Along with embracing an American flag for the cover of Wired, Edward Snowden said he’d willingly go to prison to return to American soil.
“I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” the NSA whistleblower told Wired. “I care more about the country than what happens to me.”
Wired writer James Bamford flew to Moscow and spent three days with Snowden to get the exclusive, more time than any other journalist has spent with Snowden since he moved to Russia last summer. The result is a long-form article published Wednesday which offers a rare glimpse into the mind and actions of “the most wanted man in the world.”
Here are some of our takeaways:
He thinks he’s eventually going to get caught.
While in Russia, Snowden goes to great lengths to evade trackers. He constantly changes his computer and e-mail accounts, but thinks the day will come when it’s “game over.”
“I’m going to slip up and they’re going to hack me,” he said. “It’s going to happen.” He also said he’s more worried that his former employers, the CIA and NSA, will catch up with him than the Russian secret police.
Meet “MonsterMind,” a privacy advocate’s worst nightmare.
A long line of disillusionments preceded Snowden’s turn from agent to whistleblower, but one of the last “straws” before he decided to go rogue was his discovery of a cyberwarfare system ominously codenamed “MonsterMind.” When completed, the program would automatically retaliate against cyberwarfare attacks, bypassing human involvement or review. Not only could this system accidentally start a war, Snowden said, but it would entail that the government have access to virtually all private communications coming into the U.S. from overseas.
Snowden’s moral framework was shaped by Greek myths he read as a kid.
Much ink has been spilled over Snowden’s true motives for disclosing thousands of classified documents last summer. He’s been called a hero, a traitor, and a Russian pawn. But Snowden’s love of Greek mythology sheds new light on his inner psychology. Reading those stories as a kid, Snowden said, gave him a schema for dealing with moral dilemmas. “I think that’s when I started thinking about how we identify problems and that the measure of an individual is how they address and confront those problems,” he said.
There was no ‘Change’ in 2008. And there won’t be in in 2016.
Disenchanted with government surveillance under Bush, Snowden said he hoped things would change for the better when Obama took office. But then, he said, Obama fell short on promises to protect citizens’ privacy. “Not only did they (the Obama administration) not fulfill those promises, but they entirely repudiated them. They went in the other direction,” he said.
And things aren’t likely to get better in 2016, Snowden predicts, asserting that the real solution to illegal surveillance is not politics, but technologies like encryption. “We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes,” he said.
Read the full Wired article here.
