Leaks of internal National Security Agency documents began to dominate the headlines in June, and the conversation around surveillance has changed dramatically. The surveillance techniques have been denounced as “almost Orwellian” by a federal judge, and Congress is debating whether mass surveillance should be stopped entirely.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who pushed the spy agency into the global spotlight, has stayed mostly quiet in recent months. But he broke that silence recently, sitting down for two days of interviews with one of the trio of journalists he gave the documents to, Barton Gellman.
The headline splashed on the front page of The Washington Post on Christmas Eve was no holiday gift for the intelligence community. “Edward Snowden: I already won,” read the headline, atop one of several new pictures of the leaker.
His goal, he told Gellman, was not necessarily to ban bulk surveillance, but to give the public a chance to weigh in. And that has happened, no matter what the outcome.
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
Lead-up to a leak
Snowden made the decision to leak after his colleagues in the intelligence agency continued to ignore his concerns about the public’s forced blindness. The intelligence agencies and their supposed overseers had become a “graveyard of judgment,” he said.
To critics who say he could have raised his concerns through more conventional channels, he says he did so.
“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?”
Loading comments...
