Edward Snowden has sparked a global debate on mass spying, but he is actually a “private person" who does not seek much attention, journalist Barton Gellman told RT. Snowden told Gellman that the notion of having a “suicide switch” of leaks is illogical.
Gellman, a Washington Post journalist and author of Pulitzer
Prize-winning reports, became the first reporter to interview
Snowden since the former NSA contractor was granted temporary
asylum in Russia.
Snowden - who talked with Gellman for some 14 hours in two days -
explained the reasons behind his whistleblowing, but did not
speak very much about his private life.
However, Gellman shared his own impressions of Snowden’s
personality with RT America, offering a rare insight into the
current state of mind of the “most wanted man on Earth,”
who Gellman says spends much of his time on the internet.
The journalist also revealed the precautions he had to take
before meeting with Snowden, and discussed the “dead man’s
switch” that the whistleblower has been accused of
possessing.
Watch RT America’s full interview with Barton Gellman:
RT:Why did Snowden grant you this
interview? And why now?
Barton Gellman: Well, to back up, he has not
wanted to be at the center of the story. He wants the story to be
about electronic surveillance and the limits of espionage and
democracy. So he’s kept away from the story. I spent a lot of
time trying to talk him into the idea that at the end of the
year, after half a year of this remarkable global debate, that
there needed to be a kind of summing up; what have we learned,
what does it mean. And we needed his voice in that story. And he
agreed to let me come and see him.
RT:You were with him for two days, and had
14 hours of conversation. How would you describe Edward Snowden
right now, in terms of his demeanor and his mentality?
BG: He is remarkably at peace with everything.
He’s a man under considerable pressure, I must assume, but he
doesn’t show it. He’s feeling like he did what he said “I have to
do.” When he says what he’s accomplished in his mission, what he
means is that he’s taken a very important subject out of a secret
world and handed it to the public so people can decide for
themselves where they want to draw the lines - instead of having
the lines drawn for them.
RT:In the article, you mentioned that “his
guard never dropped” during the interview. Did you get the sense
that he was constantly worrying, or concerned at all about his
future?
BG: He doesn’t project concern about his future.
What I mean by that is…his boundaries. For one thing, he is a
very private person. He understands that he is in the news, that
he has done something very newsworthy. He wants the news to be
about the policy, the subject, the documents themselves. He
doesn’t see that he’s got any obligation at all to talk about his
personal life. And he has natural security concerns. And so he
pays attention to what he says.
RT:Can you talk about how you prepared for
this trip? Did you have to leave your laptop, your cellphone?
What precautions did you have to take?
BG: I can say a little bit about that. I mean, I
did not bring anything with me that I was not prepared to have
one or another government take hold of and search or keep or
copy. So, no, I didn’t bring anything sensitive. I brought an
empty notebook computer and I brought a telephone I don’t
normally use, with none of my data on it. And, as far as I know,
these precautions were superfluous in the end, because no one
stopped me.
RT:Did Snowden have anything to say about
the current reform efforts underway on Capitol Hill?
BG: He clearly has his own views about what
ought to happen. What he most wants to make sure is that there
can be an open debate about that with full knowledge. It was all
in a secret court, it was all in a very small committee of
Congress.
We spoke just before a very big week for him that vindicated many
of his assertions. He has said all along that he believes some of
the programs at the NSA are illegal. Well, soon after we spoke, a
federal judge - the first one to consider it in open court – said
that one of the main programs of the NSA is almost certainly
“unconstitutional.”
The president’s own review board comes back with many reform
proposals. The leaders of the US technology industry come and
tell the president in person that the NSA’s actions are harming
the information economy. So he got a lot of validation in the
last working week of the year.
RT:Snowden was insistent that he would
never want to publish his leaks all at once; that that would be
“suicide switch.” Can you explain what he meant by that?
BG: He opposes [mass] publication or dumping all
the documents out. He doesn’t want me to publish everything that
I have, he wants me to use my own judgment about what is
newsworthy and what would do harm. So it’s not only that he
doesn’t want it all at once; he doesn’t necessarily want it all
published in the first place.
What he’s talking about with this “suicide” is this:
there are people who claim that he has some other cash of
material that he’s got rigged up to a dead man’s switch so that
if he doesn’t keep checking in, if something bad happens to him,
then he unleashes this whole thing on the world.
First of all, there is no evidence of that. It’s contrary to what
he says he wants. But he said, “just look at it logically, if
I’ve rigged up a dead man’s switch, I may as well ask everyone to
shoot me, because any service in the world that really wants this
stuff go public, all they have to do is get rid of me.” So
it’s illogical, he says. It’s not a dead man’s switch; it’s a
suicide switch.
RT:You mention that you have all this
material. How are you making decisions on what gets released and
when?
BG: I am reviewing material with a very small
number of trusted colleagues; I’m doing the reporting around it.
A lot of it is in the form of clues, which might be one line in
each of the 16 documents, that make me think that there is
something going on or there is something of interest. I check it
out, I talk to government officials. I talk to people in the
industry. Sometimes I’m persuaded that my idea is wrong,
sometimes I’m persuaded by [a] government that it would be a bad
idea to publish this story. But most often we find something that
we think is interesting and of public import, and in consultation
with my editors at the Post, we publish.
RT:The Guardian was threatened by the UK
government and forced to destroy the copies of the documents
leaked by Snowden on their server. Was that ever an issue for
you? How have you been able to maintain these documents and
protect them?
BG: If there had been threats or coercion used
against me or The Washington Post, you would know it. That would
be news, and we would be the first to report it. There has been
no attempt by the US government to compel us to do anything.
There have been times when they would ask us, they would try to
persuade us not to publish something. There have been times when
we agreed and times when we haven’t. We are taking very
considerable steps to keep the materials safe.