Former presidential candidate Gary Johnson 'applauds' NSA leaker's actions, provided he didn't reveal any state secrets



Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson told MailOnline that he's 'okay with' what Edward Snowden did, as long as only the NSA's methods - and not its results - were placed in the public domain

Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who ran an unsuccessful 2012 campaign for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, is the first major political figure to side with Edward Snowden, the government contractor who exposed a massive National Security Agency data collection program.

Johnson was careful to qualify his endorsement, however, saying that it's his understanding that Snowden has claimed he revealed only the information he knew about the agency's data collection methods, and not the information that was collected.



'If what he said is true, he doesn't belong in jail, he said. 'He may not belong in government service with his employer either, but it seems that all he said is, "Here's what the machine is doing. This is the machine."

'What's the result of having the machine and operating it? We don't know. We know this massive data collection is taking place, but no one has leaked the specifics of what it collected. So I'm okay with that.'

'If he's divulged the means but not the content, then I applaud it,' Johnson concluded, 'if it turns out - and I'm paraphrasing what I read about him - that he didn't divulge any national secrets, but just the massive data gathering.'



'We need to have a national debate over this. We never had the discussion during the PATRIOT Act debate over how this all comes down and gets implemented. And here we are.'

Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, outed himself this weekend as the source for The Guardian's reports on U.S. intelligence programs. He fled to Hong Kong and is now reportedly been offered asylum in Iceland

Johnson railed against a national security system that, by one estimate, has given 1.4 million Americans the clearances necessary to see information classified as 'top secret.'

With such a large number of Americans empowered to possess information that would otherwise violate another citizen's privacy, he said, the line between the informational haves and have-nots has become arbitrary.



'1.4 million people have top secret security clearance? That just slays me,' he said. 'I ran for president, and I'm in the dark.'

' Where is there a secret when you have 1.4 million people clued in? ... L et's throw it wide open and show everyone what they can see. '

And with the NSA bending - if not breaking - the restrictions imposed by the PATRIOT Act, Johnson argued, the result of widespread secrecy in government is that constitutional guarantees have been ignored.



' I'm willing to bet that due process is out the window,' he said.

Asked if he thinks government employees who exceeded the authority of that law, in Congress or elsewhere, should be prosecuted. Johnson thought for a moment before replying, 'Yes, I do.'



Johnson, the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential candidate and the former governor of New Mexico, is the first U.S. major political figure to offer support for NSA leaker Edward Snowden

The NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, is scheduled to go online this fall. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, and the Internet records of most Americans, under a top-secret court order

'If I had been elected president,' he told MailOnline in an exclusive interview, 'this would be a lot different. This would all be more open.'

Johnson spoke broadly during the 2012 campaign about the democratization of information and the need for greater emphasis on constitutional liberties that tie government's hands. Neither Democratic nor Republican politicians, he warned, were eager to make the U.S. Constitution a priority.



'The "I told you so,"' he said Monday, 'is that Obama speaks great words when it comes to civil liberties, but the reality is anything but.'

'And with Romney, I don't think there was any doubt that he was going to carry on, or even carry it further.

'So yes, I told you so,' he continued, 'but you can forget that part of it, and let's just focus on how we ensure our constitutional rights.'

As New Mexico's governor, Johnson took a strict view of the U.S. Constitution, rejecting so many spending bills and line items - more than 200 times during his first six months in office - that he became known as 'Governor Veto'

President Barack Obama said on Friday that the NSA's PRISM project is lawful and applied judiciously. 'Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,' he said, just so-called 'metadata' including phone numbers and call duration

President Obama has emphasized in recent days that Republicans and Democrats in Congress were briefed on the NSA's PRISM project, which sought and obtained massive tranches of data from wireless phone providers and Internet companies.

Verizon Wireless, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL and other companies have participated, according to NSA documents published by The Guardian, a London newspaper, and by The Washington Post.

Obama has also reminded the public that judges appointed to serve on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts have had the opportunity to approve or deny NSA requests for more than three decades.



Johnson said he favors greater transparency, even with respect to those courts.

'I'm reading about the secretive FISA courts that supposedly are overseeing this. Let's open this all up and put some light on it,' he said.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that those courts have declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the federal government in 33 years, an approval rate of 99.97 percent.



'This is the result of the PATRIOT Act,' Johnson warned. 'This is like what everyone who said "beware" was talking about. It's happening. It's here. It's now.'