2015's FutureFest weekend featured a live video link interview with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

This transcript is the full-length version of the interview with Edward Snowden, who spoke to our FutureFest audience via Google Hangouts. Snowden set out a compelling case for why we should not sleepwalk into a mass surveillance world. He was interviewed by Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta; Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford; Breffni O’Connor, President, GUSRC and Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer and activist.

You can watch the video version of the talk, along with highlights from all of our FutureFest events, on FuturePlayer, our free on-demand content platform. Register for FuturePlayer.

Transcript of the full interview

Geoff Mulgan: Well, thank you, Edward, so much for joining us from chilly Moscow to chilly London. And I'm going to ask Luciano to kick us off with a question.

Luciano Floridi: With pleasure. We have a kind of broken marriage with our governments, at the moment. Trust is way gone. And that trust is essential for any democratic sort of interaction.

So how can we rebuild trust, especially now that trust has been lost? It's much easier to build trust when you don't have it in the first place. You just have to create a relationship. But now that trust between citizens and their governments has been so badly damaged, what do you think can be done in this respect, if anything?

Edward Snowden: It's kind of a complicated question. There's a lot of nuance to it, so it's difficult in a short answer. But it's not just a local issue, it's sort of a global issue we’re seeing.

In the United States and some of the other countries involved it's sort of a "five eyes" global spying alliance. That's the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. They've had a little bit of a more muscular public response. Now, they haven't been satisfying or really meaningful in any country yet. But they have been engaging.

They've discussed the issues, they talk about the failings, they've tried to substantiate, provide evidence of what value these programmes had that would justify them being secret, which in any case it didn't, which was a surprise not just to the public, but also to government, itself. Because there hadn't been many statistics like that. We don't really see that happening in the UK. And I think that's a real challenge.

We've seen increasingly-- I think actually I've got some references to this in my deck-- but we've seen the controversy with Malcolm Rifkin, the intel oversight apparatus in the UK, in general failed fairly comprehensively. They said initially, these things didn't happen, they weren't lawful, they couldn't be happening. And they said well, they are happening, but they're lawful in a technical sense, even if they don't comply with the spirit of that. And until we get some kind of a reconciliation, some kind of direct response, where we move from the status quo, which is sort of the secret issues that we have in the slides, that were internal to the UK government, classified at the highest level.

You probably can't see this, but what it says is, they weren't worried about the public learning about these capabilities because it would hurt our ability to follow terrorists, or because it would cost lives, but because it would cause a damaging public debate. And so what is a damaging public debate? What are they really afraid of? And what we've see is that they're afraid of us. The government doesn't want us to know what they're doing, how they're interpreting the law, how they're interpreting and redefining their powers, and increasingly, how they're redefining the boundaries of our rights and our liberties, broadly, socially, and categorically without our involvement.

And I think if we're going to restore trust, the first step is that we have to attack that. We have to get our media, we have to get our civil society, we have to get everybody in every forum to demand accountability for the use of these powers, of the expansion of these powers, and the creation of these systems without our involvement or awareness at all. That's not to say that we need to know every programme that's targeting this specific terrorist or watching Bin Laden, or something like that. Obviously a problem, but we should know at least the broad strokes of the powers that the government's claiming in our name, and using allegedly, on our behalf. And also against us as well.

Geoff Mulgan: And Edward, just to follow that up, what would be the first step from governments towards the reconciliation you just described?

Edward Snowden: I think a full accounting of what has happened. What general programmes exist. They have to stop euphemising the difference in terms.

For example, we know mass surveillance has happened. It's been admitted in the United States, and many other countries well. The UK uses the same literally NSA-provided programmes and infrastructure. All of the information is collected and shared in sort of the same silos, and the same repositories. But the UK government claims that it's not mass surveillance, it's “bulk collection”.

This kind of Orwellian redefining of language doesn't help. They have to repudiate that as sort of a matter of policy. Speaking common language, common terms, and tell us what is the truth, and then allow us to have a debate as to what kind of decisions we should make. Which direction we should go in from there.

Dame Vivienne Westwood: You gave your files to The Guardian and to Glenn Greenwald. And only a fraction of those files have been published. Would you like more of them to come out?

Edward Snowden: Absolutely. Yeah. When I provided the documentation to journalists, I'd provided it to Glen Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gelman, and Unicast. So that represented The Guardian newspaper, the US branch of that.

The UK Guardian got UK information that they've published. Der Speigel in Germany has files. The Washington Post has files. And then a result of the UK government forcing their way into The Guardian offices and literally destroying the archive that was on site at The Guardian news office in London. The New York Times got access to the files as well.

So they're fairly well distributed. We've got different organisations with different levels of conservatism versus sort of radicalism in their perspectives and their eagerness to report. I would like to see more come out, and I think that work continues today.

And we've seen just this week significant news stories being reported in the news. This month we've seen stories even about the UK's involvement attacking companies within the European Union, the Gemalto SIM card hacking in the Netherlands. So this is going to continue to happen.

Now what I will do is say generally, I want this to be released in this way. I want you to publish this because it's not and shouldn't be up to an individual like me. Regardless of whether people trust me, they don't trust me, that's really too much power for one individual to have. So the reason that I provided this information to journalists and didn't publish it myself was I want them to be able to make institutional decisions about what's in the public interest to know. And I had to be able to provide information beyond what should reasonably be published. Because if I only provided information about sort of the outrageous abuses that we've seen today, it would give these journalists a false impression of the reality of work of these agencies.

They would think these guys are total devils, with no redeeming factors at all. They have to see at the same time that some of these programmes do serve legitimate purposes so they can understand where to draw those lines. I did not simply take the government at their word, in defence of these programmes and the other side. So really it has to be a balancing act. And I do agree strongly that more has come out, but I'm also fairly confident that it will.

Breffni O’Connor: In one of the first interviews you gave you said that the reason you whistle blew is because you wanted to protect citizens' ability to meaningfully question the powers of the state. And I suppose I want to know, how can we, as individuals, do that, but also how can we, as a community within society, kind of obtain mass interest in it, so these issues aren't going back into the shadows? Is the answer releasing of more files? Or is there something that we, as citizens, can do?

Edward Snowden: This is a tough one, because we are increasingly dis-empowered. One of the reasons that I came forward and sort burned of my life to the ground, and I can't go back and see my family in the United States-- I obviously lost my job, which I was quite comfortable with. I lost my home. It was because I felt there was no alternative.

The official processes, the oversight processes for example, that we see in the UK, where the guys were supposed to be overseeing the agencies, are actually meeting secretly to sell their influence to Chinese companies, which is sort of a counterintelligence problem, rather than a robust oversight. The issue is we're losing leverage. Governments are increasingly getting more power and we are increasingly losing our ability to control that power, and even to be aware of that power.

So it is a question of how do we stop it? How do we resist? And it's an open question. I don't have all the answers.

I was sort of the mechanism of disclosure, but I'm not particularly important, in terms of my background, my individual capability to resolve this. But I have sat on that side of the desk. I have used mass surveillance to target people, so I do know how it works. And I know that fundamentally, changes to the fabric of the internet, and sort of our methods of communication, can enforce our rights.

They can enforce our liberties and our values on governments. Not just our own governments, which we tend to like, which we tend to at least trust to some level, but to enforce the protection of those rights against governments that we don't trust. Profoundly authoritarian, illiberal governments outside of our borders. Because you have to remember the way the internet works, when you communicate with the server, it's very likely not in your country. It's somewhere else in the world.

And as soon as that communication leaves your borders, you lose those protections. It's sort of a free for all where anybody can intercept it, they can analyse it, they can monitor it, they can store it for increasing and ultimately permanent periods of time. By leaning on companies, by leaning on infrastructure providers, by leaning on researchers, graduate students, post-docs, even undergrads, to look at the challenges having an untrusted internet, where we have to put our communications on wires that are owned by a phone company that we can't trust, that's working in collaboration with a government that we can't trust, in areas around the world, we can restructure that communications fabric in a way that it's encrypted. And by encrypted, I mean the only people who can read and understand the communications that are crossing these wires are the people at the two distant ends. This is called the end-to-end encryption.

And what we're doing there is we're making it much more difficult to perform mass surveillance, we they simply put a sniffer-- some kind of snooping equipment-- in the middle of everybody's communications around the world. They put it on all the wires that cross the oceans, and they see everything that all of us do, without needing to target any of us specifically, and instead, change it to where if they have an investigation, if they have a legitimate need where we suspect this person, this individual is involved in some sort of criminal activity, they have to target that individual. They have to go after their computer specifically. They have to go after their phone specifically. They can't just go in the bucket that holds all of our private lives and rummage around until they find something that's interesting to them. And I think that is the most realistic thing that we can do.

Geoff Mulgan: Can I just pursue that point about end-to-end encryption? So are you saying-- and you've obviously had a lot of time to think about these things, quite profoundly-- that if democratic governments did the things you're asking them to do, restored trust, abided by their laws, were open about their processes, that in that situation, they should still have the power and the right to intervene and with surveillance on any individual's communication, so long as there is due cause in terms of suspicion of crime or terrorism?

Edward Snowden: So I'm not exactly the best person to provide a radical perspective on this, because I worked for the federal government for almost the entirety of my career. So I tend to be fairly conservative on this, and say that yes, I think it's reasonable that the government, when it has a warrant from a court, when it's exposed to scrutiny by a legal process that would be upheld, not just nationally, but internationally as a reliable and robust standard rights protection, they can enjoy certain powers. This is no different from having the police able to get a warrant to go and search your house, to kick at your door because they think you're an arms dealer or something like that. There needs to be a process involved, it needs to be public, and it needs to be challengeable in court at all times. However, governments cannot require individuals, they cannot require the public as a body, and they cannot require corporations to make investigation and law enforcement easy for them in a liberal society.

In liberal societies we don't typically require citizens to rearrange their activities, their lives, the way they go about their business, to make it easy for the police to do their work. When the police officers knock on your door with a warrant, they don't expect you to give them a tour. It's supposed to be an adversarial process so that it's used in these extraordinary powers are applied only when there's no alternative. Only when they're absolutely necessary, and only when they're proportionate to the threat faced by these individuals. And that's what we do, by shifting it from mass communications, bulk collections, the UK likes to euphemise it as, and put it back on the targeted, individualised basis, where they have to show they had a reasonable suspicion that this particular individual's involved in wrongdoing ahead of interception.

This whole pre-criminal investigation, where we watch everybody, all the time, just in case, is really an extraordinary departure from the Western liberal tradition. We are all today being monitored in advance and in criminal suspicion. And I think that's terrifying, and deeply illiberal as concept. And that's something that we should reject.

Luciano Floridi: I think I'll just follow some of the things that you've said with a question to which I must confess I have no answer. So I hope you can help me with this. It's a difficult question.

During times of conflict and war, even the best liberal democratic governments require big sacrifices from their citizens. I like to call them ethical sacrifices. There is a reason why you have to do this, you have to put up with that. And it was the second World War, and then there was the Cold War. And now we have this so-called War on Terror, which I share with you, probably the view that is a way of rhetorically presenting a good excuse for more ethical sacrifices, and including six million CCTV cameras in this country. Unethical sacrifice for security.

How far do we go in asking ethical sacrifices to people? More research on some visas, more checking at the airport, more acceptability of surveillance. When some kind of balance needs to obtained between securing the one hand, but also civil rights, and a democratic country on the other hand? And I really don't have an answer, but I'd like to hear from you what you think of that's sort of balance between security on the one hand, and civil rights on the other. Whether we strike that kind of balance, if at all.

Edward Snowden: So this is another really complicated question. It's difficult to put in a short soundbite. But it's very popular. It's sort of an enduring, persistent question.

We see government officials all throughout the Western world putting this forward as a sort of their argument. They go, it's a balance between security and privacy. It's a balance between security and liberty. And we live in dangerous times, we need to re-balance, and as you say, you need to give up your rights so that we'll all be more secure.

But I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact. Because what we're really debating is not security versus liberty, it's security versus surveillance. When we talk about electronic interception, the way that surveillance works is it preys on the weakness of protections that are being applied to all of our communications. The manner in which they're protected.

Yeah, so really it's a question of do we want to all be secure? Do we want to all be protected in our communications, not just as individuals, but as governments, as states, as nations? Or do we want to leave them intentionally weak, and open to surveillance, open to monitoring, to provide sort of a relative advantage, in terms of intelligence gathering, in terms of spying?

Now, this might sound contrary, and you go back and go well, is it really about that or not? But you don't take my word for it, because in the United States the White House has appointed two different independent panels who had full access to classified information for the last 10 years that master balance has been in place in the United States, and they found that despite intercepting the calls-- everybody in the country, -- it had never stopped a single terrorist attack. So the question is, why would these officials be pursuing these policies, if we know they don't work, if they don't stop terrorism? And the thing is, the only way they can get these programmes to be publicly authorised is on the basis of stopping attacks, of stopping terrorism, even though that's not the case.

These programmes are not public safety programmes, they're spying programmes. But they are extraordinarily valuable in terms of spying. For example, imagine, if you will, you're sitting at my desk in Hawaii. You have access to the entire world, as far as you can see it.

Last several days, content of internet communications. Every email that's sent. Every website that's visited by every individual. Every text message that somebody sends on their phone. Every phone call they make.

The locations of all of the phones at all of these times. You can make it any individual, and learn everything about them. Now that's not necessarily going to help you stop terrorist attacks, because Bin Laden, for example, stopped using a cellphone in 1998. Terrorist are not the key target.

And we know these powers don't usefully thwart that, but they do help you understand who's involved in violent activism. They do let you know who's involved in trading negotiations that you want to get an advantage in as a government. They do help you know about the military movements of foreign countries. And some of these things are valuable. And you do want to retain these capabilities to some extent.

But we have to have that debate honestly. We can't simply scare people into giving up their rights, on the basis, oh, this protects us from terrorism. I know I'm going on here, but let me summarise this by going back to the key factor, which was about the ethical sacrifices. I think the fact that this has happened in the post September 11 period is not a coincidence.

This was an extraordinary time of psychological trauma with the Western liberal tradition. Where we faced a sort of unifying moment, where we saw that terrorists can be effective, they can be deadly. Now terrorism is not the greatest threat facing our societies. Terrorism kills far fewer people than cigarettes, or alcohol, or car accidents. But we don't see ourselves restructuring society and lives in order to make those threats go away.

Because we see the threats to liberty as being sort of not worth it, as being too restricted. But this isn't the case for surveillance, for whatever reason. Now previously, in those conflicts that you cited before World War II, the Cold War, these periods of sort of total war, froze in conflict, we saw those balances were drawn differently. There was a lot more surveillance. But at the same time, there were two ideologies fighting.

They were both considered, by governments of the time, to be credible and a tract. It was a conflict of ideologies, between sort of communism, capitalism, and so on and so forth. We don't have that anymore. We don't have a great clash of civilizations, a clash of ideologies, a clash of alternative models, where governments thought to themselves, if we go too far, if we sort of trample unreasonably on rights, we'll give birth to a political movement which will cost us our credibility, and will possibly cost us our offices, because people will vote for the other team, the other guys. Nobody's going to vote for Isis. Nobody's going to vote for Bin Laden. Nobody's going to vote for terrorism. So they don't have that sort of political pressure to act in a responsible manner when it comes to stewardship of our rights.

And I think we would all do well to look at that and demand a higher standard of accountability. And say increasingly, because technology provides us means outside of governments to begin enforcing our rights, enforcing protection of civil liberties, regardless of law, through the implementation of systems and standards. We put them on notice and say, we have empowered you to act on our behalf. If you begin acting contrary to the public's interest, and there is no alternative governmental model, with which you're willing to engage, we, the people, will have to put forth our own extra governmental models and methods of trying to restore the balance of liberty to the liberal tradition of Western society. But I agree that there no easy answers there.

Geoff Mulgan: So the extent of ethical sacrifice-- to use Luciano's phrase-- needs to be both relevant and proportionate. And you would argue it's neither relevant nor proportionate. Vivienne, next question from you.

Dame Vivienne Westwood: I wonder what happened after you left Hong Kong? And if you could tell us how much help you got from Julian Assange, something about that. Because I believe he helped you to get to a place of safety.

Edward Snowden: There have been so many individuals who have really put a lot on the line. That they've sacrificed so much to try to protect the principle of source protection in the journalism world. And I think Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks, and Sarah Harrison have really been extraordinary in standing up for that. Because while many other news organisations around the world sort of ran away from me in terror as the hammer came down, WikiLeaks was the only organisation that really said, regardless of the risks, whether they're legal, whether they're personal, financial, we'll do what we can to try to help this guy out. Because we believe he did the right thing, not just politically, but for press principles.

Now I can't criticise too strongly any particular press organisation for not doing that, because it's obviously a rational decision not to do it. But sometimes that irrational commitment to principle is what society needs to survive. Whenever you talk about radicalism, whenever you talk about activism, whenever you talk about progressive activity, that sort of moves the measure of liberty in human society forward, makes us all enjoy a better standard of liberty, it typically starts out criminal. It typically starts out a little bit shaky, and rather radical. And that's irrational to put yourself up to do that.

The only thing that can sustain that is a commitment to principle. When you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense. It required this sort of commitment. And that's happened throughout all time.

It doesn't have to be as sort of extreme as the example of slavery. But not just Julian Assange, he worked with the government of Ecuador, a particular individual named Fidel Narvaez, who lost his job because he signed a safe pass document that said I was a refugee and I didn't have a travel document that would allow me to depart Hong Kong.

And if I hadn't had that document in hand-- my passport was actually still active at the time I crossed the terminal. The US government hadn't cancelled it just yet. But I didn't know that at the time. I'm not sure that I would have had the courage to go through that terminal and get on that plane. And I think I have to thank a lot of people for that.

Geoff Mulgan: So how much was it irrational for you to act as you did? What was the imperative-- the personal imperative for you?

Edward Snowden: I was living a charmed life. For people who aren't familiar with my background, I didn't graduate high school. My career high salary was about $200,000. My last position was about $122,000. For a guy without a high school diploma, that's pretty good.

And it wasn't for entirely that much work. I was living in Hawaii, which is paradise. And nobody in the office really expected too much.

I talked to people about these things. I said, doesn't this bother you? Isn't this wrong? And they said, yeah, of course. This is kind of messed up.

We shouldn't be doing this. We shouldn't do that. But at the same time, they recognised that the purpose, the call, the mission was just.

And it is. I mean, the people at the NSA aren't trying to ruin your life. They're not trying to put you in authoritarian dystopia. These are normal people trying to do good work in hard circumstances. But they also recognise that these decisions happen outside your pay grade.

And that governments broadly-- particularly in the United States recently-- there's sort of a war on whistle blowers. If you're the guy who stands up and self-nominates-- if you say something about this, they're going to destroy you. For example, when the US government got word that I was planning to leave Russia to go to Latin America, they brought down the plane of the-- the presidential plane, which had diplomatic protection, that had the Bolivian president on board. They closed the airspace in four different countries in Europe, I believe, which was extraordinary, unprecedented.

It had never happened before. Because they really wanted to make an example out of me. So it was irrational. And I think to this day it still is irrational.

But ultimately it's not a question of did I want to do the right thing? It's not a question of where is the line? It's really a question of how people feel about the concept of necessity. I saw things that reached a point that I could no longer conscientiously participate with them. And I simply do what I could to allow the public to make a better decision about whether or not these things should continue.

It's very possible that this will be debated by governments and will be debated by the public and nothing will change. But that's all right. I did my part. Again, all I was was a mechanism. All I was was a mechanism. So I'm ultimately satisfied that we know a little bit more about how the world really works.

Breffni O’Connor: So obviously my kind of background is in higher education. And I believe that universities are one of the key areas in societies where we should be challenging ideas and debating the different visions of society. However, recent legislation, including the UK counter-terrorism and security bill is severely jeopardising academic freedom.

It's encouraging, measuring, and monitoring of potential radicalisation. And it's encouraging kind of information tracking to do so. So as a rector of a university, how important to a healthy democracy do you think the abilities of academics and students to fully explore these ideas is without any constraints?

Edward Snowden: It's absolutely critical. I mean, when we think about the language that's being tossed around-- and this isn't unique to the UK. It's happening throughout governments because intelligence communities they sort of share this language.

They share these terms of talking points. How do we sell this to the public? How do we get approval? And we see it getting fed out and echoed throughout the media across the Western world. But radicalism and extremism, while they are dangers, they exist in every society on some level.

And the question becomes, where is the best place to debate and either find credit or discredit in extreme ideas? And if that's not the academic community, than where? If we can't have an open and honest debate about the value of ideas in a university in Glasgow, or Boston, or anywhere else in the world, then where are they going to go? Extremists are not going to disappear. Radicals are not going to disappear. They're going to go underground. They're going to be hardened. And they're not going to be exposed to contrary ideas made by educated people who can make real, convincing, and persuasive arguments to deradicalise these people. By creating a self-policing, self-reporting, sort of self-monitoring culture through law, through statute, and imposing that on the academic world, I think not only are we losing a significant measure of freedom in academic traditions and in our civil society, but we're actually making ourselves less competitive with every other country around the world that does not do that. Because that's where researchers are going to go and that's where academics are going to go. And ultimately, that's where breakthroughs are going to occur. Because we have to be able to ask questions in order to answer them. And by putting these sort of lines around what ideas are proper or improper, we lose things.

Geoff Mulgan: Can I ask you Edward, in our final few minutes, to turn to the future. Because this is an event really about the future. Many of the things you've said are in some ways, relatively timeless principles about now the rule of law, about the trade-offs of security, and freedom, and surveillance.

But how different will these questions look in a few years’ time, with perhaps much easier access to strong cryptography? The Internet of Things, meaning that we'll all be being followed around everywhere we go by the systems around us. What's your picture of sort of 10 years’ time, or what the equivalence of this debate might look like then? And how do we need to be prepared for that?

Edward Snowden: So there's a fork in the road today. And this is one of the few places, I think, in the global political debate, where we have a meaningful choice to be made about where we steer this. If we don't do anything, if we go along with the status quo, we are going to have a mass surveillance world. And what I mean by that is we're not just worried about sort of the UK doing this, as government. We're worried about every government in the world doing this, even to the smallest ones. Talk about Ghana being able to do this. But additionally, companies being able to do this. Additionally, criminals being able to do this, and have access to the entirety of the human pool of communications that's washing back and forth across the internet everyday.

But we also have the ability to enforce, both through statue and through systems, a different path. Which is that we decentralise permissions over the use of our communications. We decentralise the ability to decide the level of publicity that's attached to any of our communications. We can still publicly post a message to Facebook that's globally readable. But we could also adjust things so that they can only be shared with those closest to us, and the confident that this is enforced through both legal and a systemic standards-based protection.

That technologically, as this crosses the internet, the only people who will be able to read this, and then share distribute it further are the people who we initially decided to trust that toward. But ultimately, it's an open question. And this is very much an area where things could happen unpredictably. I think it is more likely than not actually, that the technical side of the argument will be in, because it's much easier, I think, to protect communications while they're in transit at least, than it is to enforce legislation in every country in the world to say that you can't do this.

And if even one country, an Iceland for example, defects from this global legislative bargain and says no, we're not going to enforcement mass surveillance here. We're not going to do that. That's where all of the data centres, all the service providers in the world will relocate to. And I think that gives us a real chance to see a more liberal than authoritarian future.

Geoff Mulgan: And Iceland is indeed, kind of hoping a little bit for that. Luciano, do you think that's a plausible account? And do you have another question for Edward?

Luciano Floridi: Let me say that I wish it weren't plausible. I would like to share it. I just would like to hear from you, in terms of future scenarios, are you moderately optimistic about at least some corners of the world, and how are we going to deal with this massive surveillance?

Or, just to frame my question more broadly, do we need another disaster before we change course? An environmental disaster, a financial disaster, surveillance disaster, and finally realise as the comment we heard a moment ago, holy…. We really need to change here.

Edward Snowden: I am optimistic. I think we're going to see disasters on both sides. I think we're going to see them exploited callously and relentlessly by governments actually to purposes that undermine really the progress of the public's interest, to the expense of elite interest.

That's one of the biggest issues that we see in the question of governments right now, I think, in the Western world. Is that increasingly all of our elected officials are pulled from the same class. These aren't normal people. I don't want to say they're all terrible people, but at the same time, they're not like you and me. These are people who have sort of a nine to five working history.

These are people like the former chairman of the IFC in the UK, Malcolm Rifkin, who just quit when he got found out in a spying scandal, who said, MP's can't be expected to survive on a salary of about 70,000 pounds. He's complaining about the poverty of that salary. And when we have these people representing everyone in our society-- the millions and millions of people-- the question becomes are we really going to get policies that reflect the broad social interest, the broad public interest, or more of class interests?

And I think that's what we're starting to see. When we have some horrible terrorist attacks happen-- like Charlie Hebdo, like the things in Canada, in Australia, in Denmark-- we see in the recording that follows, that the intelligence community already knew about these people in advance. We know that these countries were involved in intelligence sharing premiums, that they benefited from mass surveillance, and yet they didn't stop the attacks. Yet at the same time we immediately see intelligence officials running to the newspapers and claiming that we need more surveillance, that we need more intrusion, that we need more expense of powers because it could have stopped an attack.

Despite the fact that when we look at the full-on mass surveillance watching everyone in the country, in the United States, it doesn't work. It didn't stop the attacks in Boston. The marathon bombings. Where again, we knew who these individuals were. It didn't stop the Underwear Bomber, whose father walked into an embassy and warned us about this individual before he walked onto an airplane. And it's not going to stop the next attacks either. Because again, they're not public safety programmes. They're spying programmes. They are valuable for spying.

They will provide unique and otherwise ungainable information. But the question that we, as a society, have to ask is, are our collective rights worth a small relative advantage in our ability to spy on other countries and foreign citizens? I have my opinion about that, but we all collectively have to come to our opinion about it. And we have to argue forcefully and demand that the government recognise that these programmes do not prevent-- mass surveillance does not prevent acts of terrorism.

Dame Vivienne Westwood: Mass surveillance, is this as bad here as it is in America? Or is it all one thing?

Edward Snowden: So the systems are all collected and sort of put into a bucket. It gets filled in Canada, it gets filled in the UK, it gets filled in the US, it gets filled in New Zealand, it gets filled in Australia, but they're all searchable from the same user token. The same permission that says I'm a member of this system. I work for the NSA, or I work for the GCHQ, and based on which agency you work for, based on what sort of authorities you've been provided on the technical side, determines which buckets you get to search. But really, they all flow to the same home.

This is called a Federated Query System. So you sent one search, and it goes to all these buckets around the world, and it searches through everybody's communications, all of your private lives, and it goes is anything interesting in here for what I asked for. It's actually much worse in UK than it is in the United States. The UK's own documents say that they have a light oversight regime. Which is again why they were concerned about the damaging public debate.

Now the challenge is how we fix that. And we can't fix that until we get the government to admit at least that there is a problem, and that we need some resolution, some means to address this. Oversight by itself is not enough. We have to recognise that rights are being violated. The United Nations actually filed a report that found that that was the case, that mass surveillance is a violation of rights.

And we have to additionally demand the enforcement and adherence to the definition of language. We have to call mass surveillance mass surveillance. We can't let governments around the world redefine, and sort of weasel their way out of it by saying this is bulk collection. Bulk collection means all of your communications are being secretly intercepted. They are being stolen as they cross India, and they're being stored in these silos so that they can be rifled through at the convenience of secret agents, basically.

Now that may be justified if the public of the day says we want to do that. I think it would be an unallowable violation of inherent fundamental rights. But ultimately, these are questions of the public debates all the time. But we have to at least say this is happening.

We can't wish it away. We can't say it's something that it's not. We have to confront the reality of our world, and make the hard decisions about which way we want to move forward.

Geoff Mulgan: Breffni, quick, quick last question, and last answer.

Breffni O’Connor: Simply, how are you coping with your situation currently? And what are your kind of feelings about your own future?

Edward Snowden: Weirdly, I don't think about it much anymore. Before any of this happened, I think I had a much more forward-looking perspective. You think about retirement, and you think about vacation, and you think where you're going next.

One of the kind of unexpectedly liberating things of becoming this global fugitive is the fact that you don't worry so much about tomorrow. You think more about today. And unexpectedly, I like that very much.

Geoff Mulgan: Well, with thanks to Edward Snowden for giving us such thoughtful replies. Thanks to our questioners Luciano, Breffni, and Vivienne. Thanks to the intelligence agents of the world for not interfering with the live stream from Moscow. And perhaps just one final round of applause for our speakers today.