Edward Snowden, American Hero

[Canadian_watcher]

weird. the same people who will disembowel anyone who questions whether or not Sandy Hook or the Boston bombing evidence and witnesses are legit are the ones who are calling into question the true identity/motives of Snowden, a whistleblower.

There is a theme here, which to me, says: Anyone whose story fits my government's narrative and direction is someone who shouldn't be questioned. Anyone who goes against the motives and direction of the establishment is suspect.

That strikes me as very anti RI. But that's me. I'm an oddball contrarian in comparison to some here..

[barracuda]

Funny, i thought the motto here was, "What you don't know can't hurt them," not "Hey, let's jump on every harebrained conspiracy bandwagon that pops up on the internet".

[Project Willow]

Could we please have one discussion that doesn't devolve into personality conflicts?

FFS.

[seemslikeadream]

Admiral Bobby Ray Inman
Posted by seemslikeadream on Tue Sep-11-07 07:57 PM


http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/stealth.htm

Tipped off by a journalist in Washington DC, my investigation of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman revealed that he was THE Admiral at the center of the spider web. A look at his social network (see Namebase.org - opens in new window) helped put the ‘puzzle palace’ together, and I discovered he was National Security Advisor to five Presidents, Director of the NSA, Deputy Director of the CIA under William Casey, Vice Director of the DIA, Director of Naval Intelligence, President of SAIC, Chair of the 1985 Congressional ‘Inman Commission' on Terrorism, affiliated with the Carlyle Group, on the advisory boards of Tufts and the University of Texas, represents SBC Communications Corporation at Cal Tech, Chairman Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, and a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. And, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman is a member of the University of Texas faculty. One could say he is a dangerous man.

One job he didn’t get was Secretary of Defense under Clinton:

"1994: Former admiral Bobby Ray Inman, stung by press and Senate criticisms of his record, asked President Clinton to withdraw his nomination as secretary of Defense. A Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, later wrote that Inman had held back information during his White House background check."

A look at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) reveals just exactly what kind of activities are undertaken in a spook shop where there is no accountability, and what business Inman was conducting at SAIC under his leadership. SAIC is one of the largest private employee-owned corporations, and like the Carlyle Group, escapes scrutiny (because it is privately owned) despite annual revenues of more than $5.9 billion. In 1990 it was indicted and pled guilty to ten felony counts of fraud on a Superfund site, called "one of the largest of environmental fraud…" in Los Angeles history. DOE contracted SAIC to manage and operate the Yucca Mountain Program, which I worked on as a scientist at the Livermore Lab. I became a whistleblower at Livermore in 1991 because of my knowledge of the extent of science fraud on the most important public works project in US history. SAIC’s control over internet domain names, gained when they purchased Network Solutions Inc., caused a furor and identified the ties in SAIC to "the shadow ruling-class within the Pentagon". Basically SAIC is a private spook corporation, involved in voting machines (SEQUOIA etc.), controlling the internet (Network Solutions), training foreign militaries, and the contractor that set up global communications for the US military. The internet is being changed from a public resource to a lucrative operation influenced by spooks and former Pentagon officials. The internet was a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to begin with.

One of SAIC’s prime clients is DARPA (DOD), which recently employed 5-time convicted felon Admiral Poindexter, an associate of Inman’s going back to Iran-Contra. Poindexter was forced to resign over his involvement with PAM, a "terrorism futures market" DARPA project which predicted assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East. His earlier controversial program TIPS – the Total Information Awareness Program – was set up to spy on Americans. He was also involved in creating large information databases on Americans which are now being used to track citizens. SAIC also had contracts to develop information systems for the Pentagon, FBI and IRS. Police can now legally stop a person on the street, ask their name, type it into a palm pilot and come up with detailed personal information in a few seconds. An Associated Press story on Sept. 9, 2004, "Conn. City Uses Scanners to Nab Criminals" revealed that police in New Haven, Connecticut, are now driving around in police cars with infrared scanners connected to databases which they are using on license plates to hunt for "criminals", tax delinquents, and parking ticket violators. Some of the $25,000 scanners were paid for in one month from collected revenues. A military project, the real purpose of the internet is revealing itself:

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." - Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The association of Admiral Inman, the Bush crime syndicate, Texas oil companies, and the Carlyle Group with the University of Texas explained why an advanced 4th generation nuclear weapons research program is there. And it explained why the University of Texas is so eager to take over the nuclear weapons labs. But this takeover resembles Inmans involvement with a stealth takeover of the Mars program transferring it from JPL management and control to NASA.

The NASA Deep Space Program was started at JPL to do space exploration more efficiently with lower costs. Criticism of NASA/JPL Mars mission failure problems in the Thomas Young Report released on March 28, 2000, revealed that the supposedly public space program had been hijacked into secrecy and that the military was calling the shots. NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin on March 29, 2000, revealed at JPL the day after release of the report, just who was in control and the existence of an oversight committee that nobody at JPL knew existed:

"I'd also like to acknowledge Admiral Inman, head of the JPL Oversight Committee at Cal Tech. He couldn't be here today, but I talked to him by phone. His commitment to the team here is also unwavering. And I thank him for that."

Goldin was there "to address beleaguered personnel, scientists and engineers of the Nation's premier unmanned center for planetary exploration, and to somehow advise them of the new political and engineering realities, while simultaneously exhorting them to continue to new heights but now under more stringent NASA management". The real question is what was Admiral Inman doing as chair of a committee in a private university overseeing all civilian unmanned exploration of the planet Mars without the knowledge of anyone at JPL?

In two years Admiral Bobby Ray Inman took over the space program, and in another year from now he will have succeeded in taking over the nuclear weapons program. When Newsweek called him "a superstar in the intelligence community", it was for good reason.

A Naval officer I interviewed later replied when I asked him if he knew Inman "…oh yeah… he’s one of the players…".

Profile: Bobby Ray Inman
Bobby Ray Inman was a participant or observer in the following events:
1945-1975: NSA’s Operation Shamrock Secretly Monitors US Citizens’ Overseas Communications
The NSA, working with British intelligence, begins secretly intercepting and reading millions of telegraph messages between US citizens and international senders and recipients. The clandestine program, called Operation Shamrock and part of a larger global surveillance network collectively known as Echelon (see April 4, 2001 and Before September 11, 2001), begins shortly after the end of World War II, and continues through 1975, when it is exposed by the “Church Committee,” the Senate investigation of illegal activities by US intelligence organizations (see April, 1976). [TELEPOLIS, 7/25/2000] The program actually predates the NSA, originating with the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) then continuing when that turned into NSA (see 1952). [PENSITO REVIEW, 5/13/2006] The program operates in tandem with Project Minaret (see 1967-1975). Together, the two programs spy on both foreign sources and US citizens, especially those considered “unreliable,” such as civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters, and opposition figures such as politicians, diplomats, businessmen, trades union leaders, non-government organizations like Amnesty International, and senior officials of the Catholic Church. The NSA receives the cooperation of such telecommunications firms as Western Union, RCA, and ITT. [TELEPOLIS, 7/25/2000] (Those companies are never required to reveal the extent of their involvement with Shamrock; on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and presidential chief of staff Dick Cheney, in 1975 President Ford extends executive privilege to those companies, precluding them from testifying before Congress.) [PENSITO REVIEW, 5/13/2006] In the 1960s, technological advances make it possible for computers to search for keywords in monitored messages instead of having human analysts read through all communications. In fact, the first global wide-area network, or WAN, is not the Internet, but the international network connecting signals intelligence stations and processing centers for US and British intelligence organizations, including the NSA, and making use of sophisticated satellite systems such as Milstar and Skynet. (The NSA also builds and maintains one of the world’s first e-mail networks, completely separate from public e-mail networks, and highly secret.) At the program’s height, it operates out of a front company in Lower Manhattan code-named LPMEDLEY, and intercepts 150,000 messages a month. In August 1975, NSA director Lieutenant General Lew Allen testifies to the House of Representatives’ investigation of US intelligence activities, the Pike Committee (see January 29, 1976), that “NSA systematically intercepts international communications, both voice and cable.” He also admits that “messages to and from American citizens have been picked up in the course of gathering foreign intelligence,” and acknowledges that the NSA uses “watch lists” of US citizens “to watch for foreign activity of reportable intelligence interest.” [TELEPOLIS, 7/25/2000] The Church Committee’s final report will will call Shamrock “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.” [CHURCH COMMITTEE, 4/23/1976] Shortly after the committee issues its report, the NSA terminates the program. Since 1978, the NSA and other US intelligence agencies have been restrained in their wiretapping and surveillance of US citizens by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (see 1978). Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who will become the NSA’s director in 1977, and who testifies before the Church Committee as director of Naval Intelligence, will later say that he worked actively to help pass FISA: “I became convinced that for almost anything the country needed to do, you could get legislation to put it on a solid foundation. There was the comfort of going out and saying in speeches, ‘We don’t target US citizens, and what we do is authorized by a court.’” [PENSITO REVIEW, 5/13/2006] Shamrock is considered unconstitutional by many US lawmakers, and in 1976 the Justice Department investigates potential criminal offenses by the NSA surrounding Shamrock. Part of the report will be released in 1980; that report will confirm that the Shamrock data was used to further the illegal surveillance activities of US citizens as part of Minaret. [TELEPOLIS, 7/25/2000]
After 9/11, the NSA will once again escalate its warrantless surveillance of US citizens, this time monitoring and tracking citizens’ phone calls and e-mails (see After September 11, 2001). It will also begin compiling an enormous database of citizens’ phone activities, creating a “data mine” of information on US citizens, ostensibly for anti-terrorism purposes (see October 2001).
Entity Tags: Western Union, Pike Committee, National Security Agency, Bobby Ray Inman, Church Committee, International Telephone and Telegraph, Radio Corporation of America
Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties

Late 2001: NSA Domestic Wiretapping Ties Up FBI with Bad Leads
The National Security Agency begins sending data—consisting of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and names—to the FBI that was obtained through surveillance of international communications originating within the US (see After September 11, 2001 and October 2001). The NSA sends so much data, in fact, that hundreds of agents are needed to investigate the thousands of tips per month that the data is generating. However, virtually all of this information leads to dead ends and/or innocent people. FBI officials repeatedly complain that the unfiltered information is bogging down the bureau: according to over a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, the flood of tips provide them and their colleagues with very few real leads against terrorism suspect. Instead, the NSA data diverts agents from more productive work. Some FBI officials view the NSA data as pointless and likely illegal intrusions on citizens’ privacy. Initially, FBI director Robert Mueller asks senior administration officials “whether the program had a proper legal foundation,” but eventually defers to Justice Department legal opinions. One former FBI agent will later recall, “We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism—case closed. After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.” A former senior prosecutor will add, “It affected the FBI in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads. A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to.” Former NSA director Bobby Ray Inman says that the problem between the FBI and the NSA may stem in part from their very different approaches. Signals intelligence, the technical term for the NSA’s communications intercepts, rarely produces “the complete information you’re going to get from a document or a witness” in a traditional FBI investigation, he says. And many FBI officials are uncomfortable with the NSA’s domestic operations, since by law the NSA is precluded from operating inside US borders except under very specific circumstances. [NEW YORK TIMES, 1/17/2006]
Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, Bobby Ray Inman, Robert S. Mueller III
Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Civil Liberties
March 2004: Former Intelligence Chief: No Ties between Iraq and 9/11
Retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, formerly the deputy director of the CIA, head of the National Security Agency, and the former director of naval intelligence, says: “There was no tie between Iraq and 9/11, even though some people tried to postulate one.… Iraq did support terror in Israel, but I know of no instance in which Iraq funded direct, deliberate terrorist attacks on the United States.” [TEXAS MONTHLY, 3/2004; MIDDLE EAST POLICY COUNCIL, 6/2004]
Entity Tags: Bobby Ray Inman
Timeline Tags: Events Leading to Iraq Invasion
May 12, 2006: Former NSA Director Says NSA Wiretapping Program ‘Not Authorized’

Bobby Ray Inman. [Source: DefenseTech.org]
Former NSA director Bobby Ray Inman says that the secret NSA program to wiretap US citizens’ phone and e-mail conversations without court warrants (see After September 11, 2001) “is not authorized.” President Bush authorized the secret wiretapping over four years ago (see Early 2002), a program only revealed at the end of 2005 (see December 15, 2005). Since the program was revealed, it has created tremendous controversy over its possible illegality and its encroachment on fundamental American civil liberties. Bush and other White House officials have repeatedly asserted that the program is legal, mainly because Bush and his officials assert that the president has the authority to implement such a program (see December 15, 2005); Bush also insists, as recently as the day before Inman’s statement, that the program is only being used to spy on terrorists and the privacy of US citizens is being “fiercely protected,” a statement that does not jibe with the facts. [DEMOCRACY NOW!, 5/12/2006]

[bks]

I wonder if Greenwald's move to the Guardian from Salon was precipitated in some part by his learning this huge story was coming. I'm aware he wasn't living in the States when he wrote for Salon, but I highly doubt a US-based publication would have published this material.

[Hunter]

Interesting, WIRED pointing out that WashPo and Guardian did not release all of the stuff Snowden asked them to, they have only released 5 of the 41 slides/documents he gave them. They are suggesting the rest of it is way too damaging for the public to know about. So what else is in there, some shit about how they can crack the video cams and mics on our new flat screen smart TVs and watch us in our homes? THAT would certainly be something the media might think twice about releasing LOL. Just a guess tho.


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/0 ... deid-57990

What’s in Edward Snowden’s 41-slide PowerPoint deck that’s so hot that nobody dare publish it?

Now that Snowden has revealed himself to the world as the NSA whistleblower, details about his interaction with the press are surfacing. And at the center of the drama is a still mostly unpublished 41-slide presentation, classified top secret, that Snowden gave to the Washington Post and the Guardian to expose the NSA’s internet spying operation “PRISM.”

Only five slides from the presentation have been published. The other 36 remain a mystery. Both the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and the Post’s Barton Gellman have made it clear that the rest of the PowerPoint is dynamite stuff … which we’re not going to be seeing any time soon. “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them,” wrote Gellman on Twitter, adding in a second tweet: “I know a few absolutists, but most people would want to defer judgment if they didn’t know the full contents.”

Even Greenwald, who urged me rather strongly in 2010 to publish Bradley Manning’s personal chats, is taking a more conservative view of the NSA’s PowerPoint. “I’m not going to discuss our legal advice with you,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter, “but we’re not publishing NSA tech methods.”

To us geeks, the tech methods, of course, are the most interesting part. Snowden evidently wanted the entire presentation published, at least at one point in his discussions with the Post’s Gellman. On May 24, “Snowden asked for a guarantee that the Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of [the] PowerPoint presentation,” Gellman wrote Sunday, in a fascinating account of his interactions with the whistleblower. “I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when.”

That’s when Snowden looped in the Guardian, according to Gellman’s account. On Twitter, Greenwald disputed that timeline, and wrote that he’d been working with Snowden “since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

Regardless of which reporter met Snowden first, both publications wound up handling the PowerPoint roughly the same, publishing only a small portion of the slide deck. The Guardian initially published three slides from the deck. The Post published the same three, plus a fourth slide illustrating the quantity of international internet traffic that flows through the U.S.

It’s strangely incongruent that a PowerPoint deck has taken on such importance. Indeed, the very properties of PowerPoint that make it one of the most hated conveyances of information in the world have contributed to the lingering uncertaintly about PRISM and what it really does. Crude vector art and bullet points leave too much to the imagination, even when it’s the most highly classified crude vector art and bullet points the public has ever seen.

After company executives and administration officials disputed the key finding in the newspapers’ first reports — that the NSA has unilateral access to backend servers of Google, Facebook, and seven other technology companies — the Guardian released a new slide (slide number eight, we’re told) to support the paper’s claim. This one includes this PRISM point: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube [and] Apple.”

Source: The Guardian

But in context, that additional line adds little. The slide is intended to distinguish PRISM collection from the NSA’s raw internet wiretapping. It doesn’t address whether the collection is broad and automatic, or narrow and mediated by lawyers at the target companies, as subsequent reporting by other news outlets has indicated.

The most compelling part of the new slide is the top half, which seems to show (as first noted by ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian) the rough location of NSA fiber optic taps on cables in South America, eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean. Now that’s interesting.

Julian Assange, tweeting from his haven in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, weighed in yesterday, and made it clear what WikiLeaks would do in this situation. “Snowden demanded all 41 pages of PRISM document be published but neither WaPo nor Guardian had the courage,” he wrote.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Assange said today that WikiLeaks has had “indirect communication” with Snowden – a development that probably isn’t comforting to the NSA.

[Hunter]

The most poignant thing Snowden said in his interview:





Conspiracy types have been laughed at for years over beliefs like this...

[JackRiddler]

Damn, people, do you see? The wall between our world and the majority's suddenly has holes in it big enough to see through easily. Millions of people are falling down the rabbit hole right now. Just read this - Greenwald and Guardian introducing Snowden as the leaker. It's like RI has come alive... you could link every sentence of it to more than one thread here and it would rhyme. This is our epic poem:

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows

• Q&A with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again'

Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong
The Guardian, Saturday 8 June 2013

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing."

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. "I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me."

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. "I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in." He added: "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

'I am not afraid, because this is the choice I've made'

Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week's series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose.

He then advised his NSA supervisor that he needed to be away from work for "a couple of weeks" in order to receive treatment for epilepsy, a condition he learned he suffers from after a series of seizures last year.

As he packed his bags, he told his girlfriend that he had to be away for a few weeks, though he said he was vague about the reason. "That is not an uncommon occurrence for someone who has spent the last decade working in the intelligence world."

On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent", and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government.

In the three weeks since he arrived, he has been ensconced in a hotel room. "I've left the room maybe a total of three times during my entire stay," he said. It is a plush hotel and, what with eating meals in his room too, he has run up big bills.

He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.

Though that may sound like paranoia to some, Snowden has good reason for such fears. He worked in the US intelligence world for almost a decade. He knows that the biggest and most secretive surveillance organisation in America, the NSA, along with the most powerful government on the planet, is looking for him.

Since the disclosures began to emerge, he has watched television and monitored the internet, hearing all the threats and vows of prosecution emanating from Washington.

And he knows only too well the sophisticated technology available to them and how easy it will be for them to find him. The NSA police and other law enforcement officers have twice visited his home in Hawaii and already contacted his girlfriend, though he believes that may have been prompted by his absence from work, and not because of suspicions of any connection to the leaks.

"All my options are bad," he said. The US could begin extradition proceedings against him, a potentially problematic, lengthy and unpredictable course for Washington. Or the Chinese government might whisk him away for questioning, viewing him as a useful source of information. Or he might end up being grabbed and bundled into a plane bound for US territory.

"Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets," he said.

"We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

The only time he became emotional during the many hours of interviews was when he pondered the impact his choices would have on his family, many of whom work for the US government. "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night," he said, his eyes welling up with tears.

'You can't wait around for someone else to act'

Snowden did not always believe the US government posed a threat to his political values. He was brought up originally in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His family moved later to Maryland, near the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.

By his own admission, he was not a stellar student. In order to get the credits necessary to obtain a high school diploma, he attended a community college in Maryland, studying computing, but never completed the coursework. (He later obtained his GED.)

In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression".

He recounted how his beliefs about the war's purpose were quickly dispelled. "Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone," he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged.

After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency's covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.

By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.

That access, along with the almost three years he spent around CIA officers, led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw.

He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment.

"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he says. "I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."

He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons.

First, he said: "Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone". Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.

He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."

The primary lesson from this experience was that "you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act."

Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

He described how he once viewed the internet as "the most important invention in all of human history". As an adolescent, he spent days at a time "speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own".

But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. "I don't see myself as a hero," he said, "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.

A matter of principle

As strong as those beliefs are, there still remains the question: why did he do it? Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? "There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich."

For him, it is a matter of principle. "The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to," he said.

His allegiance to internet freedom is reflected in the stickers on his laptop: "I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation," reads one. Another hails the online organisation offering anonymity, the Tor Project.

Asked by reporters to establish his authenticity to ensure he is not some fantasist, he laid bare, without hesitation, his personal details, from his social security number to his CIA ID and his expired diplomatic passport. There is no shiftiness. Ask him about anything in his personal life and he will answer.

He is quiet, smart, easy-going and self-effacing. A master on computers, he seemed happiest when talking about the technical side of surveillance, at a level of detail comprehensible probably only to fellow communication specialists. But he showed intense passion when talking about the value of privacy and how he felt it was being steadily eroded by the behaviour of the intelligence services.

His manner was calm and relaxed but he has been understandably twitchy since he went into hiding, waiting for the knock on the hotel door. A fire alarm goes off. "That has not happened before," he said, betraying anxiety wondering if was real, a test or a CIA ploy to get him out onto the street.

Strewn about the side of his bed are his suitcase, a plate with the remains of room-service breakfast, and a copy of Angler, the biography of former vice-president Dick Cheney.

Ever since last week's news stories began to appear in the Guardian, Snowden has vigilantly watched TV and read the internet to see the effects of his choices. He seemed satisfied that the debate he longed to provoke was finally taking place.

He lay, propped up against pillows, watching CNN's Wolf Blitzer ask a discussion panel about government intrusion if they had any idea who the leaker was. From 8,000 miles away, the leaker looked on impassively, not even indulging in a wry smile.

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden's leaks began to make news.

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

As for his future, he is vague. He hoped the publicity the leaks have generated will offer him some protection, making it "harder for them to get dirty".

He views his best hope as the possibility of asylum, with Iceland – with its reputation of a champion of internet freedom – at the top of his list. He knows that may prove a wish unfulfilled.

But after the intense political controversy he has already created with just the first week's haul of stories, "I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets."


© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

[tazmic]

The most poignant thing Snowden said in his interview:

And the most incongruous:

"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

[justdrew]

he's leaked a powerpoint presentation? I love that there's finally a little traction on this issue, but a powerpoint file CAN'T prove anything. Yes we KNOW much of this IS going on in one way or another, from a wide variety of sources. but we don't have any evidence, like say, an operators manual, or a somehow authenticated powerpoint that is proven to have been made to brief senior staff with. or something. I would love to see proof that this magical Promised software even does what people are fallingoverthemselves to assume it does. Canceling a whole shitpile of boondoggle programs that don't work under a cloud of bending to public outrage would be a great move, and tend to lock in the few 'concessions to necessity' (that DO work, like collecting telephony metadata) during the great reform. Smooth move.

5 of 41 slides released by the media? Well, the unpublished slides might be 'too damaging' OR they might be credibility destroying for this story (in any of a variety of ways) OR they could be in flux, to used used depending on how things unfold.

Nothing in the 'leak' has been confirmed by anyone right? yeah, there's a program called PRISM, but exactly how and what it works to do is unclear.

36 slides remain face down.

an 'investigation' is underway, but don't be surprised if nothing happens.

they could very well ride this out letting him sit wherever he wants to, a free man, simply by denying the leak and not prosecuting.

This can be a great win-win for everybody, a chance to blow away some very expensive boondogles and redirect resources in more profitable directions. Very possibly we can finally get a Right to Privacy clearly enshrined in law, at least that can be a great new wedge issue in the next election. A potential knockout blow in fact.

We'll see... fingers crossed...

the most dangerous wild-card here is Snowden's safety. He could even be a kidnap for ransom target, and it doesn't sound like he has any guard.

[parel]

the empire seeks 'Unified Command and Control' of the Global Information Grid & sees the internet as a tool of warfare and strategic control.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The most poignant thing Snowden said in his interview:

And the most incongruous:

"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Also if he's on the level publicity is the biggest thing he has going for him.

Plus hiding is no life, really.

if he's not on the level ... in the news in Australia, and they have been going on about this, they are quoting opinion polls that are trying to legitimise what Snowden publicised.

But whatever the case - if he's for real or not "they'd" do that.

[Hunter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8

[seemslikeadream]

signatures on petition 45,875

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petiti ... n/Dp03vGYD

[MinM]

@pourmecoffee: Booz Allen says Snowden terminated yesterday. I bet it was because of that leak thing

@emptywheel: @pourmecoffee Nah, obviously that didn't do it. I think it was the beautiful acrobat girlfriend. SHE's obviously security risk.