VIDEO: Snowden receiving Sam Adams Award in Moscow.

VIDEO: Snowden receiving Sam Adams Award in Moscow.HT: RussiaToday.

The first videos of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have surfaced since he received an asylum in Russia. The footage, provided by WikiLeaks, was taken during the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence awards ceremony.
The clips were released by WikiLeaks on Friday, along with a quote by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was in attendance along with former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, both whistleblowers in their own respects, and Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project.
“Sam Adams Associates are proud to honor Mr. Snowden’s decision to heed his conscience and give priority to the Common Good over concerns about his own personal future,” said McGovern.
“This is not about any sort of particular program, this is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America,” Snowden said speaking about the government transparency situation in the US. “That is increasingly coming into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic people. If we can’t understand the policies and the programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them.”
“As someone very clever said recently, we don’t have an oversight problem in the US we have an undersight problem.”
The problem has grown up to a point where Americans have “an executive, the Department of Justice, that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera but they’ll stop at nothing to prosecute someone who told them the truth,” Snowden added.
Snowden has expressed his satisfaction that people around the globe are starting to understand mass surveillance doesn’t increase safety at all.

“People all over the world are realizing that these programs don’t make us more safe, they hurt our economy, they hurt our country they limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships, to associate freely.”

There is a huge difference between surveillance programs aimed at increasing security and Big Brother mass surveillance, the NSA leaker added.

“There’s a far cry between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement where it’s targeted, it’s based on reasonable suspicion, an individualized suspicion, and a warranted action – and a sort of dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under a sort of eye that sees everything, even when it’s not needed.”
After a meeting with Snowden, the four whistleblowers – former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former FBI agent Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project – all met in RT’s to share their thoughts on Snowden and tell their stories.