Fiction and films, the nearest most of us
knowingly get to the world of espionage, give us a series of reliable
stereotypes. British spies are hard-bitten, libidinous he-men. Russian agents
are thickset, low-browed and facially scarred. And defectors end up as tragic
old soaks in Moscow, scanning old copies of the Times for news of the Test
match.
Such
a fate was anticipated for Edward Snowden by Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA chief, who predicted last September that the former
NSA analyst would be stranded in Moscow for the rest of his days – “isolated,
bored, lonely, depressed… and alcoholic”.
But
the Edward Snowden who materialises in our hotel room shortly after noon on the
appointed day seems none of those things. A year into his exile in Moscow, he feels
less, not more, isolated. If he is depressed, he doesn’t show it. And, at the
end of seven hours of conversation, he refuses a beer. “I actually don’t
drink.” He smiles when repeating Hayden’s jibe. “I was like, wow, their
intelligence is worse than I thought.”
Since
arriving in Moscow, Snowden has been keeping late and solitary hours –
effectively living on US time, tapping away on one of his three computers
(three to be safe; he uses encrypted chat, too). If anything, he appears more
connected and outgoing than he could be in his former life as an agent. Of his
life now, he says, “There’s actually not that much difference. You know, I
think there are guys who are just hoping to see me sad. And they’re going to
continue to be disappointed.”
When
the Guardian first spoke to Snowden a year ago in
Hong Kong, he had been dishevelled, his hair uncombed, wearing jeans and a
T-shirt. The 31-year-old who materialised last week was smartly, if
anonymously, dressed in black trousers and grey jacket, his hair tidily cut. He
is jockey-light – even skinnier than a year ago. And he looks pale: “Probably
three steps from death,” he jokes. “I mean, I don’t eat a whole lot. I keep a
weird schedule. I used to be very active, but just in the recent period I’ve
had too much work to focus on.”
There
was no advance warning of where we would meet: his only US television
interview, with NBC’s Brian Williams in May, was
conducted in an anonymous hotel room of Snowden’s choosing. This time, he
prefers to come to us. On his arrival, there is a warm handshake for Guardian
reporter Ewen MacAskill, whom he last saw in Hong Kong
– a Sunday night after a week of intense work in a frowsty hotel room, a few
hours before the video revealing his identity to the world
went public. Neither man knew if they would ever meet again.
Snowden
orders chicken curry from room service and, as he forks it down, is immediately
into the finer points of the story that yanked him from a life of undercover
anonymity to global fame. The Snowden-as-alcoholic jibe is not the only moment
when he reflects wryly on his former colleagues’ patchy ability to get on top
of events over the past year. There was, for instance, the incident last July
when a plane carrying President Evo Morales back to Bolivia from Moscow was forced down in Vienna and searched for a
stowaway Snowden. “I was like, first off, wow, their intelligence sucks, from
listening to everything. But, two, are they really going to the point of just
completely humiliating the president of a Latin American nation, the
representative of so many people? It was just shockingly poorly thought out,
and yet they did it anyway, and they keep at these sort of mistakes.” It was as
if they were trying not to find him. “I almost felt like I had some sort of
friend in government.”
He
is guarded on the subject of his life in exile. Yes, he cooks for himself –
often Japanese ramen, which he finds easy to sling together. Yes, he goes out.
“I don’t live in absolute secrecy – I live a pretty open life – but at the same
time I don’t want to be a celebrity, you know. I don’t want to go somewhere and
have people pay attention to me, just as I don’t want to do that in the media.”
He
does get recognised. “It’s a little awkward at times, because my Russian’s not
as good as it should be. I’m still learning.” He declines an invitation to
demonstrate for us (“The last thing I want is clips of me speaking Russian
floating around the internet”). He has been picking his way through Dostoevsky,
and belatedly catching up with series one of The Wire, while reading the
recently published memoir of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers
whistleblower.
In
October last year, he was photographed on a Moscow tourist boat. “Right. I didn’t
look happy in that picture.” And pushing a loaded shopping trolley across a road?
“You know, I actually don’t know, because it was so far away and it was blurry.
I mean, it could have been me.” Does he go out in disguise? He is deadpan:
“Before I go to the grocery store, I make sure to put on, you know, my Groucho
Marx glasses and nose and moustache… No, I don’t wander around in disguise.”
The only props in evidence today are an American Civil Liberties Union baseball
cap and dark glasses, tossed on to the bed. Some disguise.
He
is not working for a Russian organisation, as has been reported, but is
financially secure for the immediate future. In addition to substantial savings
from his career as a well-compensated contractor, he has received numerous
awards and speaking fees from around the world. He is also in the process of
securing foundation funding for a new press freedom initiative, creating tools
that allow journalists to communicate securely.
He
feels the world has got some things wrong about him, but even so he would
rather not correct the record publicly. He was exasperated to be marked down as
a conservative libertarian, for example (he is, he says, more moderate than has
been reported), but declines to be more specific about his actual politics. It
would simply alienate some people, he believes. He thinks journalists have
speculated too much about his family (his father has visited him in Moscow),
and misunderstood his relationship with Lindsay, the girlfriend he left behind
in Hawaii; life is more complicated than the headlines. But, again, he won’t go
on the record to talk about them.
At
the same time, the people closest to him have plainly told Snowden he has to
raise his profile if he wants to win over US hearts and minds. And, from his
periodic self-corrections and occasional stop-start answers, it is evident he
is on a mission to make friends, not enemies. At the end of a diplomatic answer
to a question about Germany, he breaks off in frustration. “That’s probably too
political. I hate politics. Really, I mean, this is not me, you know. I hope
you guys can tell the difference.”
The
Snowden-as-traitor camp will take his reluctance to vouchsafe too many details
as confirmation that he is, if not a double agent, then a “useful idiot” for
the Kremlin. He tackles some of these criticisms head on. He didn’t take a
single document to Russia. He has no access to them there. He never initially
sought to be in Russia – it happened “entirely by accident”. It’s a “modern
country… and it’s been good to me”, but he would rather be free to travel. He repeats
his criticisms of Russia’s record on human rights and free speech, and tacitly
concedes that his televised question to Vladimir Putin in April
this year was an error.
What
about the Russian spy thesis, advanced by the Economist writer Edward Lucas,
among others? Lucas has said that, had Snowden come to him with the NSA
documents, he would have marched him straight to a police station. “Yeah, he’s
crazy,” Snowden sighs. “He’s not credible at all.” One of the Lucas charges was
a “fishy” September 2010 trip to India, where he speculates Snowden may have
met unspecified Russians or intermediaries, and attended a hacking course.
“It’s bullshit,” Snowden exclaims. “I was on official visits, working at the US
embassy. You know, it’s not like they didn’t know I was there. And the six-day
course afterwards, it wasn’t a security course, it was a programming course.
But it doesn’t matter. I mean, there are always going to be conspiracy
theories. If my reputation is harmed by being here, there or any other place,
that’s OK, because it’s not about me.
“I
can give a blanket response to all the Russia questions,” he adds. “If the
government had the tiniest shred of evidence, not even that [I was an agent],
but associating with the Russian government, it would be on the front page of
the New York Times by lunchtime.”
What
about the accusation that his leaks have caused untold damage to the
intelligence capabilities of the west? “The fact that people know
communications can be monitored does not stop people from communicating
[digitally]. Because the only choices are to accept the risk, or to not
communicate at all,” he says, almost weary at having to spell out what he
considers self-evident.
“And
when we’re talking about things like terrorist cells, nuclear proliferators –
these are organised cells. These are things an individual cannot do on their
own. So if they abstain from communicating, we’ve already won. If we’ve
basically talked the terrorists out of using our modern communications
networks, we have benefited in terms of security – we haven’t lost.”
There
still remains the charge that he has weakened the very democracy he professes
he wants to protect. Al-Qaida, according to MI6
chief Sir John Sawers, have been “rubbing their hands with glee”. “I can
tell you right now that in the wake of the last year, there are still
terrorists getting hauled up, there are still communications being intercepted.
There are still successes in intelligence operations that are being carried out
all around the world.”
Why
not let the agencies collect the haystacks of data so they can look for the
needles within?
Snowden
doesn’t like the haystack metaphor, used exhaustively by politicians and
intelligence chiefs in defence of mass data collections. “I would argue that
simply using the term ‘haystack’ is misleading. This is a haystack of human
lives. It’s all the private records of the most intimate activities, that are
aggregated and compiled again and again, and stored for increasing frequencies
of time.
“It
may be that by watching everywhere we go, by watching everything we do, by
analysing every word we say, by waiting and passing judgment over every
association we make and every person we love, that we could uncover a terrorist
plot, or we could discover more criminals. But is that the kind of society we
want to live in? That is the definition of a security state.”
Snowden with Ewen MacAskill (left) and Alan
Rusbridger. Photograph: Alex Healey for the Guardian
When
did he last read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? “Actually, quite some
time ago. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think we are exactly in that
universe. The danger is that we can see how [Orwell’s] technologies now seem
unimaginative and quaint. They talked about things like microphones implanted
in bushes and cameras in TVs that look back at us. But now we’ve got webcams
that go with us everywhere. We actually buy cellphones that are the equivalent
of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets voluntarily. Times
have shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous [than Orwell
imagined].”
But
the life he describes inside the closed walls of the NSA does have echoes of
Big Brother omniscience. Snowden, sipping Pepsi from a bottle and speaking in
perfectly composed sentences, recalls the period when he was working as an
analyst, directing the work of others. There was a moment when he and, he says,
other colleagues began to have severe doubts about the ethics of what they were
doing.
Can
he give an example of what made him feel uneasy? “Many of the people searching
through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old. They’ve
suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where
they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily
work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of
necessary sense – for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually
compromising situation. But they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do?
They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker
says, ‘Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way’, and then Bill
sends it to George, George sends it to Tom, and sooner or later this person’s
whole life has been seen by all of these other people.”
The
analysts don’t discuss such things in the NSA cafeterias, but back in the
office “anything goes, more or less. You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has
sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world. It’s
never reported, because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The
fact that records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private
communication stream, from the intended recipient, and given to the government,
without any specific authorisation, without any specific need, is itself a
violation of your rights. Why is that in the government database?”
How
often do such things happen? “I’d say probably every two months. It’s routine
enough. These are seen as sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance
positions.”
And
the auditing is really not good enough to pick up such abuses? “A 29-year-old
walked in and out of the NSA with all of their private records,” he shoots
back. “What does that say about their auditing? They didn’t even know.”
He
emphasises that his co-workers were not “moustache-twirling villains” but
“people like you and me”. Still, most colleagues, even if they felt doubts,
would not complain, having seen the fate of previous whistleblowers, who
ended up vilified and “pulled out of the shower at gunpoint, naked, in front of
their families. We all have mortgages. We all have families.”
As
the leaden skies darken beyond the net curtains, Snowden breaks to order a bowl
of ice-cream (chocolate, vanilla and strawberry sorbet). Afterwards, he warms
to his theme, explaining how he and his colleagues relied heavily on “metadata”
– the information about our locations, searches and contacts that needed no
warrants or court orders, but that betrays a huge amount about our lives. “To
an analyst, nine times out of 10, you don’t care what was said on the phone
call till very late in the investigative chain. What you care about is the
metadata, because metadata does not lie. People lie on phone calls when they’re
involved in real criminal activity. They use code words, they talk around it.
You can’t trust what you’re hearing, but you can trust the metadata. That’s the
reason metadata’s often more intrusive.”
What
about his own digital habits? He won’t use Google or Skype for anything
personal. Dropbox? He laughs. “They just put Condoleezza Rice on their board, who is
probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine. She’s one of the ones
who oversaw [the warrantless wire-tapping program] Stellar
Wind and thought it was a great idea. So they’re very hostile to privacy.”
Instead, he recommends SpiderOak, a fully encrypted end-to-end
“zero-knowledge” filesharing system.
Photograph: Alex Healey for the Guardian
Why
should we trust Google any more than we trust the state? “One, you don’t have
to. Association with Google is voluntary. But it does raise an important
question. And I would say, while there is a distinction – in that Google can’t
put you in jail, Google can’t task a drone to drop a bomb on your house – we
shouldn’t trust them without verifying what their activities are, how they’re
using our data.”
He
is extremely alarmed by the implications of the NSA and GCHQ documents, which
showed their engineers hard at work undermining the basic security of the
internet – something that has also concerned Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with
inventing the world wide web. “What people often overlook is the fact that,
when you build a back door into a communication system, that back door can be
discovered by anyone around the world. That can be a private individual or a security
researcher at a university, but it can also be a criminal group or a foreign
intelligence agency – say, the NSA’s equivalent in a deeply irresponsible
government. And now that foreign country can scrutinise not just your bank
records, but your private communications all around the internet.”
The
problem with the current system of political oversight is twofold, he says.
First, the politicians and the security services are too close: no politician
wants to defy intelligence chiefs who warn of the potential consequences of
being seen to be “weak”. And then there’s the problem that, in most societies,
the job of monitoring the security agencies goes to the most senior politicians
or, in the UK, retired judges – most of whom, he believes, do not have the
technical literacy to understand what it is they should be looking for, or
regulating.
“What
last year’s revelations showed us was irrefutable evidence that unencrypted
communications on the internet are no longer safe. Any communications should be
encrypted by default.” This has big implications for anyone using email, text,
cloud computing – or Skype, or phones, to communicate in circumstances where
they have a professional duty of confidentiality. “The work of journalism has
become immeasurably harder. Journalists have to be particularly conscious about
any sort of network signalling; any sort of connection; any sort of licence
plate-reading device that they pass on their way to a meeting point; any place
they use their credit card; any place they take their phone; any email contact
they have with the source. Because that very first contact, before encrypted
communications are established, is enough to give it all away.” To journalists,
he would add “lawyers, doctors, investigators, possibly even accountants.
Anyone who has an obligation to protect the privacy of their clients is facing
a new and challenging world.”
But
ask Snowden if technology is compatible with privacy, and he answers with an
unequivocal “absolutely”, mainly because he believes that technology itself
will come up with the solutions.
“The
question is, why are private details that are transmitted online any different
from the details of our lives that are stored in our private journals? There
shouldn’t be this distinction between digital and printed information. But the
US government, and many other countries, are increasingly seeking to make that
distinction.”
Snowden
is not against targeted surveillance. But he returns to the philosophical,
ethical, legal and constitutional objections to security agencies routinely
seizing digital material from innocent people, when they would not dream of
entering their houses to plant spy cameras, or walk off with personal diaries
and photographs. If these things are wrong in analogue life, why not in our
digital lives? And where, he asks repeatedly, is the evidence that it is
cost-effective? Or even effective?
Surely
he would concede there are occasions when it is of benefit to police or
intelligence agencies to be able to trawl collected records after a crime or
terrorist event has taken place? He concedes there are “hypotheticals” in which
such a capability might have its uses, but he counters with questions of
proportionality. America is not at war; terrorism should be treated as a
criminal problem. He might personally draw the line in a different place in the
event of a war, but, in any event, this is something that should be determined
by democratic discussion.
“You
have a tremendous population of young military enlisted individuals [in the NSA]
who may not have had the number of life experiences, to have felt the sense of
being violated. And if we haven’t been exposed to the dangers of having our
liberties violated, how can we expect these individuals to reasonably represent
our interests?”
He
cites the German Stasi as an organisation staffed by people who thought they
were “protecting the stability of their political system, which they considered
to be under threat. They were ordinary citizens like anyone else. They believed
they were doing the right thing. But when we look at them in historic terms,
what were they doing to their people? What were they doing to the countries
around them? What was the net impact of their mass, indiscriminate spying
campaigns?”
The
skies over Moscow are darkening as Snowden prepares to go. We give him a
fragment of a smashed-up hard drive, a memento of the Guardian’s tangles with
GCHQ: a year ago this weekend, senior editors destroyed computers used to store
Snowden’s documents while GCHQ representatives watched. “Wow, that is the
real deal,” he mutters as he examines the scarred circuit board. And then he
speculates – maybe only half joking, for the tradecraft never quite goes – that
it might have a tracking device in it. He says that he faces a logistical
nightmare in getting home undetected tonight. A driver is waiting for him
outside.
Will
he be watching that night’s World Cup semi-final between Holland and Argentina?
“You know, this is probably going to surprise a lot of people, but I’m not
particularly athletic. I’m not a great sports fan.”
He
wonders if we will want to shake his hand. We do. An adviser has warned him not
to be offended if visitors are anxious about a photograph of a handshake that
might come back to haunt them.
He
means, if it turns out Snowden really is a Russian spy?
“Right,
exactly. If you guys were running for office, then you’d be in trouble.”
And
with that he picks up his rucksack and slips out of the room, back into the
curious world of semi-anonymous exile that may be his fate for a long time to
come.
• Watch the video interview here and read an edited transcript.