BERLIN, September 18. /TASS/. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Russia after exposing a mass surveillance scheme of the US government, said in a video linkup broadcast by Germany's Zeit Online he had to make a choice between honoring either a non-disclosure agreement or his oath to defend the US constitution.
During a video linkup to coincide with the release of his book, Permanent Record, Snowden said he is often being portrayed as a person who broke his oath of service.
"We do have a very dramatic oath of service. And this is what I did on my first day - I swore allegiance, or loyalty not to the CIA, not to the intelligence community, not even to the government of the United States," he said. "I swore to support and defend the constitution of the United States."
On the other hand, Snowden said, he made a non-disclosure commitment by signing a document called ‘Standard Form 312.’
"So this was really the scene that set the stage for what had become the biggest conflict of my life: <…> you have a secrecy agreement and at the same time you have an oath to defend the constitution. And the secret that you have to protect is that the government is violating this constitution."
Snowden stressed that he does not believe that his case in the United States will be heard in a fair trial.
"The laws, under which I’ve been charged in the United States, are a special kind of law, very unusual law, it’s called ‘a strict liability crime.’ A strict liability crime means that jury is forbidden from hearing why you did what you did. They are forbidden from discussing whether it was good or whether it’s bad. They are forbidden from listening you motivations in any way. You are not allowed even to mention it in court. The only thing the jury is allowed to hear is the arguments as to whether the information was provided to someone who is not authorized to see it," he said.
"If you give this information to journalists, regardless of whether the government was breaking the law or not, regardless of whether these illegal actions were stopped afterwards, regardless of reforms that came, regardless of whether it was good or bad for society - the jury cannot consider it," Snowden continued.
"When we are talking about crimes by the government being the impetus for revealing information to journalists, you cannot have a fair trial, if the jury cannot consider the question of whether the disclosure was justified or unjustified," he added.
Dangers of gadgets
During the video linkup, Snowden warned about dangerous consequences of the practice to collect citizens’ private data with the help of mobile devices.
"When we talk about data, when we talk about data collection, when we talk about the exploitation of data, when we talk about the abuse of data, it all sounds very abstract to non-experts," he said.
"Everywhere you go, everything you do, every conversation that you have, everything you buy, everything that you read is producing records. The history of your phone is the history of your intellectual life. When we talk about data, what are we talking about? It is the memory that you cherish the most, the people that you care about the most, it’s the secrets that embarrass you the most, any ideas that you got, that belong only to you… our data is in a real way us," he continued. "What is being exploited is not data, it is people."
According to him, phones gather information about us in a way that is hard to notice.
"It is the very invisibility of this, it is the knowing concealment of this information that is leading to the construction of what I describe in the book as our permanent record," he said. "It’s the construction of perfect records of private lives. They are using it today to make money, they are using it to change behaviors, to sham votes, and in some cases, unfortunately, but in a very real case, they are using it to end lives."
Snowden's case
In June 2013, Snowden leaked classified information to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, which revealed global surveillance programs run by US and British intelligence agencies. He explained the move by saying that he wanted to tell the world the truth because he believed such large-scale surveillance on innocent citizens was unacceptable and the public needed to know about it.
After leaking classified information, Snowden flew to Hong Kong and then to Moscow, arriving in Russia on June 23, 2013. He applied for political asylum to more than 20 countries while staying in the transit zone at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
On July 16, he applied for a temporary asylum in Russia, accepting Moscow’s condition to refrain from activities aimed against the US. On August 1, 2013, Snowden was granted a one-year temporary asylum. On August 1, 2014, he received a three-year residence permit, which was later extended until 2020. In July 2018, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the possibility of Snowden’s extradition to Washington in an interview with the RT TV channel.
The NSA and the Pentagon claim that Snowden stole about 1.7 mln classified documents concerning the activities of US intelligence services and US military operations. He is charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. He is facing up to ten years in prison on each charge.