Published in the January 2014 issue

Interviewed by Tom Junod, September 15, 2013

I'm definitely assuming, because you called my home phone, that this call is being monitored. I'm not saying it's being monitored in real time, but it's being stored and recorded and will be analyzed by the NSA. I mean there's just no question about that.

Even though it's sometimes difficult, and sometimes burdensome, and sometimes anxious, you have to feel grateful that you're able to do something this riveting and significant. At some point it's gonna end, so it's good to just ride it while it happens.

I'm excited to get back to something resembling normalcy.

The very first time I spoke to Edward Snowden about what he intended to do, he said the only fear he had was that he would unravel his life to bring these disclosures to the world and it would be met by apathy and indifference—that the public might say, "Yeah, I pretty much assumed that's what they were doing. I don't really care, and in the scope of what I'm worried about, that's pretty low on the list." And none of that has happened. I think Snowden, Laura Poitras, and I all agree that it has gone shockingly well compared to what we thought could go wrong.

Whenever I think something's ready to be unveiled in the world, you know, that's when it gets published.

Ultimately the reason privacy is so vital is it's the realm in which we can do all the things that are valuable as human beings. It's the place that uniquely enables us to explore limits, to test boundaries, to engage in novel and creative ways of thinking and being. Only if we feel free of the kind of judgmental eyes of others are we able to try different things out, to experiment, to evolve, to free ourselves of mores that are imposed on us or conventional orthodoxies about how we're supposed to behave and think. And that, ultimately, is what is most valuable about being human: to be able to create new ways of thinking and being.

Surveillance breeds conformity.

We were all assuming in Hong Kong that pretty much any day Snowden was gonna end up in U. S. custody and then be in prison for the next several decades, if not the rest ofhis life. And he wasn't the slightest bit bothered by it. He had decided that far worse than that was knowing he had had the ability to stand up to these things and yet stayed passively and silently by.

If you work for MSNBC or for CNN or whatever, you're basically nothing more than an employee of a large corporation, and in order to thrive in large corporations, the attitude you need is somebody who gives power what it wants rather than looking to subvert it or to be antiauthoritarian. Antiauthoritarians don't succeed in large corporations. They get expelled by them.

I think the real Obama reveres institutional authority. He believes that it might need to be a little more efficient, but he has zero interest in undermining the powerful, permanent factions that have run Washington.

There are different ways that kids who are gay take on the rejection and alienation they feel. The way I dealt with it was to say, You know what? You're imposing judgments on me and condemnations, but I don't accept them. I'm going to instead turn the light on you and see what your flaws are and impose the same judgmental standards on you.

Once I looked for the first time at the archive of documents that Snowden had given me, my partner and I had a long conversation over the telephone, like hours long, about all the things that were likely to happen in terms of my ability to live a private life. And they definitely have happened. But I live far away from the action, geographically. So when I turn off the computer, I can go out with friends here or walk my dogs on the beach—something where you're getting away from this immersed tension and remembering the parts that keep your life balanced. If I don't do that, that's when it starts getting to me.

If you're gonna challenge people in power, you have to be ready to be attacked in effective ways. That's the nature of power. If they couldn't do that to you, they wouldn't be powerful. Yeah, but I mean, of course it's not easy. Nobody likes it.

The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. That it would empower people to band together to work against oppression. That it would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn't otherwise get to know in completely free and unconstrained ways. And what has happened instead is that we face the threat that it's the exact opposite—that instead the Internet could become the most potent and odious tool of human control and oppression in human history.

Eisenhower laid out the challenge fifty years ago, right? That these institutions are becoming more powerful than democratically elected leaders. And there hasn't been somebody since who's been willing to embrace the existence of that danger, let alone take it on. The promise of the Obama candidacy was that he would make Washington work for different interests. And that's exactly what didn't happen. When people perceive that things have gone dramatically wrong enough, that's when it will happen.

Every now and then you may get a little feeling of being overwhelmed or you get kind of frustrated, but I always tell myself, "Look, when you go into journalism, this is exactly the sort of thing that you hope one day you're going to be able to do."

I suppose there will come some point in time when I feel like most or all of the documents that are in my possession that ought to be published have been published, and that most of the reporting that I think ought to be done has been done. That won't necessarily end it, because I'm sure the fallout of that reporting will continue, the public debates over things, the consequences from these revelations will endure. And I will likely play some role in debating those things and talking about them and writing about them, but in terms of the very surreal craziness that has become my life, I'm looking forward to that subsiding.

I could have written a book. I could have just sat back and not triggered any more risk for myself, or any more sort of recriminations. But, you know, the premise of what I was doing all along was that I wanted to report this story differently than the normal, unwritten rules between journalists and the U.S. government that typically govern how these things function. I wanted to be as aggressive as possible in how I reported them; I wanted them to actually make an impact.

There was this radical, palpable shift the minute that we unveiled Snowden. I remember the first two interviews I did after we unveiled him were on Morning Joe and then with Savannah Guthrie on the Today show. The tenor of those interviews was incredibly hostile. They had suddenly been able to grab on to this person that they could demonize as this lawbreaker and traitor.

We're social beings, we need interaction with other human beings, but we also crave privacy. It's why we put locks on our bedroom and bathroom doors or why we use passwords on our e-mail accounts or use anonymity on the Internet. So I think we have an instinctive understanding about why privacy is so crucial to us, but it takes some work to really ingest in a visceral way why it is as important as anything else.

Even if we're not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don't think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable.

My grandfather was sort of this renegade local politician who was on the city council, and he perceived all these injustices and ways these power factions were exercising their authority. And when he got too old to fight them, he encouraged me to run for city council so I could continue his fight, which I did when I was seventeen. So this kind of ethos was instilled in me early on, that what's most noble is to fight on behalf of those who don't have power against those who do.

I'd like to see Internet systems that are routed places other than the United States, to thwart their control. I'd like to see countries band together to raise the cost of allowing U.S. corporations and the U.S. government to construct this spying system. I'd like to see other big Internet corporations crop up that are geared toward protecting privacy rather than destroying it, to compete with the companies that don't seem to value that much. I'd like to see ongoing eyes being opened to the role of the United States in the world and what its relationship is to their countries.

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