While reporting my Wall Street Journal article about NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, I posed some questions to Edward Snowden. Here is our exchange, which was fielded by his legal counsel, Ben Wizner at the ACLU:
Q: In a June Q&A with the Guardian, you were asked about the treatment of Binney and Drake, and you replied “these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers.” Can you elaborate on what you learned from the treatment of Binney and how it has informed your actions?
Snowden: I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for highlighting how the Intelligence Community punishes reporting abuses within the system. If you stay quiet and keep your eyes forward, you’ll be taken care of, even if you lie to Congress. If you buck the system, you find armed agents in your bathroom.
Q: One of the points that Binney makes is that not only is dragnet surveillance harmful to civil liberties, but it also overwhelms the NSA analysts who have to sift through it, weakening our intelligence apparatus. Do you agree with that argument?
Snowden: I do. Mass surveillance causes us to miss events like the Boston Bombings because analysts are distracted by low-effort analysis of endless and unfocused chatter rather than the focused, targeted investigation of things like tipoffs from partners. When your working process every morning starts with poking around a haystack of 7 billion innocent lives, you’re going to miss things like that. We’re blinding our people with data we don’t need and it puts us at risk.
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