Snowden Loves America, Not Its Government; Says He’s Unwilling to Live Under Constant Surveillance
Photo Credit: The Guardian The Guardian released the second part of Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong. In it Snowden, made it clear that he loved America but hated what its government has become. He also predicted that the feds would ultimately accuse him of espionage. Here are excerpts of that interview:
“I think they are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems. But this argument can be made against anyone who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems,” he said.
Asked whether he had sought a career in the intelligence community specifically to become a mole and reveal secrets, Snowden, 30, said he had joined government service very young, first enlisting in the US army immediately after the invasion of Iraq out of a belief in “the goodness of what we were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.”
But his views shifted over the length of his career as he watched the news, which he saw as propaganda, not truth. “We were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the American public, in order to create certain mindset in the global consciousness and I was actually a victim of that.”
He had not fallen out of love with America, only its government. “America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”
In the new excerpts, he explained his motivation for revealing the information. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,” he said. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”
