Radio: Andy Worthington Discusses Edward Snowden, Whistleblowers and the Overreach of Surveillance on Voice of Russia

On Thursday, I took part in a fascinating conversation on Voice of Russia about Edward Snowden, the role of whistleblowers and the surveillance state. The discussion was entitled, “How far can politicians go to protect our security?” and I was with Brendan Cole in London, while, in Moscow, Dmitry Medvedenko’s guest was Dr. Boris Martynov, Deputy Head of the Institute of Latin America in Moscow, and in Washington Rob Sachs’ guest was Bruce Zagaris, a partner with Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe LLP.

The 40-minute show is available here, and in it I made a particular point of explaining how far too much of the mainstream media is obsessively focusing on Edward Snowden’s search for asylum, rather than focusing on the aspect of the story that is much more significant — the fact, as I put it, that “he felt compelled to sacrifice his career because he wanted to reveal the extent that people were being spied on by their governments.”

I also explained why that is so important — because, instead of governments regarding their citizens as “innocent until proven guilty,” they have revealed themselves — with America in the driving seat — as “massively obsessed with trawling for information about all of us,” and having “an obsession with power and a sense of paranoia that is very inappropriate.”

There was much more in the show, and I hope you have time to listen to it, not least because Bruce Zagaris was very informative about the legal and political aspects of the case, involving extradition treaties and international law.

I was very pleased to be asked to take part, as the importance of whistleblowers cannot be overstated. As Bradley Manning’s trial continues, and Edward Snowden seeks a safe place for asylum, it’s worth remembering how another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, described the threat to all of us from the US government and those working closely with it (like the UK, for example).

Drake, who, as the New Yorker described it, “was charged with espionage for revealing details about an electronic-eavesdropping project called Trailblazer, a precursor to Operation Prism, one of the programs that Snowden documented,” spoke to ABC in Australia a few days, and described “a vast, systemic, institutionalized, industrial-scale Leviathan surveillance state that has clearly gone far beyond the original mandate to deal with terrorism.”

That says it all, really. And as Edward Snowden said, in the video that introduced him to the world just three weeks ago, “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

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