14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, has been sitting on the PRISM documents nearly since the project was started.
According to Snowden, who gave an interview for The Guardian, while he didn’t vote for Barack Obama back in 2008, he believed in his promises and so he decided to wait to disclose the information he had.
“I was going to disclose it but waited because of his election,” he says, mentioning that he finally decided to go through with his plan because Obama continued the policies of his predecessor.
Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA, as well as for the NSA, says that he didn’t decide to leak the documents overnight, but that it was a decision that was taken over time.
“You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive,” Snowden remarks.
According to The Guardian, they had been in talks with Snowden for several weeks and received the documents over two weeks ago – 41 slides containing information that explains exactly what PRISM does and what the NSA achieves with the help of this project.
However, before they even agreed to publish the document, the authorities were consulted in an effort to establish if revealing this information would be a matter of national security.
In the morning before The Washington Post published its first story, Snowden announced that the police had already visited his house, which was intimidating to his family.
Now, Snowden is in Hong Kong, which he finds slightly ironic. He believes that while China does have a reputation for offering less freedom, Hong Kong is known to have a tradition of free speech.
He hopes the government there won’t deport him and that he’ll get the chance to ask for asylum in a country such as Iceland, where the government has stood up for people over Internet freedom.
However, he does not know what his future holds and he believes he will never see his home ever again or talk to his family and friends. Snowden is also afraid that the authorities will go after his family, but his belief that this information needed to reach the public is greater than his fears.
“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” the man behind the PRISM leak says.
He also mentions that he doesn’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things or in a world where everything he does and says is recorded.
Snowden was aware of the risks that came with such a disclosure, he admits. "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will."