Top 12 Most Fascinating Takeaways from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s Reddit AMA

Q: Edward, a friend of mine works for the NSA. He still actively denies that anything you have done or said is legitimate, completely looking past any documented proof that you uncovered and released.

Is this because at lower levels of the agency, they don’t see what’s going on in the intelligence gathering section? Or do you suspect he simply refuses to see any wrongdoing by his employer?

Snowden: So when you work at NSA, you get sent what are called “Agency-All” emails. They’re what they sound like: messages that go to everybody in the workforce.

In addition to normal bureaucratic communications, they’re used frequently for opinion-shaping internally, and are often classified at least in part. They assert (frequently without evidence) what is true or false about cases and controversies in the public news that might influence the thinking about the Intelligence Community workforce, while at the same time reminding them how totally screwed they’ll be if they talk to a journalist (while helpfully reminding them to refer people to the public affairs office).

Think about what it does to a person to come into their special top-secret office every day and get a special secret email from “The Director of NSA” (actually drafted by totally different people, of course, because senior officials don’t have time to write PR emails) explaining to you why everything you heard in the news is wrong, and how only the brave, patriotic, and hard-working team of cleared professionals in the IC know the truth.

Think about how badly you want to believe that. Everybody wants to be valued and special, and nobody wants to think they’ve perhaps contributed to a huge mistake. It’s not evil, it’s human.

Tell your friend I was just like they are. But there’s a reason the government has—now almost two years out—never shown me to have told a lie. I don’t ask anybody to believe me. I don’t want anybody to believe me. I want you to look around and decide for yourself what you believe, independent of what people says, independent of what’s on TV, and independent of what your classified emails might claim.