The Men Who Want Him Gone

Edward Snowden told NDR journalist Hubert Seipel, sitting in Moscow in early 2014, that American government officials had discussed having him killed. He said it plainly, without melodrama, the way you’d state a procedural fact. Which is, in its own way, more disturbing than if he’d said it like the dramatic centerpiece it clearly is.

The interview covered the expected ground—NSA surveillance architecture, the mechanics of mass collection, what it meant that the United States had built a system of planetary eavesdropping and tried to keep it permanent and invisible. But the detail that stuck with me wasn’t the scale of the surveillance. It was the specificity of the corporate espionage. Snowden explained that if a company like Siemens held information useful to American national interests, the NSA would take it regardless of whether it had any genuine security relevance. If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests—even if it has nothing to do with national security—they take it anyway. Not because it made anyone safer. Because it was there and it was useful and they could.

That distinction matters. The national security justification at least gestures toward a coherent framework, even if that framework has been stretched beyond recognition. The corporate espionage is something else—it’s advantage-taking, the logic of empire dressed up in the language of safety. Snowden naming it directly, in German, on German public television, felt like deliberate provocation aimed at an audience that was already furious about the surveillance of Angela Merkel’s phone.

He looked tired in the interview. Not broken—sharp and precise throughout. But tired in the way of someone who has been living inside a single very large fact for a long time and can’t put it down.