Edward Snowden Interview With Brian Williams Full

Edward Snowden Full Interview with NBC News Brian Williams Aired 05/27/2014

Edward Snowden, in an exclusive interview with Brian Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level hacker saying he was “trained as a spy” and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.

The in-person conversation with Snowden was conducted over the course of several hours and was shrouded in secrecy due to Snowden’s life in exile since leaking classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs a year ago.

Williams also jointly interviewed Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has reported stories based on the documents in media outlets around the world, about how they came to work together and the global debate sparked by their revelations.

Snowden, now 30, is a former systems administrator for the CIA who later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell inside a National Security Agency outpost in Japan. In early 2013, he went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton inside the NSA center in Hawaii.

While working for the contractors, Snowden downloaded secret documents related to U.S. intelligence activities and partnerships with foreign allies, including some that revealed the extent of data collection from U.S. telephone records and Internet activity.

U.S. officials have asserted that Snowden may have taken as many as 1.7 million documents. Among the revelations from documents in the Snowden trove are the NSA’s bulk collection of phone and internet metadata from U.S. users, spying on the personal communications of foreign leaders, including U.S. allies, and the NSA’s ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables and siphon off data.

This screen captured video is being made available under the fair use doctrine.