Edward Snowden said his goal was simple: to start a conversation.
The 29-year-old former NSA contractor discussed his motivations for leaking a trove of secret government documents during a face-to-face interview with the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, one of the journalists he entrusted with the materials, published on Monday.
See also: Snowden’s Leaks Finally Forced Companies to Enhance Security
"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” Snowden said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. "
The first reports on Snowden's leaked documents first began to surface in early June and have continued in a steady flow since then. Snowden revealed himself as the leaker days after The Guardian and The Washington Post published the initial reports on the NSA's bulk collection and storage of phone metadata and Internet communications.
Snowden's leaks sparked a global conversation on surveillance in a technological society. A common thread of this conversation focuses on striking a balance between security and individuals' rights to privacy.
The surveillance discussion seemed to crest last week. On Monday, a U.S. federal judge released a decision about the NSA, calling the agency's tactics "almost Orwellian" and ruling its mass data collection programs likely violate the Constitution. On Tuesday, a group of top tech industry executives from companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook met with President Barack Obama at the White House and urged him to reform the NSA's practices. On Wednesday, an independent panel commissioned by Obama to investigate the NSA released a 300-page report detailing 46 suggested changes for the agency, including ending its bulk data storage programs.
For Snowden, these conversations are the reasons he took action.
"I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” Snowden said in his interview with Gellman. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it."
Now, he's a wanted man in his home country of the United States, currently living in Russia under a one-year asylum agreement. Snowden scoffed at the notion that he broke any oaths he may have taken as an NSA employee; he said his top bosses, NSA Director Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, are more culpable.
“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”
The interview also revealed a few personal details about Snowden, including that he "lives off ramen noodles and chips." He is also something of a homebody who prefers to "sit down and think and write and talk to somebody" rather than "going out and looking at landmarks," he told Gellman.
Snowden's only fear at the time he decided to leak the documents, he told Gellman, was a general apathy toward the revelations. That certainly has not been the case.
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