09/26/19 09/26/19 [captioning made possible by democracy now!] amy: from new york, this is democracy now!w! >> e eventually i reaealized the u.s. government had stopped caring about w what they shouldo and instead were pursuing aggressively as possible what they could do. and this meant every time you made a phone call, the nsa literally got a copy of it delivered to them the next day. a record of that callll. not what youou said, but that yu made it, where you were when it wawas made. amy: as a whistleblower

complaint filed against president trump rocks washington and threatens trump's presidency, we spend the hour with one of the world's most famous whistleblowers, edward snowden. six years ago, the nsa contractor leaked a trove of secret documents about how the united states had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on americans and people across the globe. edward snowden is out with a memoir. it is called "permanent record." we speak to him from his home in moscow, where he has lived ever since the u.s. revoked his passport in 2013. >> the lesson of 2013, unfortunately, i think still has not been learned today, which is these revelations were never about surveillance. surveillance was the mechanism. it was thehe grounds for discussion. but the actual topic that was coming in conflict was democracy. amy: nsa whistleblower edward

snowden for the hour. all that and more, coming up. welcome to democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. house democrats moved rapidly forward with the impeachment inquiry into president trump after the white house released a wednesday rough transcript of a phone call showing the u.s. president repeatedly p pressured ukraine's leader to launch a corruption probe into trump cacampaign rival joe biden. in the five-page transcript, dated july 25, president trump alludes to $400 million in military aid to ukraine that he had ordered cut off just days prior to the phone call, before telling ukrainian president volodymyr zelensky "the united states has been very, very good to ukraine. i wouldn't say that it's reciprocal necessarily. " president zelensky responds by praising past u.s. aid to ukraine, saying he's interested in purchasing more javelin anti-tank missiles, which

ukraine has used in its fight against russian-backed separatists. trump responds, "i would like you to do us a favor though." he goes on to urge zelensky to work with attorney general william barr and trump's personal attorney, rudy giuliani, to open a corruption investigation into former vice president joe biden and his son, hunter, who served on the board of one of ukraine's largest natural gas companies. "whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible," trump says in the transcript. and president zelensky promises to launch an investigation into the bidens. the transcript's release prompted democratic leaders to charge the president with blatantly impeachable offenses. many lawmakers are also calling for the impeachment of attorney general william barr. this is california democratic congressmember adam schiff, chair of the house intelligencee committee. boss, they mafia president did not need to say "that's a nice country you have.

it would be a shame if something happppened to it," because that was clear f from the conversati. there is no quid pro quo necessary to betray your country or your oath of office come even though many read this as a quid pro quo. amy: speaking from the sidelines of the u.n. general assembly in new york, president trump sought to defend his actions, saying he'd engaged in nothing improper and had held a "beautiful conversation" with ukraine's leader. pres. trump: the witchhunt continues, but they're getting hit hard on thisis witchhunt because when they look at the information, it is a joke. impeachment for that? amy: trump's problems are set to increase, with nbc reporting a whistleblower's complaint against trump's interactions with ukraine has been declassified and is set to be released as early as this morning. that complaint was initially withheld from congress, even though the inspector general for the intelligence community found it to be credible and urgent. the man who refused to turn the complaint over to congress as

required by law -- acting director of national intelligence joseph maguire -- is set to testify before the house intelligence committee today. "the washington post" reported maguire threatened to resign if the e trump administration tried to restrict his testimony to congress, though maguire later issued a statement strongly denying the report. "the washington post's" executive editor says the paper stands by its reporting. by thursday morning, at least 217 democrats and one independent congressmember saidd they support an impeachment inquiry into president trump's actions -- just over half of the majority of representatives who would be needed to pass articles of impeachment. a two-thirds majority of senators would be required to convict trump and remove him from office, meaning at least 20 republican senators would need to turn against the president. so far, only one republican senator has spoken out strongly against trump's actions --mitt romney of utah, who on wednesday called trump's behavior "troubling in the extreme." at the united nations general assembly, iranian president

hassan rouhani ruled out any negotiations with the u.s., until the trump administration cancels harsh sanctions that have devastated iran's economy. >> the government and people of iran havave remained steadfast gives the horses sanctions in the last 1.5 years and we will never negotiate with an enemy that seeks to make iran surrender with the weapon of poverty, pressure, and sanctions. amy: he warned the region was "on ththe verge of collapse" asa single blunder c can fuel a big fire." last f friday, the t trump administraration said itit would deplploy military forces to sasi arabia, while e imposing new sanctions on iran's central bank and other financial institutions. officials in yemen say seven children were among 16 people killed tuesday when a saudi-led coalition airstrike tore through a residence in a houthi-controlled province in yemen's southwest. graphic video posted on social media showed the remains of children's bodies and residents buburying victims inin a mass g.

the latest deaeadly attack o on civilians by the u.s.-supported coalition comes less than a week after houthi rebels clclaimed responsibility for an attack on a saudi oil facility. houthieaders havave offered to halt missile and drone attacks on saudi arabia in exchange e fr a similar ceasefire. in israel, president reuven rivlin has instructed far-right prime minister benjamin netanyahu to form a new government following last week's election that left him deadlocked with rival candidate benny gantz. the pa had been negoations ovea proposed powewer-sharing dedeal tuesday,t talks fafailed. gagantz previoususly said w wod not join aovovernment led by netanyahu, whos facing indidictments over t three corruption cases.. the e prime ministster now has 8 days to form a government. in bolivia, environmental groups warned wednesday that more than 2 million wild animals, including jaguars and pumas, have died as fires continue to ravage bolivia's grasslands and forests. the fires began in may but intensified in august, completely devastating bolivia's tropical savanna and destroying

at least 10 million acres of forest and grassland. more than 200,000 fires have burnt in the amazon basin this year, destroying at least 29 million acres of r rainforest, mostly in brazil. italian authorities have evacuated communities and closed roads around mont blanc, warning the mountain's glacier is at risk of collapse, with 9 million cubic feet of ice set to break away. this is stefano miserocchi, mayor of the town of courmayeur, ich was partially evacuated. >> the risk of collapse is definitely due to global warming. the average temperatures in the mountains keep getting higher, and there is less right in the winter. areof the grea glaciers in crisis. amy: this comes after the northern hemispherere experiencd its warmest summer on record. and all five of the hottest summers on record have occurred in the last five years. in san francisco, california, police arrested seven protesters who locked themselves together to blockade an entrance to a wells fargo building wednesday. the protesters joined more than 100 climate activists who shut

down part of the city's financial district, blocking traffic to demand banks and government institutions divest from fossil fuels. meanwhile, in london, england, four medical doctors supererglud themselves to a government building in the latest "extinction rebellion" protest against climate change. the group plans to shut down parts of central london for two weeks in october to demand urgent action on the climate. in mexico, lawmakers i in the soututhern statete of oaxaca approveded a bill wednesday decrimiminalizing g abortion dug the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. oaxaca becomes just the second region of mexico, after mexico city, to permit abortions. this is pro-choice activist pilar muriedas. >> the victor is not only for oaxaca. it gives hopes to other states were women decide to have an abortion legally are punished. amy: this comes just days after mexican president andres manuel lopez obrador sent lawawmakers a

bill that would grant amnesty to women serving prison terms for abortition. meanwhile, legislators in australia's most populous state, new south wales, voted thursday to decriminalize abortion, ending a century-o-old law that made terminating a pregnancy a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. the move will allow abortions up to the 22nd week of pregnancy -- or later if two doctors agree. honduras has signed an agreement with the united states that would force asylum seekers who cross through the central american country to first seek refuge there rather than the united states. a similar agreement with the trump administration was signed by the guatemalan government in july and by the salvadoran government last week. this is just the latest policy pushed by the trump administration aimed at deterring migration from central america and other regigions. in chicago, thousands of park district employees voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike demanding higher wages, stable health care costs, and equal pay and benefits for part-time workers. their strike authorization came

ahead as teachers are wrapping up a work stoppage. the teachers are demanding more staffing a lower class sizes and more than 7000 unionized school support stoppers are also considering a strike. several labor groups held a rally in chicago this week with 2020 presidential candidate bebernie sanders in attendance.. and on capitol hill, freshman congressmember alexandria ocasio-cortez released a sweeping policy package wednesday aimed at tackling poverty and inequality. the plan, titled "a just society," would offer full social services to formerly incarcerated people and undocumented immigrants, cap annual rent increases, push government contractors to improve benefits, and update the way the government tracks poverty by taking into account geographic location and health care and child care access. this is representative ocasio-cortez introducing the legislative plan. >> america today is at its wealthiest point in its entire

history. in fact, many would argue today the united states represents one of the richest societies in global history. among all these record profits, 4040 million americans are livig in poverty and 18.5 million americans are living in extreme poverty -- which is measured as less than two dollars a day. that is why i'm so excited to introducuce legislation includig five bills and one was -- one lelegislation that begins to chp awaited our issues of economic injustice. we are calling it a just society. amy: and those are some of the headlines. this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. as a whistleblower complaint filed against president trump rocks wawashington and threatens trump's presidency, we spend the hour with one of the world's most famous whistleblowers, edward snowden. six years ago, snowden leaked a trove of secret documents about how the united states had built a massive surveillance apparatus

to spy on americans and people across the globe. he gave the information to reporters. in may 2013, snowden quit his job as an nsa contractor in hawaii and flew to hong kong where he met three reporters -- glenn greenwald, laura poitras and ewen macaskill -- who began publishing a series of articles exposing the nsa and the surveillance state. snowden was then charged in the united states for violating the espionage act and other laws. in order to avoid being extradited to the united states, he attempted to fly from hong kong to latin america via a stopover in moscow. but snowden became stranded in russia after the u.s. revoked his passport. he has lived in moscow ever since. edward snowden has just published his memoir. it is called "permanent record." he writes about what led him to risk his life to expose the u.s. government's system of mass surveillance. juan gonzalez and i spoke to him from his home in moscow on wednesday.

we talked about his book, his work as an intelligence contractor, the ongoing debate about privacy rights online, and the latest news from washington where a whistleblower complaint against president trump has helped push house democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry. i began by asking ed snowden about the justice department's new lawsuit against him, claiming his memoir violates nondisclosure agreements he signed with the cia and national security agency. i asked him to respond to the trump administration's threat to seize the proceeds from the book because he did not submit the manuscript for review before it was published. >> well, in general, everyone can see what this is. the united statates government, largely the intelligence community, agenencies withinn ia much do nonot want too see books lilike this published.d. any kindnd of true an accounting of the actuaual facts o the government's unlalawfulr

potentially unconstitutiononal behavior i is alwaways going to cause friction. the first thing they go to is what they call a secrecy agreement. this is not an oath of secrecy. a lot of people think it is. when you first join the cia, you do swear an oath but it is not an oath of secrecy. it is not to the agency. it is nonot to the government tr the president. it iss to susupport and defefene constitution of uniteded states agaiainst come as well know, all enemies foreign and domeststic. so this raises the question of what do you do when your obligations come into conflict, what taleo - -- do we owe a greater legions, the constitution or the standard form 312, the nondisclosure agreement? my belief is the constitution prevails in that kind of conflict. the government is saying -- because i signed this agreement, regardless of whwhether it i is right or wrongng or the book has

any classified or doeoesn't t he anany classified m material in - and by the way,t doesn'n't, at least not anytything that has nt alreadady been pupublished in newspapers a around ththe world, they go, allll right, we're goig to take the money for it. not because the department of justice when they brought this complaint -- they were very clear and precise to say, we are not banning the book, not try to stop publication, , and they captureded it in language ththat makekes it appear l like this wa choice they made,, that t they e beingg generous. the reality is, they couldn't because they are forbidden from doing g so by the first amendnd. all they c can do is go after te money and we simply havave to reremember thahat financial censorship i is still censorshi, bubut that doesn't bother me because i did not write this book to make money. amy: and what does that mean they have sued you? what effect has that had on your book? storyry.ually is a funny were at about number 25 on the charts, it had been a pretty quiet launcnch because a lot of

the more incorporate mediaia in ththe unita states doesn'n't rey want to o talk about things like whwhistleblowing -- well, ununtl this week. it sort of went under the radar. comeery dayay of the launch about four or fiveve hours afterward, we could see it hour by hour, the metrics of how the book was doing, we went from number 25 right up to number one. so you couould see the attorney general is the best front man for this book that i could possibly ask for. amy:y: on tuesday, the huffingtn post ran an article headlined "the trump whistleblower scandal is proving edward snowden right." --the piece, they write "now whistleblower inside the intelligence community is trying to do what snowden claimed he couldn't. so far that person has been effectively silenced by the trump administration's refusal to provide the complaint to congress by law. so it is possible the

administration will eventually comply with its legal obligations. at the political system has already sent a clear signal, even intelligence community whistleblowers who follow the theirn't be confident concerns will be heard." can you respond to this and the decision you made to go o a very differenent route ,ed? >> h how best do we inform the public, whether we are government employees, whether we thecontractors working in intelligence community, whether we are ordinary citizens who witnessed serious wrongdoing? what can we do? particicularly when we start beg burdened by all of these nondisclosure agreements? this case that we see before us totoday is i think a actuallllye clear c cut. it is one of the s simplest cass and simplest controversieses we have seen inin a while because e are talking about what appears to be a s single exchange, singe

complaint about a particularized thing and it does not threaten the institutions of power broadly. and what we see in the system that has been built today for whistleblowing i is you are tol, there are proper channnnels youo through and you will b be safe f you do this. you will be heard and y your complaints wilbebe investigated and any improroprieties that are bornee out bthe factcts will be correcected. we know histstorical this is not the case. there have been academic articles published for years and there was one pubublished jusust today looking back to previous cases, for example, nsa whistleblowers who did go through this process and they had their lives destroyed. they lost their careers, their homes. in some cases they lost their families because of f the stress and retaliation andnd consequens they face. some of them lost their freedom. chelsea manning right now is

sitting in prison. much mistreatment of whihistleowerers. the question we haveve to asask, why? don't we need as a public to understand what the government is doing and doesn't depress require access to sources and evidence of what the government is actually doing bebehind closd doors -- which it mimight not think k is comfoabable for thehe publblic to know, but it's realy serves the public interest for the pepeople to know. and so in thihis context, we now have someone who is coming forward. the reason i say this is so more than any other factor, what academics find when they look at the what is wrong with the whistleblowing process in the united states today, is your outcome is entirely the centers of power and how they respond to it. we have three branches in our government, as s everyone knows.

you have the white house. you have the congress. you have thehe judiciary. in my case, in t the case of mot of the consequential whistleblowers s of the last decade even going as far back asas ellsberg and the pentagon papers in the 1970's, they have been reporting failures that cross the branches, not about an individual but about policy broadly that wasut forwardrd by the executive. it was backstopped or ignored by congress and the cous refused to evaluate the legality of it.. in t this case it is quite different. although this whiststleblower is absolutely being mistreated by this white house in this white house is doing absolutely everything it can to stop this person from communicating what the public needs to know to the public in a meaningful way so we can evaluate it, i do not think they will succeed.

because e in this case, the whie hohouse is i in isolationon. in a meaningful way,y, in opopposition to the c congress t feels their prerogatives are being stepped on by thiss -- and that is quite unusual in the context of whistleblowowing. tytypically, we see all three brbranches of government aligned against the whistleblower. in this case, because the at least alleged bad behavior is so bright line clear and because the white house is trying to deny congress access to the complaint, more so than the public itself, i think t there e a nenet people who will go to bt for whoever this p person i is t ththey will enend up allightht. and that is acactually a wonderl thing. it is nonot enough and whistltleblowers a are today a d classemain a vulnerable into we fix the broadader syste, but the most alarming part of what we see in the treatment of this person today by the white

house is what every white house does. they try to o make the conversation not abobout the allegationons. theyey try to make the conversation about the source of the allegations. they wanant to talk k about the whistleblowewer rather than thee governrnments own wrongdoingng. and wewe need d to have access o the facts and we needed to hear this person out. because it doesn' matter the providenence o of an allegatioi. what matters is the proof of it. is what this person is alleging to be true in fact true? if it is, what are we going to do about it? who they are does not matter. whether or not the allegations that are leveling are true matters absolutely. juan: what is your perspective on the raging debate in eurorope over the right to be forgotten, the privacy -- greater privacy protections that the european union is attempting to institute? the general data

protection regulation, gdp are come in europe that is a major step forward in that we now have advanced d democracies that are tryingng to recogngnize essentiy a kind of ownership and records about usus. tois true -- itits simplistic a and parochial, bubt theoretically, it holds the potential for enormous fines for the internet giants of the world come if they misbehave and abuse the public as a class. as you say, one of the primary sort of ideas highness is a right to be forgotten. would yoyou can demand from a company, basically, an understanding of all of t the records they have on you, and you can demand they delete t thm ---- in some cases.. and this actually is tremendously beneficial. theproblem is, and wherere

sharpening of f this conflict comes intoto view, is, well, w t about pupublic figures? what if this is someone who is engaged in corruption? what if this is a pololitician trying to o bury a scandalal? can they go toto a newspspaper d go, yet to r remove this article about me? of course, they cannot and they must not be able to do that. struggletill a legal in europe today, to figure out where to find that line. i think we as average people undersrstand quite w well the difference betweween a private citizen and a public official. these terms mean somemething to usus. we are supposed to know everything about the people who wield the most powerer i societ. and they're supposed d know very little about us who have very little influence over the direction of the future because privacy is about power. it is about influence. and this is whwhat we have been robbed of over these last decades. government increasingly has

tried to change this paradigm and the ultimate result of syststems of mass surveillancnc- byby which i m mean this dragng. everyone's communicications, whether you're actually suspected of any wrongdoing or you are simply getting caught up with everyone else. that governments are increasingly aggressive in asserting different kinds of secrecy privileges, whether it is the actual state secrets doctrine which t ty used too declassify informationon or in thisis case,e, the whistleblbloo isis the talk of the towown this week, which is the government actually does not s seem toe especially concerned about classified information here. of course, they nod t toward tht but if you look at the analysis, they are arguing -- they're more concerned about executive privilege. inside the white

house n't neneed to be given too the public. we are livining in a timime wher we are talking aboutut governmes or whether we e are talking abot google and facebook, the institutions of the greatest power of the world todayay are creasingngly able to shelter ththeir behaviors fr o our viewt the same time they know more about us, our families, communities, and our societities than any government has in any previous time. edwarda whistleblower snowden speaking from his home in moscow. we will be back with him in a moment. ♪ [music break]k]

amy: "frolic" luciano michelini. this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. as we continue our conversation with nsi whistleblower edward snowden, who has just published his memoir called "permanent record." gonzalez and i spoke to him. juan: you said you worked for ththe government and now you wok for r the public. can you explain that? >> i thinknk a lot of americans, particularly y younger a america like myself o cocome from -- my

father worked for thehe military before retiring, my grandfather was an admiral, my mother worked and still works for the same chords that are trying to put me in prison. you have a kind of association often that the government is the cocountry, the govovernment is e nation, the governmement is the people because that t is what we are e culturally being taught. now, there probably a lot of your viewers who go, hold d up. naive.. when everyryone else was protesting the i iraq war, i was volunteering to fightt it becaue i did not believe the government would lie to us. he did not make sense to me that a gogovernment would risk our long-term public faith in the institution of government for short-term political advantage in building support for a war. in "permanentory record" is the evolutition of a person who really has no skskepticism, , discovering allf

the conontradictions in governmt onee by one and whatat happensns bebehind t that veveil of secre, top-secret classified fileses, that helelps you undederstand tt the governrnment canan be a good thing.g. it can be a bad thing. but it is always a a distinct thing from thehe public.c. ms. ine government says the interests of the united states is often quite different than what the people of the united states would consider to be in their interests. amy: i want to go back to that moment for the period of time that you're describing, your growing awareness of what was happening in the level of surveillance in the united states. talk about where you were working and when you made your decision and the steps you took that, well, lead you to the world-famous name today -- maybe not something you intended at the time. >> so i think everybody wants to

imagine there is this cinematic moment where you discocover thee double -- golden document and it changes everything aboutut who u are and you run out the b buildg and deliver to journalists and there's a happy ending. where in the c case of was of lg today come off in unhappy ending. but of course, life is so much more complicated than that. , the change in a person's fundamental beliefs can only happen over a very long period of time. and whatat i realized, first in jajapan, and then fifinally in hawaii, was thahat the systems i have been building g throughouty career as a t technologist -- yu don't have to work on the policy level to have an extraordinary influence in organization today, sai id realized all.

. of these different components i had been working on in isolation, working at the cia, connecting and routing the flow of intelligence, i have been working g in japan crereating a backup system that major all of these things were moving around come all of the secrerets we wee stealing would be saveved andnd stored and backed up. so even if the building was blown up, nothing would be e lo. and fifinally, working at ththea -- rather, working at dell for the caa at aa technical level, wherere i'm sitting dodown withe cco's and cios of the central intelligence agency, try to solve their technology problems, i am proposing to build a new private cloud system. and what this means is all of the informatition we saved and stored forever can now be wherevery anyone and theyey work at this agencycy.

this is where i begin to realize ththat each of t these cogs were part of a larger machine. and this machine was not for the targeted surveillance that i had always believed was the purpose of the intelligence community. when you think about what the cia does, what t the nsa does, u are at least supposed to t think they spypy on bad guys, right? to find themem how youou wilillt they arere looking at articularized people e who have suspicion of e engaging in some wrongdoing. thee systems my y generation had built have produced a system that instead spied on everyone. something that was a long time coming for meme to try undersrstand because yet understand the cognitive dissidents o of believing your government wouldn't do something like that. when i was in japan, i was invited to speak at something

called the joint counterintelligence training academies. cononferenceigence for china. this is basically where specialilist from every differet papa of the e intelligence community get t together and thy talklk about h how china is gogg after us and we try to thwarart it. in their briefer for technology --- chinese on hackers were monitoring our government and our military. couldn't make it. just accident of history. so i get excited -- i geget invited to speak in his place. i spent all night pulling the records because i get extra near access.- exextraordininary i give her presentation n and ge it -- while i am looking at all of the terrible things the chinese government is doing and planning and really the leading

edge of the kind of mass surveillance, technhnically was possiblele for thehe public lary viewed as a consraracy t theoryi was still trying to coconvince myself there was a big is thence -- which chinese government applied to everyoyone andnd our surveillane was just beieing applied to terrorists. then once i discover the stellar wind, inspector general's report, and once i see more and more programs indiscriminate and broadly based, i realize that our surveillance programs operate on the same principles as the worst governments on earth because they are not controlled most strongly by l lw , but bybycyy popossibility. and this is whahat drove me forward.d. eventually, i realized the u.s. governmentnt had stopped caring about what they should do and

instead were pursuing as aggressively as possible what they could do. and this meant every time you made a phone call, the nsa literally goa copy of it delivered to them ththe next da. a record of that call. not wh y you said, butut that yu made it to who you madade it to, whwhen it happppened, wherere ye when it was made. theyey were tracking the locatis of people around t the world. it happepened across thehe we. they happen toto see because thy were creatating a collection platform that meant anything that passed by their systems was what they called ingested. it was brought into our databases. and then all you had to do -- ink about it, yet every text mail, email, web request, you know where every cell in the world is becaususe you have accs to the rececords of where they e located because every y cell phe in order to function on the network has to be paired wh thesese cell phone towers. you look at your signal bars, what is that saying? hohow far you are from the neart

cell phone tower. all of those towers are saying, this person at this time, we knknow theheir billing address. when you take this in aggregates, what we were building and what we were trying to store to a greater distance every year was history's first permanent record of everyone's life. juan: of course, you mentioned in the book the government would label this bulk collection. terminology that obscures the reality that what it is is massive surveillance of everyone. >> right. if you hear the teterm "book collection," would you will hear anyone in covers referred to the nsa mass surveillance program as, it sounds like what a garbageman does or what is aarticularlrly busy post office. it is a e euphemism in the same interrogation i is

for torture. the same wayay detainee is a euphemism forr prisoner. the same way we use targeted killing instead of assassination. the government loves euphemisms. we must always be on guard against them. when they say we are national security, what they're talking his state security. theyey are interested in maintaining the stability o of government more so than they are interested i in what we actually think it to mamaine, which is public safety. we know this not because of what i am saying here. in the wake of my actually comingng forward and sang, look, people need to know about this in greater detail from everyone in the white house from barack obama, the congress as they always do and i it whistleblower comes up which implicates the cowards that be in real serio across-the-board wrongdoing,

said, look, this guy's not a patriot. don't listen to hihim. it i is a lie. anythingnghey could dodo to get you to talk about m me instead f talking about what they are doing to you.. but to obama''s credit, he appointed two didierent rebuke groups to look into what these programs actually did in terms of public safety. s.e president's review group when they investigateded the fit onone of thesese programams, whs investigating s section 215 of e patriot act, the o one about t e phone r records -- your phohone recocords everytything thahat ty were b being delivered to the na and applying -- and it was applied to everyone. this was authorized not by real corporate by secret court, the pfizer court.

this was a court that by the way was never intended and certainly not designed to interpret thehe coconstitution in new and novel ways thahat granted new authorities s to goverernment. they were ononly intendeded to p routinine requests forr surveieillance that did not implicate ouour righghts. but when the p president looked into this and these groups had full access to classified information, talked to the head of the fbi, cia, everyone, by their own words, this kind of mass surveillance -- woke collection as they call it -- never made a concrete difference in a single counterintelligence investigation. the only time it made any didifference at all was s in the case of a cabdriver in california wiring $8,500 b backo had ties tothat teororism. they shredded the constitution. theyey destroyed our way of lif, rather to catch a cabdriver

sending money home. even in this case, the fbi said they would have gotten this guy anyway without the program in a way i think all of us can understand. even if you have all world communications in a bucket waiting for you to run your hands throughh it, you have to know what you're looking for in order to be able to pull it out. and by the time you can type in a name, and email address, phone number, credit card commit anytng to o sort throughgh that bucket with all of these systems, you h have enough informatioion to go to a judge d get a warrant -- which the judge will absolutely grant because no judge is going to go comeau, no, no, i'm not going to grant this country terrorism warrant for someone you think is funding terrorism. of couourse they will. then they get all of the same records. why is it than they had to violate the consnstitution to do this? and why is it then that if these programs were so o necessy, were soso vitalal, and if you believe despite alall the evididence thy werere effective, why didn't thy simply ask the public?c?

you are nenever asked or grantea vote. and this is why the lesson of 2013 unfortunately, i think still has not been learned today , which is these revelations were never about surveillance. surveillance was the mechanism. it was the grounds for discussion. but the actual topic that was coming to conflict was democracy . what do we do when we have a model of goverernment where the government dererives its mandate from m the consent t of the governed. that is where it gets its legitimamacy from. they go, we votedd for thihis. butt we are not told what they are doing so we e can exprs our opopinion on what they are doin. and this, asas we are seeeeing,s occurring today and will continue to recur so long as the for fear ofrefers politicall criticism to act more

in the shadows than it does in the light post of amy: innocent whistleblower edward snowden, author of the new book "permanent record." we will be back with him in a minutete. ♪ [music break]

amymy: "my mind i find in timi" amy: "my mind i find in time" by the guitarist and composer mary halvorson. on wednesday, she won a macarthur foundation "genius" grant. this is democracy now!, i'm amy goodman. we continue our conversation with innocent whistleblower edward snowden. who has just published his memoir called "permanent record." in the book, ed snowden writes, "as i proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me this in front of me was my future. i'm not saying i made any decisions at that instant. the most important decisions in life are never made that way. they are made subconsciously and only express themselves once fully formed. once you are finally strung it up to admit to yourself this is the course your beliefs have decreed.

that was my 29th birthday present to myself, the awareness that i had entered a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single still indistinct act." those the words of ed snowden in his book "permanent record." when one gonzalez and i spoke to ed snowden on wednesday from his home in moscow, russia, i asked him to talk a about howow he bee a whistleblower. shoes..put yoururself in my you are someone who has always a p part of ththe structcture of government. you u are dependent on it.t. the e government is what g gaver parents salaries, that fed you, that close you. you're not what anyone would consider radical. you are not a protester. you have an awareness.

you have evidence that the government is not what you bebelieved it t to be. natural lot of you, that might be like, well, d duh. bubut if you came from that position, that is meaningful -- a meaningful change. and now you go, well, how do you respond to this? there is, of course, the political active revolution. you can try to light a match and burn the building down. go this i is in a decenent cuttr program, i'm going to shut it down myself. return thetry t to agency -- the governmnment to is stated ideals, , to the standard and valueues the p public is at least told that it represents not whistleblowing, i believe, is quite distinct from

leaking. leaking is generally done for personalal benefits. these are the official stores, just t trying to get rid of superiors soso mae one day hehe will fifit in the directctor chair. bubut whistleblowiwing is s somg differenent. blowing the whistle is to try and provide the public information that is in the public interest to know. but it is -- not only do we know there is no meaningful process to protect whistleblowers, certainly for someone in mymy position because in 2013, contractors -- i was a contractor -- did nonot fall unr whistleblower protection laws. so i i was really paralyzed an agonizing over whatat to do. could i i do anything? very much trying to talklk mysef out of it. but eventually, you have to ask yourself, what hapappens if no e does anything? the reality is, everything gets

worse. if we arare to keep a constitutional public,c, everyby has to do their part. it doesn't matter who you are. what matters is what you see, what y you can prorove,ecause it is not about you. it is about us. so in that r realization, i ununderstood that even though im a technologist and it would be quite easy for me to publish these documents myself on the internet, instead what i should do is provide e them to journalists. this is because the journalists could auththenticate them and g, you don't understand all this, but wewe can get other sources o confirm this is accurate. you must understand it. your politics are crazy, whateverer. i shouldn't be the one making the decisions of what is and isn't in the public interest to know. i can provide that evidence and a good faith belief that journalist can and should do that, that is why we have the first amendment in the u.s., the

role of the press -- the role the press occupies. press, could evaluate these documents ago, people need to know whwhat is going o on. that is what happen. so i g gathered material of w wi believe to be public importance comeme evidence e of official cs , unethical behavior,r, unconstitutional behavior, or simply violation of rights. not jujust in n the u.s., but te other 95% of the world that livesseyond d u.s. borders. and d i used my position as sosomeone who worked at the offe of informamation sharing -- another one of those funny accidents of history. i was the office of information shararing. i was the sole employee in it. [laughter] and i was never even supposed to be there. i was supposed to go to a a differerent position, but the personon, another contractor who

had been intendeded to go to the offi o of informrmatio sharing, was a cut up. they would not be allowed in that building anymore. so they got put in a different position. i got slighted instead in the office of information sharing. amy: ed snowden, talk about the decision you made in hawaii to try to get this to a journalist. and your decision to go to hong kong. now your wife lindsey mills and your partner, what you told her at the time, what she understood, the difficulty of appending your life at this point, how you prepared for leaving, and then what happened next. understand for this kind of m moment fromom ane who is c considering thiss undersrstands this is s an act f self immmmolation. the likeliesest outcome e is you wiwillpend the rest t of your le and prison. not an e exaggeration.

the government argues that tellininthe truth h to a joururnalist about the govovernt breaking thehe lawaw so longng t actitity was classified is itself a crime that is punishable by 10 years per count . if you're talking about hundreds of documents, thousands of documents, or more, obviously, the sentence becomes hisistoric pretty quick. it?are you willing to risk how do you m make sure you can't bebe i intercepted and destroyen be stopppped before it e ever gs out? i believeded if there was a sine point of failure at any point in the proces off reporting, ifif myselflf and the journalists wee the sasame room at the same tim, somewhere the government could act, they would act. i don't know what the limits on that would have been. but i knew they would have usedd of theirsum

capabities to try to prevent the e public from learningng abt what they y were doing. so i had to leave. this wasas, and my belelieve, te only way we could make sure the journalists get the trututh outo the public. so i went to hong kong, which is funny in 2013, people thought was sort of a crazy move. they were like, why hong kong? hong kong is red china, or something like that. they are tools of beijing. when you look at hong kong today where the entire population is out on the street every day resisting the government in beijing, i think it is actually -- e eablisheded why that decision made so much sense is because it was kind of no man's land. the chinese government would n t be free to act at least quickly enough through -- to interferere with t the reporting. the u.s. government cannot act in hong kong f for feaear of angering the chinese government. so we would d have rooooto breat

and work and get the stories out. home alll meant leaving stuff that meant leaving my family. that meant leaving my y partnerf so many years,s, lindsa lindsay mills of the love of my life. i could not tell her bececause f ii had, she could have been charged with t the same crime tt i was. the fbi could have considered her an accessory to the crime. they could have seen her as involved in some kind of conspiracy to do what i was doing, w which is basically aiag and abetting an act of journanalism. but we can laugh about it today. hohowever, it is a very y serios felony under u.s. laws. and so that meant i i just had o leave a note that i''m going g y forr work, i l love you. and shshe found that an she was angry, rightfully, but she is seated before because she knew i have been working for the

intelligence services for years. and then she learned what i had done the same time everyone else had done when i was on tv. and the thing i will never r be able to repay her for his she , whenhen shshe saw me on tv she ununderstood why i had left d she undederstood what i had her, despite the cost t to she s said that is the reason ne fell in n love with me. and eventually she came to rejoin me. and then we got married. i'm the worstt, boyfriend in the history of the united states. states. but i am striving to be one of the better husbands because she is so much more than i deserve. juan: ed, why the book now? and are you eager to come back to did nine did -- to the united

states a and make your case to e americanan people? >> since the very beginning of this, i've had a single rerequirement for coming backcko the.s., andnd that is not to get a pardon, not a p parade, but it is a fair trial.. and thisis brings us back to the central problelem of whisistleblowing that we were talking about earlier. it is completely indefensible whistleblower that tellllthe public, informs the profoundut a matter of public interest can be charged under the espionage act. a law that was intendeded to be used againinst spieses.. and those who are accused of this havave no defense. they cannot tell the jurury whie is they did what they did. the jury c can't t decide whethr not that was justified or unjustified. whwhich is the entire e purposea trial for something like this.

demand.my and i think this needs to be the demand of f anyone whoho believn the justice system and who believes the public has a need to know, the basic facts abobout whatat the goverernment is doin. areis law t tt whistlebeblowers charged with, thehe espionage a, isis extremely rarare. it is called a strict liability crime. it is that crime that means you cannot tell the jury why you did what you did. law is unusual, even if you murder someone, straight up just kill someone, you can argue to the j jury it s selflf-defense. you can argue to the jury the person had it coming. andd is is up to the jury to decide w whether they believe yu or whether it was just t murder plain and simple. cause therere are twtwo prongof the crime that t ve to be considereded. was the lalaw broken?

this is always the easasiest and less interesting question. two, was a justified? the government forbids that when it is the governments own behavior that is on trial. instead, they simply want to consider that first prong -- was the law broken? they say if the law was broken, the jury can't consider whether it wasas justified or not becece the government argues there is no justification for revealing their own classified criminality. obviously, i would say that has to change. because you can have a sesentencing in that but you cannot have a fair trial in that. amy: we saw what happened with chelsea manning, how difficult it was to hear anything she had to say in court. we played a surreptitious recording inside the court-martial where you could hardly hear her voice. what are you demanding? what are the conditions you

would agree to to come back to the united states? >> it is simply whistleblowers have the right to tell the jury why they did what they did, forr the jury to c consider was unbalanceded s something that dd more good and harm? was it justified or was it something that shohould be punished with the prisonon sentence? that is why we have juries. that is why we have trials. if the government is unwilling to guarantee that, with the government is saying is they are not willing to grant fair trials to whistleblowers. i don't believe p participatingn that kind of system advances the interest of justice. i think that perpetuates the system of injustice. amy: nsa whistleblower edward snowden. his memoir is titled "permit record." the house intelligence committee has just released a class -- the classified version of a whistleblowers complaint accusing president trump foreign interference in the 2020 election. and that does it for our show.

democracy now! is looking for feedback from people who appreciate the closed captioning. e-mail your comments to outreach@democracynow.org or mail them to democracy now! p.o. box 693 new york, new york 10013. [captioning made possible by democracy now!]