0 program. >> he's a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the cia. >> then he goes over to work for this contractor for the nsa. >> he landed this job make over $200,000. >> are his motives pure? i have no idea. >> he says he did it because the public needs to know what's going on. >> big breaking news today. >> i certainly wasn't shocked by it. >> big break news about something we've known for like seven years. >> is this guy a criminal or is he a whistleblower? >> he's not a whistleblower. >> do you think has credibility as a whistleblower? >> you don't break the law, steal documents, and then make a run for the border. >> i can tell you this. these programs are within the law. >> aren't all the programs that have been revealed legal? >> the damage these revelations incur are huge. >> this is u.s. policy. you may disagree with it. >> i'm no different from anybody else. i'm just another guy. >> the law was broken by one person, who is mr. snowden. >> snowden's treatment may rest on public perception. unfortunately, it isn't. when he first contacted me back in february, the first thing that he insisted that i do was to install extremely sophisticated encryption technology that would allow us to communicate by e-mail and online chat. one of the very few ways that makes it difficult for the nsa to intervene in communications. you have to have a very high level of sophistication to be able to do that. something that i don't have. and it actually delayed for quite some time our ability to communicate. so if you go to extreme lengths that the world's greatest programmers and cryptologist experts have in order to install and figure out how to do programming, maybe you can stay a step ahead of the nsa for some time. but anyone who isn't doing that is going to have their communications monitored and stored. and that's the only way that he would end up talking to me and did end up talking to me. >> what about the nsa's hiring and contracting practices? clearly, they would not have wanted snowden working for them if they knew then what they know now about him. and obviously, they're not really screening who gets to work close to this material very closely. >> well, i mean, i'm not so sure that's true. if you look at his history, i mean, he's exactly the kind of person that you would want working for you if you're in the intelligence community. the first thing that he did after he got out of -- he actually didn't complete high school but would have completed high school. was he enlisted in army training to join the special forces to go fight in the iraq war because he thought that war was so noble. and he was quickly disabused of that belief, but he then went to work for the nsa and the cia after that. he had devoted himself to serving his country. and it was only over time when he began to realize just how pervasive the surveillance state is, how secretive it is, how without accountability it is. did he gradually start having his eyes open about what this national security apparatus really does and felt compelled to step forward and do something about it. but that is the key. when you have this sprawling system and there are 20,000 employees at the nsa but many other tens of thousands working for private contractors, collecting enormous amounts of data, it's an unaccountable, uncontrollable system. you're going to give access to huge numbers of people to the most sensitive communications data and other forms of information about people. there's no way to prevent abuse. that's one of the lessons here. >> and he's kind of low level. i'm reading what he told you about what he did there. every one of his titles, glenn, is simply a technical -- he's an i.t. guy. he says he's a systems engineer. then he was a systems administrator. senior adviser for solutions. and a telecommunications information systems officer. but at the same time, at the same time as giving you a bio that's basically an i.t. guy, he claimed to have very powerful authority. let's listen to what authority he claimed he had. >> i sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if i had a personal e-mail. >> now, glenn, he does not mean, does he, that he had the legal authority to do that. he is simply saying because i had i.t. access i could get into anything i wanted to get into, much like, say, people working in the irs used to be able to just look at your tax return if they felt like it even though they were not authorized to do it, the irs has since controlled that. but he's not saying he in any way could legally possibly been given that authority by anyone at the nsa to look at president obama's e-mail? >> precisely, lawrence. and you're making the important point. it's the point that he's making. it's the point that he wants everyone to understand. which is that even though he is a relatively low-level, not even an employee of the nsa, private contractor, he has been given -- by authority he means he's authorized to access these data bases and these technologies. and that there are tens of thousands of people in the nsa who are not accountable, who are authorized to do the same. everyone should go right now who's listening, go onto google and google 2008 abc news nsa abuse. and you will find stories there about low-level nsa analysts who abused these technologies to listen in on the conversations that soldiers were having with their girlfriends, that people they knew were having with one another internationally. it is a system that is begging for abuse because it's all in secrecy. we don't really know what it is that it's doing. but his point is that this apparatus is sucking up every communication, every telephone call, every e-mail so that at any time any of these people at these terminals can go in and invade these conversations because it doesn't have sufficient oversight and it's ie ubiquitous, the surveillance it's doing. >> but glenn-i don't think we can attack a systems mission because someone working in that system like snowden is willing to actually violate the rules of the system. for example, my bank. there are people working at my bank who can go and look at exactly what's going on in every one of my bank accounts whenever they feel like it because they just saw me on tv and they said i wonder how much money he has in check. they can go do that. they're not supposed to. it doesn't mean that my bank is a bad bank because someone working there violates the rules. same thing with everything else that private companies -- like gmail, for example, anybody working at the e-mail facilities at google, all these places, they can go look at the people's e-mail who are writing those e-mail if they want to, if they want to break the rules and do that. >> right. well, first of all, he didn't actually break the rules. he didn't say that he has gone in and invaded other people's communications that he shouldn't have been looking. he was making the point that he had the ability to do so as a way of warning us. but i think that your question raises the important point. look, we have to have a banking system. we have to have e-mail. we don't have to have a government that is collecting all of this information about us. this is a choice that we have as citizens about whether we want the government to be doing this. we have a history in this country that we can look to. go and look at the church committee report of the mid 1970s, with which i know you're obviously familiar. and what it found is when you empower politicians and law enforcement officials to gather massive amounts of information about people and don't provide sufficient transparency and oversight to how they're using it they will abuse it. it's j. edgar hoover's fbi followed martin luther king around, read his mail, listened to his conversations, found out about what they thought were adulterous relationships and tried to use it to discredit him and even encourage him to commit suicide. what he's trying to say is we should be debating whether we want to have a government that is in the business of collecting huge amounts of extremely invasive information about not terrorists or people suspected of wrongdoing but all americans. and think about the potential for abuse that has, the inevitability of abuse that has. and even if you're right, lawrence, at the end of the day we decide we do want, that at the very least we should have way more transparency and checks and accountability on how this is done and what is being done, which is the reason that we decided to write these stories, so that we could start a debate and make americans aware of what this apparatus is actually doing. >> yeah, i mean, glenn, my feeling so far is in everything i -- and i've been slow to react to it because i want to take in as much as possible. but so far i'm not scared. so far i haven't heard a single thing about what the government has collected on me that isn't also collected by a bunch of private companies. and the fact that the government is collecting it at such a gigantic massive level means that it's even harder for the government to find me in this giant amount of data that they have. and they have absolutely no incentive to find me. and so i at this stage feel completely unthreatened by this. i understand every point you're making on principle. i get the principle. and my reaction to it in the practice is i am at this point unthreatened by it. but glenn, one more thing before we go here. you have said that there are people who tried to sue the nsa and their suits were dismissed because they didn't have standing. and based on some things i've heard you say in the last 24 hours, i'm starting to think that one of the next things you have coming out is you're going to release the names of people that the nsa has specifically been looking at so that they actually can have standing to go to court and sue. >> we would not ever publish the names of people that the nsa has spied upon because one of two things could happen. either they are actually guilty of doing bad things, in which case you tip them off to the fact they're being surveilled or they're actually innocent of all wrong doing and then you make it seem as if they're guilty by publishing their names. so we're not going to be doing that. but the fact that there are these names out there means that they do have evidence to show they have been surveilled and therefore can sue. >> well, glenn, i have the feeling you are going to be breaking more news. this is not the last night of breaking news with glenn greenwald, is it? >> you're correct about that, lawrence. there are certainly lots more stories that need to be covered, and we intend to cover them aggressively. >> all right. come back with it on your next one. glenn, thank you very much for joining me tonight. coming up -- david axelrod will be next. i'm the next american 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