Snowden to Critics: Questioning Putin Has Opened Conversation About Surveillance

The Guardian carries Edward Snowden's detailed rebuttal to critics who say that his recent live-TV interaction with Vladimir Putin, in which Snowden asked whether the Russian government was engaged in spying on Russian citizens' communications, was a scripted moment intended to curry or maintain favor with Putin. After all, Snowden is currently living in Russia, where he has been granted only temporary harbor, goes this argument, so he is at the mercy of the Russian government, and has just gamely thrown Putin a softball. (Slashdot reader Rambo Tribble said the exchange had a "canned quality," a sentiment widely echoed.) Snowden writes that, far from being a whitewash of actual policies by the Russian government, his question ("Does [your country] intercept, analyse or store millions of individuals' communications?") "was intended to mirror the now infamous exchange in US Senate intelligence committee hearings between senator Ron Wyden and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, about whether the NSA collected records on millions of Americans, and to invite either an important concession or a clear evasion"; he decribes Putin's answer as a combination of inconsistent denial and evasion. Snowden writes: "I blew the whistle on the NSA's surveillance practices not because I believed that the United States was uniquely at fault, but because I believe that mass surveillance of innocents – the construction of enormous, state-run surveillance time machines that can turn back the clock on the most intimate details of our lives – is a threat to all people, everywhere, no matter who runs them. Last year, I risked family, life, and freedom to help initiate a global debate that even Obama himself conceded 'will make our nation stronger.' I am no more willing to trade my principles for privilege today than I was then. I understand the concerns of critics, but there is a more obvious explanation for my question than a secret desire to defend the kind of policies I sacrificed a comfortable life to challenge: if we are to test the truth of officials' claims, we must first give them an opportunity to make those claims."

Comments

Re:Dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way there can be such a conversation is if people try to start it.
If you have a better idea, feel free to go to Russia and try out your idea.
Frankly, I don't think you are even one tenth as brave as Snowden who has now deliberately and explicitly "bit the hand that feeds him" in public.

Re:Dumbass

[mi]

Imagine for a minute, an associate of Alan Turing escaping Bletchely Park in 1944 with files recording the facility's activity — and with details of its capability to decrypt Enigma traffic.

He is outraged about the government's attempts — often successful — to intercept other people messages (some intercepts leading to deaths of hundreds) and is smart enough to envision the future, where such ungentlemanly conduct will become common place. And so he goes public with the materials he took with him, holding a press-conference somewhere — say, in Switzerland.

Because none of the UK allies will have him, and he fears the Allies' long hand in neutral Switzerland, he takes refuge in Germany, where he is promptly drained of all the information he carries (in files and head)? Germans modify their encryption practices and Bletchley Park is no longer able to decode the communications.

Should the man's life not be hell after that? Or should he simply be hung for treason?

Re:Dumbass

[Maritz]

Imagine for a minute, an associate of Alan Turing escaping Bletchely Park in 1944 with files recording the facility's activity — and with details of its capability to decrypt Enigma traffic.

lol, thanks for cobbling together one of the most tortured analogies I've seen on this. Was the Enigma machine intercepting communications of millions of civilians? I'm amazed I didn't realise that.