"The mass surveillance of entire populations of people who are not suspected of any crime or wrongdoing is a clear violation of human rights and should never have been authorized”. One year after his decision to blow the whistle on the National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs, Edward Snowden continues to be the most wanted man of all time . He exposed something that before his leak, we may have found hard to believe: the real implementation of Orwellian control through cutting-edge technology, a huge spy machine able to penetrate into anyone's life.


The top secret documents he leaked one year ago have been able to provide evidence on how the National Security Agency (NSA) is able to spy on the entire planet, Italy included: a technological leviathan intercepting and storing billions of emails, phone calls, text messages, chats, comments on Facebook and on other social networks, videos posted on YouTube, searches on Google and other search engines, transactions with credit cards. This is the data that reveals who we are, whom we meet and talk to, what we think about certain issues, what we like, what excites or disgusts us, what we buy and how much we spend. Snowden's decision to blow the whistle on the NSA is an unprecedented challenge in the name of democracy, to “preserve the old freedoms in a new age”.

He answers the questions of "l'Espresso " from his refuge in Russia, the country which has granted him temporary political asylum. He is not giving up, but he has no illusions. The path to reforming the NSA will not be an easy one : "Defenders of the surveillance state in Congress will never willingly give up a program, even a clearly unconstitutional one, if they believe it gives them some advantage", Snowden believes.


Everything started the 5^th of June 2013, when the London daily, the “Guardian", came out with its first article based on top secret documents handed to two American independent journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, and to the Guardian's journalist, Ewen MacAskill. Like in a spy story, they had flown to Hong Kong to meet a mysterious source who had contacted Greenwald and Poitras anonymously, promising important revelations. That source was Edward Snowden, an American citizen not yet 30 years old who had worked in the heart of the US intelligence complex.

Immediately after revealing himself, he found himself at the center of a huge manhunt unleashed by the most powerful government in the world. If he has managed to emerge from it still alive and free, it is thanks to Julian Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, which sent journalist Sarah Harrison to Hong Kong. Harrison boarded a plane in Hong Kong together with Edward Snowden in search of political asylum. They ended up stranded in the Moscow airport, where she stayed with him for 39 days, only to surface together once Russia had granted him temporary asylum.


The full version of this interview is available here