Edward Snowden: 'I Already Won'-“If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public” [View all]

[kpete]

Last edited Tue Dec 24, 2013, 01:45 PM - Edit history (3)

Edward Snowden: 'I Already Won'
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/edward-snowden-i-already-won

“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

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“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he 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.”

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”


“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.”

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”


Much MORE: (very,very insightful):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html



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MORE!!!!:

Snowden also responded to the charge that he did not have the authority to do what he did, that no one elected him to make these decisions and blow the whistle.

“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts the model,” he said.
“They elected me. The overseers.”
He named the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/12/24/edward-snowden-says-his-mission-is-accomplished/

Eugene Robinson writes a piece titled Edward Snowden was the person of the year, from which I quote his penultimate paragraph:

These ongoing disclosures provide a detailed map of a shadow realm that spans the globe. We now know how technology is destroying privacy — and what steps governments and communications companies must be pressured to take in order that privacy survives.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-edward-snowden-was-the-person-of-the-year/2013/12/23/34551caa-6c13-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html?hpid=z2