The NSA whistleblower who revealed the PRISM program has publically revealed himself to be Edward Snowdern, a former private contactor for the NSA. He gave an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald about his thoughts on his reasons behind whistleblowing and what what his experience in the NSA was like. The following is a transcript of the entire video interview.
Edward Snowden: "My name is Ed Snowden, I'm 29 years old. I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.
Glenn Greenwald: "What are some of the positions that you held previously within the intelligence community?"
Snowden: "I've been a systems engineer, systems administrator, senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications informations system officer."
Greenwald: "One of the things people are going to be most interested in, in trying to understand what, who you are and what you are thinking is there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower. Walk people through that decision making process."
Snowden: "When you're in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them."
"But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you're ignored. The more you're told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government."
Greenwald: "Talk a little bit about how the American surveillance state actually functions. Does it target the actions of Americans?"
Snowden: "NSA and intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas."
"Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so."
"Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail."
Greenwald: "One of the extraordinary parts about this episode is usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can, which they hope often is forever. You on the other hand have decided to do the opposite, which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures. Why did you choose to do that?"
Snowden: "I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret consistently as the government does when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took. It'll kind of give its officials a mandate to go, 'Hey tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side.' But they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens but they're typically maligned. It becomes a thing of 'These people are against the country. They're against the government' but I'm not."
"I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what's happening and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.' And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, 'I didn't change these, I didn't modify the story. This is the truth; this is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.'"
Greenwald: "Have you given thought to what it is that the US government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you?"
Snowden: "Yeah, 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 Traids. Any of their agents or assets. We've got a CIA station just up the road and the consulate here in Hong Kong and I'm sure they're going to be very busy for the next week. And that's a fear I'll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."
"You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because they're such powerful adversaries. No one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they'll get you in time. But at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think it many of us are it's the human nature; you can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows."
"But if you realize that that's the world you helped create and it's gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied."
Greenwald: "Why should people care about surveillance?"
Snowden: "Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."
Greenwald: "We are currently sitting in a room in Hong Kong, which is where we are because you travelled here. Talk a little bit about why it is that you came here and specifically there are going to be people…people speculate that what you really intend to do is to defect to the country that many see as the number one rival of the Untied States, which is China. And that what you are really doing is essentially seeking to aid an enemy of the United States with which you intend to seek asylum. Can you talk a little about that?"
Snowden: "Sure. So there's a couple assertions in those arguments that are sort of embedded in the questioning of the choice of Hong Kong. The first is that China is an enemy of the United States. It's not. I mean there are conflicts between the United States government and the Chinese PRC government but the peoples inherently we don't care. We trade with each other freely, we're not at war, we're not in armed conflict, and we're not trying to be. We're the largest trading partners out there for each other."
"Additionally, Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. People think 'Oh China, Great Firewall.' Mainland China does have significant restrictions on free speech but the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making there views known. The internet is not filtered here more so then any other western government and I believe that the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading western governments."
Greenwald: "If your motive had been to harm the United States and help its enemies or if your motive had been personal material gain were there things you could have done with these documents to advance those goals that you didn't end up doing?"
Snowden: "Oh absolutely. Anyone in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could suck out secrets, pass them on the open market to Russia; they always have an open door as we do. I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world. The locations of every station, we have what their missions are and so forth."
"If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that's not my intention. I think for anyone making that argument they need to think, if they were in my position and you live a privileged life, you're living in Hawaii, in paradise, and making a ton of money, 'What would it take you to leave everything behind?'"
"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."
"And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather then a stipulation of law. And because of that a new leader will be elected, they'll find the switch, say that 'Because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."

"If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Are your digging for gold or are you selling shovels?  Which is best for your career, for your business, for you?  Is it possible that neither career or business strategy is best for you?  Let's begin with a bit of a history lesson for background:

The California Gold Rush began in 1848, when gold was discovered in Coloma, California.  By the beginning of 1849, word of the Gold Rush had spread around the world, and 300,000 gold-seekers and merchants rushed to California from virtually every continent.  By 1850, most of the easily accessible gold had been collected and only a small percentage of people actually struck it rich with the precious metal; however, the impact of the immense population increase built a new, vibrant and diverse economy.

Today, many marketing strategies are built around the competing ideas of digging for gold and selling shovels, inspired by the California Gold Rush: 

A prime example for the competing ideas of digging for gold and selling shovels can be illustrated in the ultimate serviced-based engine -- the Internet -- and the explosion of blogs and other search engine-friendly marketing tools.

With well over 100 million blogs on the Internet today, the statistical likelihood of earning big money writing in a blog is not much better than playing the lottery. There are, however, millions of people who enjoy creating blogs and are quite confident (or delusional, depending upon the particular case) that their writing and marketing skills, combined with incredible luck and timing will enable them to strike it rich. These are the gold diggers.

But are we now in an 1850-like environment, where the easily accessible gold has already been collected?  Many of the most successful bloggers are now selling shovels; they are selling products and services to other bloggers, such as this eBook on (you guessed it) how to sell your own eBook.

"One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

But is there really anything wrong with digging for gold? What makes the shovel sellers smarter?  Aren't they really trying to "strike it rich" also? 

Neither pursuit is inherently wrong (or right).  The only foolish pursuit is the one that is blindly chosen -- the one that is chosen for reasons, such as money, other than self-actualization.

I believe the true key to success at anything you do is rooted in self-knowledge, which largely consists of defining terms for yourself. Perhaps "digging for gold" is not even a pursuit of monetary and material wealth at all. To know the Self is to be rich. Digging for gold is a passionate pursuit. Selling shovels can also be a passionate pursuit. The gold digger and shovel seller may view their own particular career as prudent and the other as foolish.  One would not be happy being (or would exist without) the other; but this is precisely the point!  

You may never find gold, in terms of monetary wealth; you may never own a successful business; you may never make six figures as a blogger; but if you discover your Self, you have found gold, in the form of meaning, purpose and self-actualization, regardless of the monetary or material result...

Do not endeavor to dig for gold or sell shovels; be yourself.  Just consider the example and words of someone who happened to write a little book called Walden during the prime years of the Gold Rush:

"A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom." ~ Henry David Thoreau

courtesy: financial philosopy

"When the crisis came, the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent." "There is also a strong belief, which I share, that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis." Now, you've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism. But this is different. This is coming from the heart of finance. The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank. The second quote is from the head of the U.K. Financial Services Authority. Are these people implying that we don't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies? It gets worse. "We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace." What's happening here? How can this be possible? Do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. But there's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity. To explain what this means and what this thing is, please let me quickly take a couple of steps back. I ended up in physics by accident. It was a random encounter when I was young, and since then, I've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day. In a nutshell, you can think of physics as follows. So you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics. You encode it into equations. Then predictions can be made and tested. We're actually really lucky that this works, because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe. Despite the success, physics has its limits. As Dirk Helbing pointed out in the last quote, we don't really understand the complexity that relates to us, that surrounds us. This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems. So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts: swarms of birds or fish, ant colonies, ecosystems, brains, financial markets. These are just a few examples. Interestingly, complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations, so the usual physics approach doesn't really work here. So what do we know about complex systems? Well, it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction. This means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions, so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions. And it gets even better, because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence. So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system. So the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts. And all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system, how complex they are. So if it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of interaction. As a result, networks are ideal representations of complex systems. The nodes in the network are the system's components and the links are given by the interactions. So what equations are for physics, complex networks are for the study of complex systems. This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics, biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about economics? Where are economic networks? This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature. The study we published last year called "The Network of Global Corporate Control" was the first extensive analysis of economic networks. The study went viral on the Internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media. This is quite remarkable, because, again, why did no one look at this before? Similar data has been around for quite some time. What we looked at in detail was ownership networks. So here the nodes are companies, people, governments, foundations, etc. And the links represent the shareholding relations, so Shareholder A has x percent of the shares in Company B. And we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue. So ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations. In this little example, you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted. Now you may think that no one's looked at this before because ownership networks are really, really boring to study. Well, as ownership is related to control, as I shall explain later, looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like, who are the key players? How are they organized? Are they isolated? Are they interconnected? And what is the overall distribution of control? In other words, who controls the world? I think this is an interesting question. And it has implications for systemic risk. This is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall. A high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability, because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic. Scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data, because a foundational guideline in science is: Let the data speak. Okay. Let's do that. So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007. This is a lot of data, and because we wanted to find out who rules the world, we decided to focus on transnational corporations, or TNCs for short. These are companies that operate in more than one country, and we found 43,000. In the next step, we built the network around these companies, so we took all the TNCs' shareholders, and the shareholders' shareholders, etc., all the way upstream, and we did the same downstream, and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links. This is the TNC network which we analyzed. And it turns out to be structured as follows. So you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players, and in the center there's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies. To give you a better picture, think about a metropolitan area. So you have the suburbs and the periphery, you have a center like a financial district, then the core will be something like the tallest high rise building in the center. And we already see signs of organization going on here. Thirty-six percent of the TNCs are in the core only, but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all TNCs. Okay, so now we analyzed the structure, so how does this relate to the control? Well, ownership gives voting rights to shareholders. This is the normal notion of control. And there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership. If you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company, you get control, but usually it depends on the relative distribution of shares. And the network really matters. About 10 years ago, Mr. Tronchetti Provera had ownership and control in a small company, which had ownership and control in a bigger company. You get the idea. This ended up giving him control in Telecom Italia with a leverage of 26. So this means that, with each euro he invested, he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations. Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs' value. This allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder. This is very much in the sense of Max Weber's idea of potential power, which is the probability of imposing one's own will despite the opposition of others. If you want to compute the flow in an ownership network, this is what you have to do. It's actually not that hard to understand. Let me explain by giving you this analogy. So think about water flowing in pipes where the pipes have different thickness. So similarly, the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes. So what did we find after computing all this network control? Well, it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the TNCs' value. Now remember, we started out with 600,000 nodes, so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent. They're mostly financial institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. And it gets even more extreme. There are 146 top players in the core, and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the TNCs' value. What should you take home from all of this? Well, the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard. The high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy and we could easily reproduce the TNC network with a few simple rules. This means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization. It's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy. Our study "is an impression of the moon's surface. It's not a street map." So you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt, yet it "gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance." We hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction, so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future. And this is slowly starting. We're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view. But this journey has only just begun, so we will have to wait before we see the first results. Now there is still a big problem, in my opinion. Ideas relating to finance, economics, politics, society, are very often tainted by people's personal ideologies. I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found. It would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas, which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world. Reality is so complex, we need to move away from dogma. But this is just my own personal ideology. Thank you. (Applause)

Hi. This is my mobile phone. A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. All this is possible with your mobile phone.

I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. Let's go back to that time, to this city. Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket.

Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? Hold it up. Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.

But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. And I will talk about this. These are 35,830 lines of information. Raw data. And why are these informations there? Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.

This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? Who sends whom a text message? And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider.

And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." They said, we don't want this data retention. We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this."

And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.

And I also ask myself, does it really work? Can they really store all this information about us? Every time I use my mobile phone? So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.

But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. So at the end, I had a settlement with them. I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional.

So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. And on the C.D., this was on. Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. But then after a while I realized, this is my life. This is six months of my life, into this file.

So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. But then I said, I want to go out with this information. I want to make them public. Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.

So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. This is a visualization of six months of my life. You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. You can see every step I take. And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between.

All this is possible with this information. That's a little bit scary. But it is not only about me. It's about all of us. First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network.

But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. You can see all of this. You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, you can control your society.

This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years.

Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time.

But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. But you have to fight for your self-determination today. You have to fight for it every day. So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you.

So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. Thank you.

(Applause)