DSHack

"Even if September 11 were to happen every single year in the US, terrorism would be a much lower threat than so many other things,"he said.

Snowden said terrorism is "an ideal example of a growing culture of fear," noting that "the intelligence community has used it to approach it with a new dynamic of mass surveillance."

However, Snowden says, the "most tragic part" is that "eventually it is the process itself that is doing the terrorizing. It has become systemic�? and this leads us to where we are today.

"How else does one explain a President Donald Trump other than a systematic failure of rationality?"

Snowden asked, noting that "we see things happening in places like Hungary and Poland with more authoritarian leaders.

"I think it is this new atmosphere of fear and that it won't change until we, as a public, learn to perform a new kind of alchemy and recognize fear when it is being presented. We need to learn to eat fear, to convert it into an energy that can be used to better a society rather than to terrorize and weaken it. But not even Obama could do that," Snowden said.