FOCUS | Edward Snowden: 'If I Happen to Fall out of a Window, You Can Be Sure I Was Pushed'

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24 September 19
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FOCUS | Edward Snowden: 'If I Happen to Fall out of a Window, You Can Be Sure I Was Pushed'
Edward Snowden. (photo: Yuriy Chichkov/Der Spiegel)
Martin Knobbe and Jorg Schindler, Der Spiegel
Excerpt: "Book a suite in a luxury hotel in Moscow, send the room number encrypted to a pre-determined mobile number and then wait for a return message indicating a precise time: Meeting Edward Snowden is pretty much exactly how children imagine the grand game of espionage is played."

EXCEPRT:
DER SPIEGEL: Western authorities accuse the Russian government on a regular basis of being one of the biggest disrupters in the digital world. Are they right?
Snowden: Russia is responsible for a lot of negative activity in the world, you can say that right and fairly. Did Russia interfere with elections? Almost certainly. But do the United States interfere in elections? Of course. They've been doing it for the last 50 years. Any country bigger than Iceland is going to interfere in every crucial election, and they're going to deny it every time, because this is what intelligence services do. This is explicitly why covert operations and influence divisions are created, and their purpose as an instrument of national power is to ask: How can we influence the world in a direction that improves our standing relative to all the other countries?
DER SPIEGEL: Are you demanding the abolishment of intelligence services?
Snowden: I think one of the biggest problems in the world of intelligence is the refusal to separate covert action, propaganda and influence from intelligence. We need intelligence. Intelligence reduces the likelihood of war. The problem is when these services become an institution of their own that is not responsive to the desires of lawmakers, policymakers and the public, but in fact is shaping it and directing it. They will always say: Look, if you know this or that, people will die. But it's almost never true.
DER SPIEGEL: What's the solution?
Snowden: We have to stop bulk collection. If you're watching everyone in the world all of the time just in case they become dangerous, that's really problematic, because it changes the character of society.








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