The Indian way, No way

by Dinesh Thakur in The Hindu

The national culture of unquestioned obedience to authority along with an acceptance of shoddiness must not be used as an excuse to overlook violations of corporate ethics, says the Ranbaxy whistle-blower

During my tenure at Ranbaxy, I was surprised by the unchallenged conformity to the poor decisions of senior leadership. Ranbaxy was my first Indian employer following my tenure at two different American corporations. Reflecting on this experience from cultural and comparative perspectives highlights the organizational peril of such behaviour.

It is in our culture to respect authority. We are taught from childhood to listen and obey our elders. We grow up with the notion that our managers, the function heads and business heads within our respective organisations, know more than anyone else. Hierarchy is revered, authority is seldom questioned. Those who dare to ask questions are renegades.

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Asking questions

My investigation into the discrepancies between Ranbaxy’s records and the data filed with regulatory agencies in 2004 showed me how wide the questionable behaviour was within the organisation. It was systematic. It had penetrated the DNA of the organisation.

I often asked myself how was it that smart, well-intentioned people tolerated systematic fraudulent behaviour? This question led me to the Milgram Experiment, which was conducted by the Yale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in 1961. In the 1971 paper summarising its results, he stated:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Why is this important? In my view, as much as we value and respect our traditions, it is imperative that we not lose sight that being a “renegade” — a nonconformist — is acceptable when motivated by honourable intentions. It is acceptable to think that managers possess neither omniscience nor omnipotence. Our colleagues who are at the lowest rung of the corporate ladder sometimes know more than we do about an issue. It is important to encourage them to question authority, even if we find it uncomfortable and disconcerting.

The other aspect of my search for answers led me to introspection. What kind of society have we become? D.G. Shah, the secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, recently penned an elegant op-ed that called out our culture for tolerating corruption, even with needs as basic as drinking water, personal hygiene, food and medicine. Why is it that we have come to accept poor governance, corruption, incompetence and entitlement as facts of life?

Compromise

I think it has a lot to do with how we lead our daily lives. Despite an exhaustive search, I have not been able to find proper translation for the concept of jugaad. It seems to exist only within our society. While Wikipedia describes it as a term applied to a creative or innovative idea providing a quick, alternative way of solving or fixing a problem, I think it misses two important aspects that I have experienced during my tenure working in India. First, there is an implicit understanding that because the solution needs to be quick and creative, it is acceptable to make a compromise on the quality of what is produced. Second, because we focus on making “it” work just-in-time, we never think of making the solution last. That leads to poor quality.

Not 100 per cent

The other pervasive attitude is the notion of chalta-hai. It is very hard to describe this attitude to someone who has not experienced life in India, but to those of us who have lived here, we know what it is. We have come to accept that if it is 80 per cent good, works 80 per cent of the time, and does 80 per cent of what it needs to do, it is acceptable. This attitude manifests itself in almost every facet of common life in India.

Clearly, we are now beginning to see the results of our approach with jugaad and our attitude with chalta-hai. They are not pleasant. Recent events hold a mirror to our face and ask us whether we like what we see. I certainly don’t.

As Jayson Blair, the disgraced former reporter at The New York Times, said, “Rarely are our choices in life presented as a major dramatic question. One step at a time, [they come as] minor choices, that may not even seem related to the ultimate outcome. Once that fear [of getting caught] disappears with the minor choices, it is easier to cross that big ethical line.”

It is not the big ethical line that we need to worry about. Rather, we need to worry about all the thousands of little situations we are presented with in our daily lives, to which the easy answer seems to be jugaad or the attitude of chalta-hai.

Unless we develop an attitude of “do it right the first time” and inculcate this expectation into our daily life, we will continue to see the same image in the mirror every time an event like the one on May 13 holds it up to our face.

The truth about Richard Branson's Virgin Rail profits

I once called Richard Branson a carpetbagger. A new report reveals that I was correct to say he built his business empire with millions from the taxpayers – only it's worse than I thought

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 10 June 2013 20.00 BST

Richard Branson: 'subsidy junkie'. Photograph: Sipa USA/Rex Features

Just over 18 months ago on this page, I called Richard Branson a carpetbagger. Surveying his greatest business hits, from trains to planes to cable, my piece noted a common method: the Virgin boss liked to move into industries sheltered from too much competition, pull subsidies out of taxpayers and then cash out.

That was the story of Virgin Rail (now 49% owned by Stagecoach); of Virgin Atlantic (where the same role is played by Singapore Airlines) and it certainly fits Virgin's takeover last year of Northern Rock, where Branson was really the frontman for the serious money from America and Abu Dhabi.

Sir Richard was not best pleased. Faster than you could say "stroppy tycoon on the phone", a response in his name appeared in the Guardian, accusing me of a "vicious" attack full of "vitriol". But admirable hand-waving aside, he did not rebut my argument: that for all of his talk of enterprise and getting employees "really motivated and steamed up", Branson has built his business empire with millions from you, me and other taxpayers.

Well, last Friday a report was published that, I'm sorry to say, proves me wrong. He's an even bigger subsidy junkie than I thought.

Produced by academics at Manchester University's Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), and published by the TUC, the study looks at how Britain's railways have fared over two decades of privatisation. It's a hefty publication – more than eight months in the making, running to 166 pages and with more detail on the rail network than any commuter will ever need.

But it boils down to one key finding: the only way Branson and the vast majority of train barons make their profits is through handouts from the taxpayer. And while you may know about the direct payments taken by Virgin and others, the Cresc team has also analysed another, indirect transfer from the public purse to private hands. By now, it's worth £30bn – yet it is barely acknowledged either by Network Rail or Westminster.

Let's deal with the open-air subsidies first. If you tot up all the direct subsidies Branson's west coast mainline service received between 1997 and 2012, and convert them to today's prices, you get a sum of £2.79bn handed over by us – before a single ticket has been sold. And it is certainly before you factor in the service's upgrade (worth around £9bn, and paid for by the public), and the fleet of Pendolino trains (again, largely subsidised by the government).

By 2012, Virgin Trains enjoyed spanking new rolling stock, a more frequent service and a superfast line that whisked passengers from London to Manchester in just two hours. With all that going for it, plus a booming economy up till 2007 and rising fuel prices, the company couldn't help but pull in the customers.

Most of the improvements were subbed by taxpayers, with Virgin paying the state an agreed amount in the last two years of the franchise. Yet Branson and his shareholders could declare a cumulative net profit of £538m and trouser £499m in total dividends. No wonder some canny infants like to play with train sets.

These sums are what got Virgin interested in rail in the first place. In his biography of Branson, Tom Bower records a phrase used by the billionaire's lieutenants while weighing up the west coast deal: "It's a licence to print money. Can't go wrong."

But there is another undisclosed source of cash enjoyed by Virgin and the rest of the industry. Network Rail has been cutting the track access charges levied on the train companies. Under its predecessor Railtrack, the fees were worth around £3bn a year; they're now nearly half that, at just over £1.5bn a year. This is an indirect subsidy given by the public to the train operators, and Virgin is the third-biggest recipient. So important is the handout that, were it taken away, Cresc estimates the company would have made a loss of up to £257m last year alone.

Just so there's no doubt on the numbers, the Cresc report was shown to the Association of Train Operating Companies weeks before it was published. The trade body had time to dismantle the maths; but while it evidently doesn't like the conclusions, it hasn't repudiated the figures. Years of indirect subsidies have left Network Rail £30bn in the red. This is debt guaranteed by the public, although very few people know about it.

What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind". And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those looked like.

But the Virgin boss also loves to shout about the virtues of private ownership of public good. At the moment, he's lobbying hard to take control of the east coast mainline. If successful, he'll doubtless try to replicate his previous sweet deal, state-subsidised Pendolinos and all. And just like now, it will be us paying for it.

Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the trial of Bradley Manning

It is an outrage that soldiers who killed innocents remain free but the man who exposed them is accused of 'aiding the enemy'

• 
• • Gary Younge
  • The Guardian, Sunday 2 June 2013 19.34 BST

Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

In 2009 the American ambassador to Tunisia spent the evening at the home of Mohamed Sakher el-Materi, the president's son-in-law. By any standards the dinner was lavish – yogurt and ice cream were flown in from St Tropez – and the home was opulent. In a cable, made public by WikiLeaks, the diplomat wrote: "The house was recently renovated and includes an infinity pool … there are ancient artefacts everywhere: Roman columns, frescos and even a lion's head from which water pours into the pool. Materi insisted the pieces are real." By Tunisian standards it was particularly obscene. El-Materi owned a tiger and fed it four chickens a day.

The US diplomatic corps in Tunis understood this was a problem. In a cable the previous year, entitled What's yours is mine, they'd written: "With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumours of corruption have added fuel to the fire." But the US continued to back the Tunisian president anyway, considering him a reliable ally against terrorism and preferring a dependable dictatorship to an unpredictable democracy. Until, of course, a couple months after the WikiLeaks revelations, Tunisians rose up and ejected him, unleashing a wave of revolutions in the region.

WikiLeaks did not cause these uprisings but it certainly informed them. The dispatches revealed details of corruption and kleptocracy that many Tunisians suspected, but could not prove, and would cite as they took to the streets. They also exposed the blatant discrepancy between the west's professed values and actual foreign policies. Having lectured the Arab world about democracy for years, its collusion in suppressing freedom was undeniable as protesters were met by weaponry and tear gas made in the west, employed by a military trained by westerners.

On Monday Bradley Manning, the young man who leaked those diplomatic cables, goes on trial in a military court in Maryland. He has pleaded guilty to 10 charges which would put him behind bars for 20 years. But that is not enough for the US military that has levelled 22 charges against him, including espionage and "aiding the enemy", which carries up to life in prison without parole. At the time Manning released the diplomatic cables and military reports he wrote: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He hoped by releasing the cables he would spark "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".

If the leaks laid bare the hypocritical claim that the US was exporting democracy, then the nature of his incarceration and prosecution illustrate the fallacy of its insistence that it is protecting both freedom and security at home. Manning's treatment since his arrest in May 2010 has involved a number of serious human rights violations.

At various times since his arrest he has been held in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours a day for five months in succession, held in an 8ft by 6ft cell, been forced to sleep naked apart from an anti-suicide smock for two months, and been woken up to three times a night while on suicide watch. Following an investigation, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Méndez, last year argued Manning had been "subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

Meanwhile, the case against him indicates the degree to which the war on terror (a campaign that has been officially retired describing a legal, military and political edifice that remains firmly intact) privileges secrecy over not only transparency but humanity. This is exemplified in one of his leak's more explosive revelations – a video that soon went viral showing two Reuters employees, among others, being shot dead by a US Apache helicopter in Iraq. They were among a dozen or so people milling around near an area where US troops had been exposed to small arms fire. The soldiers, believing the camera to be a weapon, opened fire, leaving several dead and some wounded.

"Look at those dead bastards," says one pilot. "Nice," says the other. When a van comes to pick up the wounded they shoot at that too, wounding two children inside. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one of the pilots says.

An investigation exonerated the soldiers on the grounds that they couldn't have known who they were shooting. No disciplinary action was taken. When Reuters tried to get a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act, its request was denied. Were it not for Manning it would never have been made public. So the men who killed innocents, thereby stoking legitimate grievances across the globe and fanning the flames of resistance, are free to kill another day and the man who exposed them is behind bars, accused of "aiding the enemy".

In this world, murder is not the crime; unmasking and distributing evidence of it is. To insist that Manning's disclosure put his military colleagues in harm's way is a bit like a cheating husband claiming that his partner reading his diary, not the infidelity, is what is truly imperilling their marriage. Avoiding responsibility for action, one instead blames the information and informant who makes that action known.

There is no need to deify Manning, or WikiLeaks, in all of this. While no one has yet to make a credible case that any of the information he released put a single US soldier in greater danger than they already were by occupying a foreign country, not all of it was as damning as the Apache incident or revelatory as the Tunisian cables.

Much was the routine reports of diplomats to their bosses – channels that, for those of us who prefer diplomacy to war, we should want to protect. The chance of exposing hypocrisy must be weighed against the certainty of inhibiting the kind of candid, private back-door discussions that have helped make everything from the Northern Ireland peace process to the release of Nelson Mandela possible.

Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, told the Washington Post that Manning's leaks were a "reckless … data dump … [but] he is not an enemy of the state". But it's not just about Manning. It's about a government, obsessed with secrecy, that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. And it's about wars in which the resistance to, and exposure of, crimes and abuses has been criminalised while the criminals and abusers go free. If Manning is an enemy of the state then so too is truth.

Soldiers as teachers why not as doctors?

by Archie Bland in The Independent

In its wisdom, the Government has decided to give members of the Armed Forces a fast-track route into teaching. The plan, long in the making, will give former troops the chance to teach even if they don’t hold a university degree, and I'm all for it, but I don’t think the Government is going far enough. Yes, we need a military ethos in our schools. But what about our hospitals?

Think about it. Schools will benefit from the military values of leadership, discipline, motivation and teamwork, as David Laws and Michael Govehave argued, but you know where else those values would be useful? The chaotic world of hospitals! OK, so not all soldiers have an education in medicine. But they have the right values. And the right values are much more important than the right qualifications.

The image of infantrymen moving from the military’s theatres of operations to the hospitals’ operating theatres is not the only one available to demonstrate how absurd this proposal is, how insulting to teachers and children, and how profoundly anti-intellectual, with its contempt for the idea that knowing about things might be a necessary prerequisite for teaching them. And these other modest proposals make still clearer the rationale for the Government’s pursuit of this particular wheeze. Imagine, for instance, that teachers were to be fast-tracked into combat units because of their capacities to work hard, manage people and deal with stressful situations. Or try to picture charity workers getting teaching jobs without a degree because a philanthropic ethos might be just as worth instilling in our children as a military one. Any such suggestion would be greeted, rightly, with puzzlement.

And yet with the military it’s different. This plan is based on an American example – with the difference that in America, 99 per cent of participants already had a degree – and in recent years we’ve been edging closer to the American model of unthinking glorification of our Armed Forces. When soldiers and sailors behave well, their exploits are used as evidence of military nobility. When they behave badly, they are seen as bad apples, and we rarely ask whether their wrongdoing might in fact be the product of a poisoned culture.

I suppose this squeamishness is understandable: ever since the invasion of Afghanistan, we’ve been engaged in brutal conflicts that cost most of us very little, and a few of us a great deal. We owe those few. But squeamishness, and a heavy debt, are not a sensible basis for policy making. So, although it feels frankly treacherous to say so, here goes: a military culture is appropriate for the front line, but not for the classroom, where independent thinking should be considered essential. Soldiers might be brave, and well-disciplined, but if they aren’t well qualified that probably won’t be enough to make them good educators. Teachers are doing something really difficult. And children? Children are not the enemy.

This battle over how Britain's military and colonial history is taught is also a battle for Britain's future

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

The Government has just agreed to pay £20m to over 5,000 Kenyans tortured under British rule during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. William Hague, in a commendably sober speech, accepted that the victims had suffered pain and grief. Out rode military expert Sir Max Hastings, apoplectic, a very furious Mad Max. Gabriel Gatehouse, the BBC Radio 4 reporter who interviewed survivors, “should die of shame”, roared the Knight of the Realm. Kenyan Human Rights organisations and native oral testimonies could not be trusted; the real baddies were the Mau Mau; no other nation guilty of crimes ever pays compensation and expresses endless guilt and finally there “comes a moment when you have to draw a line under it”. Actually Sir, the Japanese did compensate our PoWs in 2000, and Germany has never stopped paying for what it did to Jewish people.

The UK chooses to relive historical episodes of glory, and there were indeed many of those. But we also glorify those periods which were anything but glorious, and wilfully edit out the dark, unholy, inconvenient parts of the national story. Several other ex-imperial nations do the same. In Turkey, it is illegal to talk publicly about the Armenian Genocide by the Ottomans. France has neatly erased its vicious rule in Arab lands; the US only remembers its own dead in the Vietnam War, not the devastation of that country and its people. Britain proudly remembers the Abolitionists but gets very tetchy when asked to remember slavery, without which there would have been no need for Abolition. The Raj is still seen as a civilizing mission, not as a project of greed and subjugation. Not all the empire builders were personally evil, but occupation and unwanted rule is always morally objectionable. Tony Blair was probably taught too much of the aggrandising stuff and not enough about the ethics of Empire. The Scots, in any case, in spite of being totally involved, have offloaded all culpability for slavery and Empire on to the English. Their post-devolution history has been polished up well. But it is a flattering, falsifying mirror.

Indian history, as retold by William Dalrymple and Pankaj Mishra, among others, is very different from the “patriotic” accounts Britons have been fed for over a century. The 1857 Indian Uprising, for example, was a violent rebellion during which British men, women and children were murdered – so too was the Mau Mau insurrection – but the reprisals were much crueller and against many more people, many innocent. Our War on Terror is just as asymmetrical.

Today we get to hear plans to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War. The Coalition Government wants to spin this terrible conflict into another victory fest in 2014. Brits addicted to war memorialising will cheer. Michael Gove will have our children remembering only the “greatness” of the Great War and David Cameron will pledge millions of pounds for events which will stress the national spirit and be as affirming as “the diamond Jubilee celebrations”. I bet Max Hastings won’t ask for a line to be drawn under that bit of the nation’s past.

A group of writers, actors and politicians, including Jude Law, Tony Benn, Harriet Walter, Tim Pigott-Smith, Ralph Steadman, Simon Callow, Michael Morpurgo and Carol Ann Duffy has expressed concern that such a “military disaster and human catastrophe” is to be turned into another big party: “We believe it is important to remember that this was a war that was driven by big powers’ competition for influence around the globe and caused a degree of suffering all too clear in the statistical record of 16 million people dead and 20 million wounded”. After 1916, soldiers were conscripted from the poorest of families. The officer classes saw them as fodder. Traumatised soldiers, as we know, were shot. In school back in Uganda, I learnt the only words of Latin I know, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. His poems got into my heart and there they stay.

Let’s not expect the Establishment keepers of our past to dwell unduly on those facts and figures; or to acknowledge the land grabs in Africa in the latter part of the 19th-century which led to that gruesome war; or to remember how it played out on that continent. With the focus forever on the fields of Flanders, forgotten are those other theatres of that war, in East Africa, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere.

In Tanganyika, where my mother was born, the Germans played dirty and the British fought back using over 130,000 African and Indian soldiers, thousands of them who died horrible deaths. Her father told her stories of, yes, torture by whites on both sides, trees bent over with strung up bodies, some pregnant women, and fear you could smell on people and in homes. Edward Paice’s book Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great Warin Africa, finally broke the long conspiracy of partiality.

The historical truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth matters. It is hard to get at and forever contested, but the aspiration still matters more than almost anything else in a nation’s self-portrait. With incomplete verities and doctored narratives, younger generations are bound to repeat the mistakes and vanities of the past. There will be a third global war because not enough lessons were learnt about earlier, major modern conflicts. And then our world will end.

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner

• Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 September 2008 14.11 BST

Richard Stallman on cloud computing: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." Photograph: www.stallman.org

The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," he said. "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

The growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google.

Computer manufacturer Dell recently even tried to trademark the term "cloud computing", although its application was refused.

But there has been growing concern that mainstream adoption of cloud computing could present a mixture of privacy and ownership issues, with users potentially being locked out of their own files.

Stallman, who is a staunch privacy advocate, advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again'

Source for the Guardian's NSA files on why he carried out the biggest intelligence leak in a generation – and what comes next

• Ewen MacAskill
• The Guardian, Sunday 9 June 2013

Edward Snowden was interviewed over several days in Hong Kong by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill.

Q: Why did you decide to become a whistleblower?

A: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."

Q: But isn't there a need for surveillance to try to reduce the chances of terrorist attacks such as Boston?

A: "We have to decide why terrorism is a new threat. There has always been terrorism. Boston was a criminal act. It was not about surveillance but good, old-fashioned police work. The police are very good at what they do."

Q: Do you see yourself as another Bradley Manning?

A: "Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good."

Q: Do you think what you have done is a crime?

A: "We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence."

Q: What do you think is going to happen to you?

A: "Nothing good."

Q: Why Hong Kong?

A: "I think it is really tragic that an American has to move to a place that has a reputation for less freedom. Still, Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People's Republic of China. It has a strong tradition of free speech."

Q: What do the leaked documents reveal?

A: "That the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America. I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinised most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians."

 Snowden is a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA

Q: What about the Obama administration's protests about hacking by China?

A: "We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries."

Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?

A: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."

Q: Does your family know you are planning this?

A: "No. My family does not know what is happening … My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with …

I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night."

Q: When did you decide to leak the documents?

A: "You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.

"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

Q: What is your reaction to Obama denouncing the leaks on Friday while welcoming a debate on the balance between security and openness?

A: "My immediate reaction was he was having difficulty in defending it himself. He was trying to defend the unjustifiable and he knew it."

Q: What about the response in general to the disclosures?

A: "I have been surprised and pleased to see the public has reacted so strongly in defence of these rights that are being suppressed in the name of security. It is not like Occupy Wall Street but there is a grassroots movement to take to the streets on July 4 in defence of the Fourth Amendment called Restore The Fourth Amendment and it grew out of Reddit. The response over the internet has been huge and supportive."

Q: Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital's Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be "disappeared". How do you feel about that?

A: "Someone responding to the story said 'real spies do not speak like that'. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

Q: Do you have a plan in place?

A: "The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me … My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland. They stood up for people over internet freedom. I have no idea what my future is going to be.

"They could put out an Interpol note. But I don't think I have committed a crime outside the domain of the US. I think it will be clearly shown to be political in nature."

Q: Do you think you are probably going to end up in prison?

A: "I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will."

Q: How to you feel now, almost a week after the first leak?

A: "I think the sense of outrage that has been expressed is justified. It has given me hope that, no matter what happens to me, the outcome will be positive for America. I do not expect to see home again, though that is what I want."