A Remarkable Interview With Edward Snowden, a Remarkable Young Man

Edward Snowden says he sleeps well - despite potential death threats

Last night the German television station NDR News broadcast a face to face interview with Edward Snowden that they conducted a few days earlier in Moscow. In the interview Snowden speaks about the NSA surveillance programs he has helped expose to the world. The full transcript of interview is available [here], but IMO the video [full version below] is far better because seeing his body language, hearing his and the interviewers inflections and tone, convey much more than the printed words alone.

Edward Snowden is a very well spoken young man in addition to exhibiting extraordinary integrity and bravery. We all owe him our thanks.

The interview covers a range of topics related to the 'security' apparatus. One of the most important, IMO, is the shell game that the Five Eyes countries perform when asked about the obviously illegal spying they do domestically. "So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD. What the result of this was over decades and decades what sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries." - Edward Snowden

The Mud Report article titled 'Canadians Must Stop Being Naive About Security and Understand We're All Foreigners Somewhere' says the same thing in more detail than the Snowden interview format allowed. Another very critically important issue - commercial espionage - that the interview touched on was also looked at more broadly by the writer of these lines in the article 'Commercial Espionage - the Multi $Trillion Iceberg Beneath the Tip of Snowden's Recent Revelations'

On this sub-topic the interviewer asks: "Does the NSA spy on Siemens, on Mercedes, on other successful German companies for example, to prevail, to have the advantage of knowing what is going on in a scientific and economic world."
Snowden answers: "I don’t want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying. If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it."

Please try to set aside 30 minutes of your time to watch this remarkable interview with Edward Snowden, a remarkable young man.