Protecting The Public Or Invasion Of Privacy

[pdogg]

Maybe they're looking for heroes?

 

Guess it comes down to whether one values civil liberties more than public safety. 

 

 

 

The federal government has secretly taken information on foreigners overseas for years from companies like Google, Facebook and Apple in search of security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.

 

[bumblebee]

where did u find this?

[pdogg]

from today's New York Times........

 

June 6, 2013

U.S. Says It Gathers Online Data Abroad

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, EDWARD WYATT and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.

 

The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.

 

Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.

 

The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and log-ins, according to classified documents obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday afternoon.

 

In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful requests for information.

 

“It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

 

The Prism program grew out of the National Security Agency’s desire several years ago to begin addressing the agency’s need to keep up with the explosive growth of social media, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.

 

Before the disclosure of the Internet company surveillance program on Thursday, the White House and Congressional leaders defended the phone program, saying it was legal and necessary to protect national security.

 

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, told reporters aboard Air Force One that the kind of surveillance at issue “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.” He added: “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.”

 

The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program.

 

The reports came as President Obama was traveling to meet President Xi Jinping of China at an estate in Southern California, a meeting intended to address among other things complaints about Chinese cyberattacks and spying. Now that conversation will take place amid discussion of America’s own vast surveillance operations.

 

But while the administration and lawmakers who supported the telephone records program emphasized that all three branches of government had signed off on it, Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the surveillance as an infringement of fundamental individual liberties, no matter how many parts of the government approved of it.

 

“A pox on all the three houses of government,” Mr. Romero said. “On Congress, for legislating such powers, on the FISA court for being such a paper tiger and rubber stamp, and on the Obama administration for not being true to its values.”

 

Others raised concerns about whether the telephone program was effective.

 

Word of the program emerged when The Guardian posted an April order from the secret foreign intelligence court directing a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to give the N.S.A. “on an ongoing daily basis” until July logs of communications “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

 

On Thursday, Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the court order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about and supported.

 

“As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act.”

 

“Therefore, it is lawful,” she said. “It has been briefed to Congress.”

 

While refusing to confirm or to directly comment on the reported court order, Verizon, in an internal e-mail to employees, defended its release of calling information to the N.S.A. Randy Milch, an executive vice president and general counsel, wrote that “the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.”

 

Sprint and AT&T have also received demands for data from national security officials, according to people familiar with the requests. Those companies as well as T-Mobile and CenturyLink declined to say Thursday whether they were or had been under a similar court order.

 

Lawmakers and administration officials who support the phone program defended it in part by noting that it was only for “metadata” — like logs of calls sent and received — and did not involve listening in on people’s conversations.

 

The Internet company program appeared to involve eavesdropping on the contents of communications of foreigners. The senior administration official said its legal basis was the so-called FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to obtain an order from a national security court to conduct blanket surveillance of foreigners abroad without individualized warrants even if the interception takes place on American soil.

 

The law, which Congress reauthorized in late 2012, is controversial in part because Americans’ e-mails and phone calls can be swept into the database without an individualized court order when they communicate with people overseas. While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies’ servers, several of the companies — including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements.

 

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” the company said in a statement. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data.”

 

While murky questions remained about the Internet company program, the confirmation of the calling log program solved a mystery that has puzzled national security legal policy observers in Washington for years: why a handful of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee were raising cryptic alarms about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress enacted after the 9/11 attacks.

 

Section 215 made it easier for the government to obtain a secret order for business records, so long as they were deemed relevant to a national security investigation.

 

Section 215 is among the sections of the Patriot Act that have periodically come up for renewal. Since around 2009, a handful of Democratic senators briefed on the program — including Ron Wyden of Oregon — have sought to tighten that standard to require a specific nexus to terrorism before someone’s records could be obtained, while warning that the statute was being interpreted in an alarming way that they could not detail because it was classified.

 

On Thursday, Mr. Wyden confirmed that the program is what he and others have been expressing concern about. He said he hoped the disclosure would “force a real debate” about whether such “sweeping, dragnet surveillance” should be permitted — or is even effective.

 

But just as efforts by Mr. Wyden and fellow skeptics, including Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Mark Udall of Colorado, to tighten standards on whose communications logs could be obtained under the Patriot Act have repeatedly failed, their criticism was engulfed in a clamor of broad, bipartisan support for the program.

 

“If we don’t do it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, “we’re crazy.”

 

And Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in a news conference that the program helped stop a significant domestic terrorist attack in the United States in the last few years. He gave no details.

 

It has long been known that one aspect of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without court oversight involved vacuuming up communications metadata and mining the database to identify associates — called a “community of interest” — of a suspected terrorist.

 

In December 2005, The New York Times revealed the existence of elements of that program, setting off a debate about civil liberties and the rule of law. But in early 2007, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the attorney general, announced that after months of extensive negotiation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had approved “innovative” and “complex” orders bringing the surveillance programs under its authority.

 

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130607&_r=0&pagewanted=all

[rxpharm]

This has been going on for a long time - even before 9/11, but increased on a massive scale afterwards. This is similar to the installation of cc TV cameras all over London, England and in other parts of the world.

 

In reality they don't listen to every individual conversation - they have program that looks for certain key words - ie: plan, raid, explosives, fertilizer, etc. If those words show up then it will trip a flag for further monitoring.

 

If you don't involve these key words in your conversation, nothing will happen. To avoid problems it's best not even to joke about such matters on the phone.

[pdogg]

June 7, 2013

Obama Calls Surveillance Programs Legal and Limited

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, EDWARD WYATT, PETER BAKER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday offered a robust defense of the government surveillance programs revealed this week, and sought to reassure the public that his administration has not become a Big Brother with eyes and ears throughout the world of online communications.

 

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said, delivering a 14-minute answer to two questions about the surveillance programs during a four-day trip to the West Coast at an event that was initially supposed to be devoted to the health care law. “That’s not what this program is about.”

 

The president’s remarks were his first since the revelations this week of programs to collect information about phone calls and Internet traffic. Mr. Obama said the programs help prevent terrorist attacks and they are kept in check by rigorous judicial and Congressional oversight.

 

He acknowledged that the public may be uncomfortable with the broad reach of the formerly secret programs, but he said he believed the government had struck the right balance between the need to fight terrorism and the need to protect privacy.

 

“You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Mr. Obama said, repeatedly stressing that the lawmakers from both parties and federal judges were aware of the efforts. “You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

 

But the disclosure of the programs, which involve some of the nation’s biggest technology and communications firms — including Google, Apple and Verizon — seemed likely to prompt a vigorous discussion among policy makers and Internet consumers about the expectations for privacy and security in an increasingly connected and online world.

 

Earlier Friday, lawmakers in Washington, many of whom have been privately briefed on the secret surveillance efforts for years, sought to balance their public expressions of concern about the impact on privacy with the need to combat national security threats. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who often votes with Democrats, said Friday morning that there needed to be a discussion about that balance.

 

“People ought to have at least a general idea of what’s going on,” Mr. King said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “It’s unfortunate that it has to come out in the form of leaks. The question is where’s the appropriate balance?”

 

He added: “It makes me nervous that all those phone records are in the possession of the National Security Agency.”

 

Under the classified program revealed Thursday, the federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats. The revelation came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States.

 

Dennis C. Blair, who served as Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said Friday that there was little debate at the beginning of the Obama administration about whether to continue the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet surveillance programs that began under President Bush.

 

“In 2006 and 2007, everything was put under a legal basis. That looked pretty good to us, so we continued it,” Mr. Blair said in an interview with The New York Times. He said that the agency’s relationships with Internet companies have been especially valuable, given the volume of global communications that are now done strictly in cyberspace.

 

“As the Internet has become the way people communicate, that’s the way we gather intelligence,” he said.

 

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement late Thursday night that the classified program to collect information from Internet providers is used to “protect our nation from a wide variety of threats” and he condemned the leaks of documents describing its existence.

 

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans,” Mr. Clapper said. In a separate statement, he warned about the negative impact from the leak of a secret court order authorizing the collection of phone records. The release of the four-page order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court “threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Mr. Clapper said in the statement.

 

The disclosure of the extent of United States surveillance caused outrage on Friday among civil liberties and privacy groups in Europe, where data protection has become a hot-button issue. The possibility that the online communications of European citizens could have been caught up in the N.S.A. data sweep, because of their use of American Internet services, caused particular anxiety.

 

“Mass surveillance is never justified,” said Kirsty Hughes, chief executive of Index on Censorship, a group based in London. “Democracies should be standing up for digital freedom at a time when it is under threat from countries like China and Iran, not undermining it.”

 

Official reaction from European capitals was more subdued — perhaps partly, analysts said, because many governments would like similar powers to monitor Internet communications.

 

In Turkey, where antigovernment protests have been raging for more than a week, partly because of complaints about a lack of civil liberties and heavy-handed government, the revelations also touched a nerve.

 

“If the U.S. complains about foreign governments spying and then it turns out it is doing the same thing — well, what are you complaining about?” said Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University.

 

Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration.

 

Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.

 

The Internet surveillance program collects data from online providers including e-mail, chat services, videos, photos, stored data, file transfers, video conferencing and logins, according to classified documents obtained and posted by The Washington Post and then The Guardian on Thursday afternoon.

 

In confirming its existence, officials said that the program, called Prism, is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and maintained that it minimizes the collection and retention of information “incidentally acquired” about Americans and permanent residents. Several of the Internet companies said they did not allow the government open-ended access to their servers but complied with specific lawful requests for information.

 

“It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” Mr. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement, describing the law underlying the program. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

 

The dual revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations. Both were reported by The Guardian, while The Post, relying upon the same presentation, almost simultaneously reported the Internet company tapping. The Post said a disenchanted intelligence official provided it with the documents to expose government overreach.

 

The Guardian and The Post posted several slides from the 41-page presentation about the Internet program, listing the companies involved — which included Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube — and the dates they joined the program, as well as listing the types of information collected under the program.

 

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Weisman and James Risen from Washington; Brian X. Chen from New York; Vindu Goel, Claire Cain Miller, Nicole Perlroth, Somini Sengupta and Michael S. Schmidt from San Francisco; Nick Wingfield from Seattle; James Kanter from Brussels and Eric Pfanner from Serraval, France.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/national-security-agency-surveillance/

[strocube]

This shit is so fucked up. Der Homeland now has total access to ALL electronic communication. That means cell phones, computers, all of it. There is no hiding from Uncle Homeland.

Too lazy to post links. If you cruise the tubes, you will find plenty.

[deepthroat]

I'm with you Stro. That's just further confirmation of my I'm such a privacy phreak - but it's really for nought as they know everything anyway and can find out  anything they want without even having to ask.

 

Right wing wackos (you know who you are!) supported this shit as a result of 9/11 but there were a number of us out on the "LUNATIC FRINGE" (their words, not mine) that shouted to anyone that would listen that in our rush to safety we were giving up civil liberties that - once taken - are nearly impossible to get back.

 

People are being "frightened" into giving up everything that freedom is about, in the name of remaining safe. Countries like Canada are now far more "free" than their buddy to the south.

[strocube]

Agreed, DT.

Unfortunately, Canada is now suffering creeping fascism courtesy of it's southern neighbor.

The current Harper regime is pretty bad for them in all kinds of ways. Still not as bad as Der Homeland, but getting worse all the time.

[strocube]

Hope you guys find this as intersting as I did.

http://disinfo.com/2013/06/a-prism-of-uncertainty-my-story-and-im-sticking-to-it/

A PRISM of Uncertainty: My Story And I’m Sticking To It.

by James Curcio on June 9, 2013 in News

From Modern Mythology: 

As anyone that hasn’t been under a rock for the past week knows, this “PRISM thing” has blown up all over the internet. Which is a good thing — privacy is something that people should be concerned about, and discuss.

Take a look at some of the other information that came to light in the past few days:

The fictional journalistic “this may or may not be true”:

The following article should be treated as strictly hypothetical. It has been editorialized to simplify the content in certain areas, while maintaining as much technical detail as we can offer. Companies named in this article have been publicly disclosed, or used in example only. This piece should not be taken necessarily as fact but as a working theory that portrays only one possible implementation of the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program as it may exist today. Several ZDNet writers contributed to this report. –Zdnet article.

The deniers: 

Slides obtained by the two newspapers say that the program was established in 2007 and that seven of the largest Internet communication companies “participate knowingly” in providing NSA direct access to their central servers.

If true, this would mean that NSA had full access to many messages sent using applications run by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, and Apple. (The documents also separately list YouTube and Skype, subsidiaries of Google and Microsoft, respectively.) The unprecedented access would give the government audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs for potentially billions of users.

But could the revelations be a carefully constructed hoax? There are several indicators that the PRISM reports may not be entirely accurate… –Business Insiders.

More deniers: 

Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants’ servers.

The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on “legally-compelled collection” but operates with the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency. Guardian Article.

The middle ground:

PRISM’S SCOPE MAY BE SMALLER THAN FEARED

Over the last day, tech executives including Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg outlined that they did not give bulk or blanket access to user data. However, they may not have been able to discuss the exact volume of the legal demands for data they’ve received. That left the exact scope of how many people had data pulled by NSA open for wide interpretation, and many including myself, in some cases assumed the worst — that while not at the volume of the massive request for data on all Verizon users that’s been reported, huge numbers of people may have been spied on.

However, in the last year, there were only 1,865 FISA requests for data. Some believe those requests could include data pulls as broad as anyone who searched a specific term. Legal experts I’ve consulted, though, believe the requests must be more narrow than that for the tech companies to have not pushed back. That means the the number of people monitored by PRISM may have been in the thousands or tens of thousands, rather than in the tens or even hundreds of millions. –Techcrunch Article.

And, of course, the conspiracy theorists:

PRISM the new Nazi party. Just confirmed!!! BE CAREFUL! They know what you’re doing! –Godlike Productions thread.

Of course, hundreds of other examples could be found. The point isn’t the particular articles but rather the incredible spread of contradictory information, misinformation, and disinformation. Pretty hard to make an entirely coherent story out of all these divergent pieces, right?

Yet, far before anyone could possibly have an absolutely iron-tight, certain conviction of what the hell is going on here, most people have already made up their minds. They’ve made up their minds with such certainty that anyone that sees it otherwise must be insane! There is a reason for this, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Narrative is everywhere. Or rather, we see it everywhere. Of course, we hope to have those expectations confounded. It is in the melody to a catchy blues riff — playing an assortment of notes enough times for you to expect it a fourth time, and then going down rather than up. Confound them, yes, but only within a certain framework. When artists such as Schoenberg or Cage tried to show our mythic impulse back to us, or even do away with that impulse altogether, many listeners rebelled. The same is what we look for in our fiction — different, but not too different — and it is also what we look for when we try to attempt to interpret the real world.

You see, when we test reality, we simultaneously build stories around that testing. We collect little pieces of information and piece them together. In a sense the metaphor of a puzzle and puzzle pieces would be altogether too apt, if somehow a puzzle could be freeform and shift around on the fly.

This is not idle speculation. As we discussed in the introductory article for Modern Mythology, this mythic impulse — or narrative impulse, if you prefer — is built into our brains. It is a big part of how we come to understand the world. This is also the reason why the best way to teach children is often through stories. Our minds are designed to work with them, and to fill in the missing pieces.

As we’ve discussed before, this is how optical “illusions” work. More accurately, the visual world we build in our heads is itself entirely illusory — flipped around, taken apart and pieced back together. Yet again we see this same tendency, now in the visual rather than auditory modality. This is not idle philosophical speculation. It is as close to fact as we can come, and therein lies the problem.

There is simply too much contradictory information out there, and too much chaos that needs to be filtered out as unimportant to our aim. For these systems to work on the fly, we have to graft in a schema ahead of time.

In other words, to go back to the puzzle metaphor, we need to imagine what the completed puzzle is going to look like so that we can understand how the pieces might fit together.  If your reality tunnel is based around distrust of authority, then you have one puzzle to cram the pieces into. If your reality tunnel is based around the opposite, or something in between — you get the point.

This is well and good for many purposes, but it is wreaking a lot of ideological havoc in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Everyone else seems insane because they aren’t trying to build the same puzzle that you are.

This isn’t to say that everything is an opinion, or that if I think a baseball is a cloud that you can’t wing it into my skull. The issue being discussed is how we make sense of the puzzle pieces (mythic fragments) that we’re given. It is not a question of the “ultimate reality” of the myth, nor what it represents.

As Robert Anton Wilson once famously said, “what the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” Still later, he used the metaphor of reality tunnels:

“When we begin to realize that we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels we find it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from or the ones who don’t have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant or deliberately perverse or lying or hypnotized by some mad ideology. They just have a different reality tunnel and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world if we’re willing to listen.”

[strocube]

You guys gotta check this out, seriously.

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

Sunday 9 June 2013 16.17 EDT

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows

• Q&A with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again'

Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Despite his determination to be publicly unveiled, he repeatedly insisted that he wants to avoid the media spotlight. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing."

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. "I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me."

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. "I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in." He added: "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

'I am not afraid, because this is the choice I've made'

Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week's series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose.

He then advised his NSA supervisor that he needed to be away from work for "a couple of weeks" in order to receive treatment for epilepsy, a condition he learned he suffers from after a series of seizures last year.

As he packed his bags, he told his girlfriend that he had to be away for a few weeks, though he said he was vague about the reason. "That is not an uncommon occurrence for someone who has spent the last decade working in the intelligence world."

On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent", and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government.

In the three weeks since he arrived, he has been ensconced in a hotel room. "I've left the room maybe a total of three times during my entire stay," he said. It is a plush hotel and, what with eating meals in his room too, he has run up big bills.

He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.

Though that may sound like paranoia to some, Snowden has good reason for such fears. He worked in the US intelligence world for almost a decade. He knows that the biggest and most secretive surveillance organisation in America, the NSA, along with the most powerful government on the planet, is looking for him.

Since the disclosures began to emerge, he has watched television and monitored the internet, hearing all the threats and vows of prosecution emanating from Washington.

And he knows only too well the sophisticated technology available to them and how easy it will be for them to find him. The NSA police and other law enforcement officers have twice visited his home in Hawaii and already contacted his girlfriend, though he believes that may have been prompted by his absence from work, and not because of suspicions of any connection to the leaks.

"All my options are bad," he said. The US could begin extradition proceedings against him, a potentially problematic, lengthy and unpredictable course for Washington. Or the Chinese government might whisk him away for questioning, viewing him as a useful source of information. Or he might end up being grabbed and bundled into a plane bound for US territory.

"Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets," he said.

"We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

The only time he became emotional during the many hours of interviews was when he pondered the impact his choices would have on his family, many of whom work for the US government. "The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won't be able to help any more. That's what keeps me up at night," he said, his eyes welling up with tears.

'You can't wait around for someone else to act'

Snowden did not always believe the US government posed a threat to his political values. He was brought up originally in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His family moved later to Maryland, near the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade.

By his own admission, he was not a stellar student. In order to get the credits necessary to obtain a high school diploma, he attended a community college in Maryland, studying computing, but never completed the coursework. (He later obtained his GED.)

In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression".

He recounted how his beliefs about the war's purpose were quickly dispelled. "Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone," he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged.

After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency's covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.

By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.

That access, along with the almost three years he spent around CIA officers, led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw.

He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment.

"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he says. "I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."

He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons.

First, he said: "Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone". Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.

He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."

The primary lesson from this experience was that "you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act."

Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

He described how he once viewed the internet as "the most important invention in all of human history". As an adolescent, he spent days at a time "speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own".

But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. "I don't see myself as a hero," he said, "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.

A matter of principle

As strong as those beliefs are, there still remains the question: why did he do it? Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? "There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich."

For him, it is a matter of principle. "The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to," he said.

His allegiance to internet freedom is reflected in the stickers on his laptop: "I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation," reads one. Another hails the online organisation offering anonymity, the Tor Project.

Asked by reporters to establish his authenticity to ensure he is not some fantasist, he laid bare, without hesitation, his personal details, from his social security number to his CIA ID and his expired diplomatic passport. There is no shiftiness. Ask him about anything in his personal life and he will answer.

He is quiet, smart, easy-going and self-effacing. A master on computers, he seemed happiest when talking about the technical side of surveillance, at a level of detail comprehensible probably only to fellow communication specialists. But he showed intense passion when talking about the value of privacy and how he felt it was being steadily eroded by the behaviour of the intelligence services.

His manner was calm and relaxed but he has been understandably twitchy since he went into hiding, waiting for the knock on the hotel door. A fire alarm goes off. "That has not happened before," he said, betraying anxiety wondering if was real, a test or a CIA ploy to get him out onto the street.

Strewn about the side of his bed are his suitcase, a plate with the remains of room-service breakfast, and a copy of Angler, the biography of former vice-president Dick Cheney.

Ever since last week's news stories began to appear in the Guardian, Snowden has vigilantly watched TV and read the internet to see the effects of his choices. He seemed satisfied that the debate he longed to provoke was finally taking place.

He lay, propped up against pillows, watching CNN's Wolf Blitzer ask a discussion panel about government intrusion if they had any idea who the leaker was. From 8,000 miles away, the leaker looked on impassively, not even indulging in a wry smile.

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden's leaks began to make news.

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

As for his future, he is vague. He hoped the publicity the leaks have generated will offer him some protection, making it "harder for them to get dirty".

He views his best hope as the possibility of asylum, with Iceland – with its reputation of a champion of internet freedom – at the top of his list. He knows that may prove a wish unfulfilled.

But after the intense political controversy he has already created with just the first week's haul of stories, "I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets."

[seven]

This is huge over here in Europe.

I´m not surprised Usa do this though.

[360]

This is the original video shot by the Guardian journalists interviewing Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. It's 12min long and definitely worth watching