The second part of Glen Greenwald’s interview with Edward Snowden has been making the rounds on the internet and some of the comments that he made are startling and shed light on what drove him to make the revelations that he did. However it is his idealism that is most surprising.

Mr. Snowden’ statements paint a picture of a slightly naïve but idealistic and well-intentioned young man who found himself being tasked with creating a monster he did not want to unleash on the world. The site mashable.com published the transcript of the interview between Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden and quotes Mr. Snowden as saying: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity, or love, or friendship is recorded, and that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

His statements are a reflection of the thinking that many young idealistic people have of a world where things are just and in particular a reflection of the brainwashing and the programming that Americans receive, programming which makes them believe that their government is fair and just and wants the best for all of the people’s of the world.

Mr. Snowden, like the character in the story of Jason Bourne who believed his cold blooded assassinations would be “… helping to save American lives”, believed his own actions would be helping “… to free oppressed people overseas.” And just like Jason Bourne he realized he was just a tool being used to advance something entirely different.

When asked why he joined the intelligence community Mr. Snowden answered: “I joined the intelligence community when I was very young… I enlisted in the army shortly after the invasion of Iraq. And I believed in the goodness of what we were doing, I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas. But overtime, over the length of my career, as I watched the news and I increasingly was exposed to true information that had not been propagandized in the media, that we were actually involved in misleading the public, and misleading all publics, not just the American public, in order to create a sort of mindset in the global consciousness, and I was actually a victim of that.”

“… the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

So Mr. Snowden learned what many independent thinking people and most of us outside of the U.S. already know and have been living with for decades. So although his revelations may be surprising for Americans who have lived inside the propaganda bubble all of their lives, these “evil” intentions behind U.S. Government policy and actions are not really surprising to most of the world’s population.

What has gotten Mr. Snowden in trouble is that he has given weight to and proven what most of the world has suspected all along, that the U.S. Government is spying on everything and everyone.

Mr. Snowden states regarding the Verizon document and the U.S. Government that they are: “… basically subverting a corporate partnership through major telecommunication providers and they’re getting everyone’s calls, everyone’s call records, and everyone’s Internet traffic as well.”

In part two of the interview Mr. Snowden mentions what appears to be the mother program of PRISM and the Verizon spying infrastructure, something which is revealing in and of itself and troubling as it is just passed over, Snowden: “On top of that you got Boundless Informant, which is sort of a global auditing system for the NSA’s intercept and collection system that lets us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities, and so forth.”

Mr. Snowden also portrays the way that Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others work with the NSA as being due to the fact that they are afraid of being liable hence they have allowed the NSA complete and total access, making it appear that the U.S. Government has literally blackmailed these companies into allowing them to access what should be private data: “… they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it.”

According to Mr. Snowden the NSA and the U.S. Government have over stepped their bounds and are manipulating information to serve their own ends, this is not surprising, an knowing this in no way damages U.S. national security. Unless of course knowing there are criminal s running the U.S. Government is something the world did not already know.