Edward Snowden thinks a lot of himself. The National Security Agency-analyst turned either traitor or Robin Hood, depending on your ideological leanings, has already taken offense to news outlets that described him as an analyst instead of a spy, and rests peacefully knowing that he has “done the right thing.” Now he says he could take on Gitmo if it came to that.
“Regardless of what happens, if I end up in chains in Guantanamo, I can live with that,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian published on Thursday.
Snowden also alleged in the interview that he had witnessed NSA agents passing around nude photographs picked up by the surveillance software.
“You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they’re extremely attractive.
“So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It’s never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?”
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, then asked: “You saw instances of that happening?”
“Yeah,” Snowden responded.
“Numerous?”
“It’s routine enough, depending on the company that you keep, it could be more or less frequent. These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”
While shocking in their bluntness, the allegations are not news to the NSA, which reported instances of similar abuse to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa), in September, 2013.
Snowden told the paper that while he feels “very fortunate” to have been granted asylum in Russia, he still wishes to return to the U.S, though he knows that this is unlikely. Despite animosity from the government, he believes that any jury he faced in the U.S. would be sympathetic to his cause.
”I think it would be very difficult to find any 12 Americans in the United States right now who would uniformly agree that the last year’s revelations about the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs did not serve the public interest,” he said. “I’m not going to presume to know what a jury would think or to say what they should or should not think, but I think it’s fair to say that there are reasonable and enduring questions about the extent of these surveillance programs, how they should be applied and that should be the focus of the trial.”
Snowden’s return to the U.S. seems unlikely at this point in time. So he is settling down in Russia and trying to make the best of the situation by learning some Russian and trying to stay in touch with the world while avoiding services like Google and Skype, which he views as potential security threats.
“I have used Skype and Google Hangouts, which are great but unfortunately security-compromised services, for public talks where they are required, but wouldn’t use it for personal communications,” he said. “We shouldn’t trust them without verifying what their activities are, how they are using our data and deciding for ourselves whether it’s appropriate where they draw the lines.”
