Citizenfour: What Edward Snowden regrets

It’s a banner time for the Edward Snowden documentary CitizenFour. Last night it picked up an Oscar, and tonight it premieres on HBO. In celebration of that, the filmmakers and Edward Snowden himself did a Reddit AMA. Snowden, who’s currently in Moscow, revealed his biggest regret.

“I would have come forward sooner,” Snowden says. “Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space, but it’s very important.”

“Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back,” he continued. “Regardless of how little value a program or power has been shown to have (such as the Section 215 dragnet interception of call records in the United States, which the government’s own investigation found never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack despite a decade of operation), once it’s a sunk cost, once dollars and reputations have been invested in it, it’s hard to peel that back. Don’t let it happen in your country.”

CitizenFour premieres tonight on HBO at 9 p.m.