July 8, 2013 -
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is still reportedly hiding out in the Moscow airport, but today The Guardian released more video excerpts from the June 6th interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitros last month. In the new video, Snowden predicts that the U.S. government will charge him under the Espionage Act, and explains more about his motivations behind exposing the NSA's lies to the public, as well as the lack of government impetus to reign in its excesses.
Snowden tells Greenwald he fully expects the United States to go after him with full force. "I think they're going to say I've committed grave crimes, you know, I've violated the Espionage Act. They're going to say, you know, I've aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems, but that argument can be made against anybody who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems, because fundamentally, they apply equally to ourselves as they do to our enemies."
Greenwald asks Snowden if he joined the intelligence community with the intention of "weaseling" in and becoming a mole in order to undermine it. Snowden explains that initially he "believed in the goodness of what we were doing," but realized after a while that he was part of a huge network "involved in misleading the public." He goes through details from the documents that have been since made public by The Guardian to show how the NSA has repeatedly, consistently "lied" to Congress about the scope of its "dangerous capability."
Snowden also addresses his decision to leave the United States, and why he felt that he had to make the information public in the first place. "I don't want to live in a world where everything I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded, and that's not something I'm willing to support. It's not something I'm willing to to built. And it's not something I'm willing to live under, so I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act any way they can. Now, I've watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy-driven way I could, which is to wait and allow other people--you know, wait on our leadership, our figures to sort of correct the excesses of government when we go too far, but as I've watched, I've seen that's not occurring, and, in fact, we're compounding the excesses of prior governments, and making it worse and more invasive. And no one is really standing to stop it."
