good things, and I hope to God that someone could do something about that.”
On 20 May 2013 packed Edward Snowden down four laptops and such a variety of top-secret documents that there still is no one can say exactly how many documents involved. The only thing one can be sure of is that the British authorities guessed too low when after revelations went to The Guardian and said: “We are pretty sure what you have … We believe that you have between 30 and 40 documents, and we are concerned over security “.
Not even the NSA knows today how many documents involved. Estimates argues that Edward Snowden had total access to 1.7 million documents and that he submitted between 50,000 and 200,000 documents to journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.
Experience from previous whistleblower had taught him that he needed documents to prove their claims so that no one could dismiss it as lies. And he had also realized include:
He would have to flee to another country prior releases.
He would be transparent in their operations, so that it was possible to see that he was alone and was not funded by any foreign power.
He would not publish anything; let the journalists responsible for the selection.
He would choose journalists who had shown they did not let silenced by the White House.
He would go out with his name not to other colleagues were under suspicion.
Laura Poitras v is a journalist and Oscars – and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who, like Thomas Drake had experienced the totalitarian methods that can be accommodated within a democracy.
After her documentary on the Iraq war, “My country, my country” in 2006, she was constantly harassed . At over 40 times stopped her in her travels abroad, when she came home to the United States. Each time there, they held her, often in three-four hours, and interrogated her about who she had met and where she had been. Her computer, camera, mobile phone confiscated and was not left back in several weeks. Her credit cards and receipts copied at several occasions. They had even taken her reporter blocks.
Poitras developed their own methods. She ended up traveling with electronic devices. She became an expert on encryption. And she avoided talking on the phone about things that touched her work.
After she had been detained and threatened with handcuffs at Newark airport, she contacted the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote an article about her in April 2012.
Edward Snowden appeared she and Glenn Greenwald as the perfect choice.
Laura Poitras, who eventually moved to Berlin in order to protect their material. Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer who is now a journalist who lived in Rio de Janeiro and among other things wrote for the Guardian.
The big problem was that Glenn Greenwald unable to install any encryption program. Months passed. Edward Snowden continued to email him under the code name “Cincinnatus”.
You never thought of giving up?
– The biggest problem for me was to get him to take me seriously. I do not blame him. I mean, if some unknown person on the Internet contact and just, “Hey, I have something you should see. It is about government supervision “so familiar it’s just” Oh help, one more person who believes that there are aliens who can send signals through people’s teeth. “
He smiles. Says it does not bother him particularly. Instead, he continued to send over instructions for how to encrypt. In several months.
– To get Glenn Greenwald to do it was a bit like teaching a cat to dance. But I can understand it. The problem is the language they use in these encryption programs when they teach it to people. They’re talking about public keys, asymmetric keys, people have no idea what it means. Meanwhile, I have always liked to teach. I wanted to do a lot of things when I was younger and working as a teacher was one of them.
“Drönarprogrammet creates more terrorists than it kills. There was no Islamic
State until we started bombing these States. The biggest threat we face in
region created by our own strategy. “
In the documentary” Citizenfour “ must be followed when Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald found Edward Snowden for the first time in Hong Kong. The surprise when the source turns out to be a 29 year old in T-shirt and jeans instead of the senior man in the jacket that the two had seen before him. Ewan MacAskill, who was sent over from the Guardian to assess the source’s credibility, heard all the alarm bells ringing when he met Edward Snowden. A guy who was the same age as his own children were talking about that he had been a CIA official in Geneva and had worked for the NSA in Japan and Hawaii. src=”http://www.dn.se/UploadedImages/2015/11/6/12a5f7dc-c8fb-47a6-8eee-a35920220639/original.jpg?id=1352736″ src=”http://www.dn.se/UploadedImages/2015/11/6/e24c2640-2dbc-446b-b5ff-0f5e2d63fbc0/original.jpg?id=1352734″ src=”http://www.dn.se/UploadedImages/2015/11/6/2722c671-e064-4c71-b636-ad9ddff7f268/original.jpg?id=1352738″
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