Edward Snowden

“In 2013, you know, when this first came out, President Obama went out on stage, because he was getting singed in the press, and said, take it from me, nobody i…”

Snowden attributes to President Obama a direct quote saying 'nobody is listening to your phone calls' in response to the 2013 NSA leaks.

“Well, Julian Assange has literally been tortured.”

Snowden states that Julian Assange has literally been tortured.

“They said, you know, first they said mass surveillance had stopped 54 terrorist attacks in the United States. Then they dropped it to seven. And then they drop…”

Snowden claims the government's public justification for mass NSA surveillance shrank from stopping 54 terrorist attacks to 7, then to just 1.

“We have spent trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, killing faraway people who, literally going by the statistics, are more likely to be non-combatants t…”

Snowden claims that, by the statistics, people killed in U.S. drone/war operations are more likely to be civilians than combatants.

“You can have, like, the Jewel versus NSA case that's run by the EFF, which is about AT&T setting up secret rooms in their telecommunications facilities where t…”

Snowden claims the EFF's Jewel v. NSA lawsuit documents secret AT&T facility rooms that funnel domestic internet and phone traffic for NSA collection, which AT&T and the NSA deny.

“The New York Times published a story in the wake of, you know, this contested 2016 election, where they looked into the history of electoral interference in Ru…”

Snowden claims a New York Times study found Russia/the Soviet Union interfered in foreign elections 36 times over roughly 50 years, versus 81 times by the United States in the same period.

“this foreign intelligence surveillance court that the government says authorized these programs 15 different times was overruled by the first open courts to lo…”

Snowden claims the NSA violated its own surveillance rules 2,776 times in a single year and that federal courts overruled a FISA court that had authorized the programs on 15 separate occasions.

“Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon. People, you know, some people aren't familiar with this. Many of them are. But Amazon runs a secret cloud system for …”

Snowden, who earlier says he worked for Dell as the senior technical official on Dell's CIA sales account, claims Dell lost a government cloud-computing contract to Amazon, which he says now runs a secret cloud system for U.S. intelligence agencies.

“The FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself before the Nobel Prize was going to be awarded. In fact, after ML…”

Snowden claims the FBI spied on Martin Luther King Jr., tried to induce him to kill himself before he received the Nobel Peace Prize, and that two days after his 'I Have a Dream' speech the FBI classified him as the nation's greatest domestic security threat.

“was Congress passed an emergency law in 2007 called the Protect America Act, which should have been our first indication this is a very bad thing... and what i…”

Snowden claims the 2007 Protect America Act retroactively immunized telecom companies from lawsuits over illegally handing over customer records to the government.

“the Espionage Act that the government uses against whistleblowers, meaning broadly here the sources of journalism, is fairly unique in the legal system in that…”

Snowden claims the Espionage Act functions as a strict liability crime that bars juries from considering a defendant's motive, making it effectively treated as worse than murder in court.

“the only way to have the courts review the legality of the programs is to establish the programs exist. But the programs are classified, so you can't establish…”

Snowden claims disclosing classified surveillance program evidence is an Espionage Act felony punishable by 10 years in prison per count, and that every significant public-interest journalism source has been charged under this same statute since Daniel Ellsberg.

“Tom Drake, who was a senior executive at the NSA, this is a guy who had a lot to lose, was charged under the same law as the Espionage Act. And these guys were…”

Snowden claims NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis were harassed by the FBI and that Drake, a senior NSA executive, was charged under the Espionage Act during the Bush era for exposing surveillance programs.

“the reason that they weren't prevented is what they call stovepiping, right? There was not enough sharing. They needed to break down the walls and the restrict…”

Snowden claims the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented and that the official explanation ("stovepiping"/inadequate interagency information-sharing) is the reason they weren't stopped.

“does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? MR. No, sir. MR. It does not? MR. Not wittingly. There are cases…”

Snowden claims Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress (Senator Ron Wyden) in March 2013 by testifying the NSA did not knowingly collect data on millions of Americans, and later admitted it was false.

“Obama's saying, you know, that's not who we are that's not what we do um and yet within 100 days of him becoming a president uh now he's sitting in that chair …”

Snowden claims candidate Obama campaigned against Bush-era warrantless wiretapping but within 100 days of taking office reversed course and expanded the surveillance programs.

“AT&T keeps those records going back to 2008 under a program called Hemisphere. If you search for Hemisphere and AT&T, you'll get a story in the Daily Beast abo…”

Snowden says AT&T's Hemisphere program retains call records "going back to 2008," then says AT&T's phone records go back to 1983 (he immediately self-corrects to 1987 in the next breath, off-quote).

“They literally brought down the president of Bolivia, his aircraft, and would not let it depart as it tried to cross the airspace of Europe, not even the Unite…”

Snowden claims multiple European countries forced Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane to land and blocked its departure, at U.S. instigation, until they confirmed Snowden was not aboard.

“unless you're talking about the existence of the intelligence community itself, which is basically constructed on the idea that you can get, I think there's 4 …”

Snowden claims somewhere between 1.4 million and 4 million people in the United States hold security clearances.

“the New York Times said, we won't run the story. Because the president just said, if you run this story a month before the election, that's a very tight margin…”

Snowden claims President Bush personally warned the New York Times that running the NSA warrantless-wiretapping story before the 2004 election would put 'blood on your hands,' and that this threat is why the paper held the story until December 2005.