Edward Snowden has blasted the United States policy of launching cyberattacks first before defending the security of its own network and Internet infrastructure.
His comments were made to journalists James Bamford and Tim De Chant, who interviewed the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor at a hotel in Moscow, Russia in June as part of an upcoming cyber-warfare documentary to be aired through PBS series NOVA.
Snowden, who was granted a three-year asylum in Russia after fleeing from Hong Kong, slams the U.S. government for prioritizing going on the offensive at the expense of the nation's security. With the NSA's creation of the Cyber Command digital warfare center, Snowden accuses the government of putting together two very different tasks of protecting American computer infrastructure and launching attacks on foreign entities.
He uses the analogy of banks to illustrate his point. The U.S. bank, he says, has a vault that is completely full, while the Bank of China and the Bank of Russia only have their vaults half full or one-tenth full. The problem is the U.S. wants to get into other bank vaults by building backdoors into every vault in the world. All the while, the Bank of China and Bank of Russia are also sneaking into the U.S. vault to take their resources.
"Because our vault is full, we have so much more to lose," he says. "So in relative terms, we gain much less from breaking into the vaults of others than we do from having others break into our vaults. That's why it's much more important for us to be able to defend against foreign attacks than it is to be able to launch successful attacks against foreign adversaries."
Snowden points his finger at the U.S. for starting a pattern of using digital weapons as "normal" military weapons when it first launched Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to destroy Iran's nuclear program, which has kicked off a trend of retaliation by other countries when they realize they have been attacked. The problem, he says, is when nation-states are involved, is the increasing capability and resources to launch cyber-attacks that aren't just disruptive, such as the everyday DDoS (denial of service) attacks launched by activists and trolls. They are destructive and could be seen as acts of war, putting the nation and the general public at risk.
"The reality is if we sit back and allow a few officials behind closed doors to launch offensive attacks without any oversight against foreign nations, against people we don't like, against political groups, radicals, and extremists whose ideas we may not agree with, and could be repulsive or even violent - if we let that happen without public buy-in, we won't have any seat at the table of government to decide whether or not it's appropriate for these officials to drag us into some kind of war activity that we don't want, but we weren't aware of at the time," he says.
It becomes even more complicated with the Cyber Command's efforts to create an automated response to attacks, which Snowden says could lead to the U.S. wrongly launching attacks on other countries given how hackers can easily cover up their tracks.
"What happens when the attack hits an office that a hacker from a third country had hacked into to launch that attack? What if it was a Chinese hacker launching an attack from an Iranian computer targeting the United States?" he says. "We're opening the doors to people launching missiles and dropping bombs by taking the human out of the decision chain for deciding how we should respond to these threats."
Towards the end of the interview, Snowden commented on an incendiary speech given by then NSA Director Michael Hayden, who predicted that the "morally arrogant" Snowden would "end up like most of the rest of the defectors who went to the old Soviet Union: isolated, bored, lonely, depressed - and most of them ended up alcoholics."
"I don't drink. I've never been drunk in my life. And they talk about Russia like it's the worst place on earth," he said. "Russia's great."
