Edward Snowden Exclusive | The Deep State & How You Can Make a Difference

Edward Snowden thank you for joining us at this late hour and I want to start with you with some history of intelligence agencies and well-known operations that has received less attention but nevertheless became scandals back in the day so COINTELPRO by the FBI chaos by the CIA operation Mockingbird MKULTRA and many others in 1935 and 75 the Church Committee was established to investigate some of the abuses committed back then by the FBI CIA and NSA could you give us some background on the surveillance state these programs and even some examples where perhaps these agencies and the operations made some positive contributions yeah sure so the main thing that we're looking at when we look back at the Church Committee which is an event in again the 1970s as you mentioned that was actually born out of an act of extremely radical law breaking people forget this because the Church Committee has a very strong reputation in the United States as being this congressional committee that actually lifted up the veil of secrecy off of the CIA off of the FBI and looked for the first time in a very substantive and actually adversarial way into what they were going went is this lawful is this constitutional and even if it's both is it right and unfortunately they found that many of those things weren't the case now why I say this was born of an adequate radical act of law-breaking that many people forget is that we had the media Pennsylvania burglaries in the United States in 1974 I believe which many people have never heard of even Americans have never heard of this and this was where a group of citizens who saw things happening in the country they saw the president was acting in ways that they considered to be contrary to the national interest perpetuating wars that were costing American lives supporting draft that was robbing people of their future for conflicts that we in these individuals believe never should have been involved in and so they formed a group called the Citizens Committee to investigate the FBI and do you know what they did they broke into the FBI's office they literally case an FBI field office waited until a holiday period when the FBI agents were out of the office everybody was watching sorry a big boxing event so nobody was going to be there I had work and when this happened they literally broke the lock went in broke open all the safes stole all the documents took them to a barn and sort of them out started mailing them to newspapers many newspapers sat on refused to publish them so they mailed them two more until eventually the dam broke somebody started printing the truth and eventually investigation had to be had because what it revealed was not only things in the FBI will that was specifically what happened there was they were focusing on the FBI but that intelligence had gone out of control whether it was our internal intelligence services in the United States this is the FBI the external intelligence services that's fine people who are sitting in the room they're with you the CIA the NSA they were doing what they thought had political benefits even if it was contrary to our national identity now what do I mean by this they argue that they were acting in the defense of national security as we always hear that's kind of the the code word we hear don't worry I turn the screen off there that's not the not effective problem and this is the this is the lead in the FBI argued look they were monitoring radical clerics inside the United States who they considered to be in contact they said they suspected them to be in contact with foreign agents they didn't have any proof of this I said look maybe it's happening the Attorney General saw this case and said alright we want to do this I'll sign off on it personally I'll put my reputation risk such is a danger that this individual presents even though they're an American citizen they authorize placing this individual on a watch list in the event that there was some kind of national emergency some kind of protest movement that really really started - shall they say destabilized government they'll bundle this guy off in a camps and of everybody that the FBI was tracking everybody who's sort of the danger to the American government from their perspective they said this man was the most dangerous and this is quoting their words from the standpoint of national security for people in the audience who may not be familiar with who that is that was the most famous with civil rights leader in the history of the United States Martin Luther King jr. a civil rights advocate who sought to establish recognition of racial equality in the United States now this happened not because he was threatening to bomb places not because he was doing anything dangerous but this determination that he was the core threat to the interests of the United States came two days after he gave his most famous speech the I have a dream speech during the march on Washington beyond this the FBI was going further they weren't just saying he's a threat to national security they wrote letters based on information that they had gathered by monitoring him in hotel rooms where he had actually it was then known to them had had affairs with other women and they mailed one of these recordings to him along with a letter this was when he was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his activism and said if you don't kill yourself within a certain time period I believe it was 36 days might have been it was somewhere under 40 days they will reveal the truth destroy his reputation so on and so forth and again this was this was routine this was the kind of thing that was happy there and why do I say this why do I get up sort of this ancient history why do we sort of think about things that we're back under j edgar Hoover's FBI well it's because these things continue this is not a radical departure from the operation of intelligence agency this is what they do in the dark this is what happens when you're not looking this is what happens when they get enough leash when they get comfortable enough that they won't be held to the account of the public or the law when they go too far and this this here is something that you might go alright you know maybe maybe that happened back then but we had this church committee we had these investigations we saw they tried to assassinate Castro God knows how many times we saw they were doing not just COINTELPRO which was this kind of FBI program that was monitoring the domestic political opposition in the United States not just CIA programs like MKULTRA where they were funding US and Canadian universities to experiment on US and Canadian citizens college students to try to develop sort of a method of crude brainwashing sort of opinion changing through a combination of sleep deprivation and drugs like LSD these kind of things were extraordinary excesses and yes they ended them but the same concern with racial activists never went away just changed its face in 2015 we saw that the FBI was again monitoring civil rights groups protests in Baltimore when they wash marched for the black lives matters movement they got airplanes that they contracted that were secretly run by the FBI they weren't registered in a way that the government was going to say these are our planes they're doing surveillance missions it was uncovered by journalists because they saw a flight path looked like this a citizen journalist saw there were planes that during the period of this protest just constantly circled the city again and again again and when they looked at later and they actually started forcing government when they started going to records when they started looking at Congress our sorry contracts they went you know this is something that the government is going to have to admit sooner or later we are going to get caught red-handed on this so we need to admit and they did admit it they said look we did it but we're just simply trying to maintain the police we're just simply trying to maintain national security what this actually means is the same thing that it meant when they were monitoring Martin Luther King national security doesn't mean what it sounds like to you and me national security isn't about preventing foreign troops from landing on us Shores right we have the largest military spending in the world we out spend the next ten nations combined we could fight a war with the next ten nations combined and beat them handling we are an extraordinarily advanced nuclear nation our national security is not in question particularly from political needs but national security from the perspective of an intelligence officer whether they're CIA the NSA or the FBI means stability of the current political system now I don't mean democracy here right I don't mean the people who are voting I mean the parties that are in power the personalities that are in power cannot be threatened in a way that could sort of radically provoke snap elections new changes changes of procedures policy that agencies would shut down the government would be really restructured in new ways that's what they mean by national security and that's something that I think is not very well understood so to continue discussion so to continue discussion of history can you pre briefly list some whistleblowers who perhaps did not get that much reach as you did but get meaningful work and influenced your views absolutely so when we start at the beginning the individual you would consider the father of American whistleblowing would be Daniel Ellsberg which in the same sort of period was protesting the Vietnam War he was a very senior analyst for a corporation called Rand he worked for the government in every way that matters he was the kind of guy who would be briefing the Secretary of Defense and he revealed a secret study a top secret study that said look the u.s. lied its way into the Vietnam War and they continued to lie to perpetuate the war they had basically thrown the monkey wrench in every peace deal intentionally because they were worried about the political consequences of it and this was despite the fact that it was a war they can't win but let's fast forward leave sort of what we would consider the ancient history of whistleblowing and get into more modern things right the post 9/11 era and it took this long because the Church Committee which was again extremely adversarial to the intelligence agencies it was not their friend it was not their defender it was not their truth those held for about two or three decades but then we got the September 11th attacks and this intelligence community complex right all the spy agencies that had felt very sore for these 20 years 20 plus years had created a secret wish list of all of the changes to law that they would have wanted if they could have passed them but they knew that they never would have passed with popular support in the United States because they violated the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution which is the prohibition against not just the unreasonable searching of your home your electronic communications where people are listening to your phone calls where they're breaking into your house placing cameras but the seizing of your personal things or your communications first place you couldn't just pull things off the line without a warrant from a court well this was sort of a secret plan that was sitting with the Department of Justice but negotiated with the intelligence agencies when September 11th happened they came off the shelf they called it the Patriot Act and in that moment of national crisis where everybody was had been terrorized quite successfully by an extraordinary attack and in this moment of vulnerability these agencies exploited that moment of national trauma to pass this there was almost no dissent there was I think a single dissenting vote in the house from extraordinary brave woman but these things swept into power over money but they were individuals who were working in these agencies who saw this happening from the other side and although the government publicly at the time was saying look this isn't going to affect Americans it's not going to affect your right is not going to affect our allies this is only about Al Qaeda this is only about terrorists there's only about bad people far away people the enemy don't worry about it there's nothing to fear individuals like Thomas Drake bill Binney Kirk Wiebe ed Loomis these individuals were sitting at the NSA and they went well if this is the case why are we ordering huge amounts of electronic equipment and putting them inside the United States at telecommunications providers that aren't monitoring foreign communications they're monitoring wholly domestic communications and they went through proper channels they went to the NSA's Inspector General this is sort of an internal watchdog right it's supposed to be a relic of this 1978 era reform of the Church Committee it says look when there's problems in classified areas you go to this watchdog in the government you tell them what's going on and they'll fix it they'll investigate they'll find are these activities on law are they unconstitutional are they contrary to the values of the nation are they waste fraud or abuse of the government's authorities and when they did this when they went internally this one individual particularly Thomas Drake is the one the government came after the hardest the NSA's number-two lawyer they've got about hundred lawyers this guy was the number two he talked to Thomas Drake personally Thomas Drake said look I understand the mission I understand we're in a moment of national crisis but what you're doing is a violation of the Constitution a fact which by the way was not affirmed by the courts in a meaningful way until more than ten years later past 2013 but the program was eventually amended because of the kind of things that he brought forward in 2006 there were some amendments the program as well but the NSA's internal process this watchdog it was supposed to be protecting the Constitution that was supposed to be waiting for men like Thomas Drake to stand up and say whoa somebody's breaking the rules here he responded like this he came to me someone who was not read into the program and told me that we were lying amok essentially in violent Constitution there's no doubt in my mind I would have told him you know go talk to your management don't bother me with this okay you know you did the two minute he said if he did say you using this to violate the Constitution I mean I probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly so I mean if that's what he said he said then anything after that I probably wasn't listening to anyway this new wave of whistleblowers the Thomas Drake's the bill Bennie's the Kirk Wiebe ed Loomis's given the John Kerry occurs that Chelsea Manning's if it had not been for them and they're examples I might have replicated their mistakes Thomas Drake for going through these proper channels was hounded by the US government he was charged under the s the same laws they accuse me of violating this is a law that does not provide a fair trial you are literally prohibited by law from presenting your defense to the jury you can't tell them why you did what you did and have them decide if that was basically a relevant enough threat to the operation of the system that your acts made sense the same way that in the United States even a murderer can say look this person was threatening my life and the jury can consider maybe this was self-defense is denied to whistleblowers in the United States who reveal information the journalists under US law it doesn't matter these men did it anyway they did everything right they even went to Congress going to journalists was an active last resort and for that US government destroyed their lives none of them continued in their career many of their pensions were threatened Thomas Drake was charged with multiple felonies bill Binney was pulled out of the shower at gunpoint Chelsea Manning is currently serving 35 years in prison in the United States and I say if it had not been for these individuals what I did my own actions and the public benefits that have derived from them would not have been possible we know we know from the leaks at the NSA of a global surveillance program and is collecting massive amounts of private data but I would like to touch on details that specifically relate to Germany can you talk about these leaks and how do they affect the public here and so I won't get into specific programs that haven't been described by journalists before because I make sure the people who are doing the documents get a chance to check my biases if I'm sort of speaking from the hip there's a chance that I say something wrong I make the wrong political calculus and even though there's no guarantee of harm or even likelihood of harm I have tried to act in absolutely the most responsible way an overly responsible way to establish that the government will respond to the saying the government will retaliate the same regardless of how careful the whistleblower is whether an individual in the United States goes to WikiLeaks or they publish these things directly unredacted on the Internet themselves or whether they work as I did where you have a system of checks and balances where journalists have the material they make the publication decisions not myself and then they even give the government a chance in advance of publication to review these swords and go hey maybe you guys don't understand the details here maybe you don't see the big picture here maybe there's one little sentence here that you don't quite get we put a human life at risk here and because of this we'd like to share this evidence with you that that is in fact the case and for you to consider whether or not you want to modify your story as a result and that has been followed in every case in the reporting that has arisen for me but despite that the US government makes no distinction whatsoever and I think this is an important thing to establish because I mean the government's not actually concerned with harm mitigation they're not actually concerned with saving lives of protecting programs or ensuring that human sources or the efficacy of our security apparatus continues unimpeded what they're looking for are easy arguments things that sound persuade at first glance like saying oh this is going to endanger sources and methods oh these journalists have blood on their hands but when you look at cases for example the case of Chelsea Manning again she went to trial the US government was able to present their best evidence they had control it was a military court they could hold secret proceedings for sections that they wanted to present classified information and despite all of this the government was asked by the judge to present evidence of any harm that came as a result and again remember in the case of Chelsea Manning these were things that were presented on WikiLeaks they eventually made their way to the public and completely unredacted form and this these were classified documents I think roughly three-quarters of a million both military records and diplomatic records and in court in front of the judge the US government said we can't demonstrate that anyone has been heard that anyone has died and we aren't even going to try because from our perspective it doesn't matter now if this is the case and I know we've run a little bit long here but is a central point that I think a lot of people don't quite get because the much of the media is afraid to confront this point because they're afraid they'll lose access to government officials to anonymous sources to senior White House officials senior administration officials in whatever country they're in they're equivalent if they don't simply repeat it if they don't just say well these officials said this and treat it as if it's reliable rather than challenging the claim but what's actually happening here why is this happening if they're not interested in saving lives if they're not interested in protecting these things and if Chelsea Manning was going to trial in 2013 four years after the documents were reeled in 2009 and in four years the government couldn't show that anyone had been hurt maybe it's just about changing subject maybe the government would rather talk about the theoretical risks of journalism when you're in an open society with a free press where mistakes could possibly be made someone could possibly be hurt although it's never happened not in national security report not the way we've seen we have no public evidence not in my case not in Manning's case not in any other case that we can think of not Ellsberg not Binney not Drake if this isn't the case they don't want to talk about the fear or they do want to talk about the theoretical risks of journalism instead of the concrete harms of their policies of their programs of the decisions the way this is affecting everyone in the United States and around the world they don't want to have a conversation about what's been done they want to have a conversation about what might happen if you don't trust them what might happen if journalists investigate them in the absolute worst case and I say ladies and gentlemen the absolute worst case that could happen is that we don't ask those questions is that we do simply trust they don't because we have evidence that when we do that things go wrong you ask generally about what kind of programs were happening not just in Germany but around the world this is the one that everyone's from lived with the prism timeline prism is a particular collection program under a specific authority in the United States but a little bit legalistic but it's called section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act this was passed in 2008 as a revision of the protect America Act of 2007 and this was when the US Internet Service Providers the one that everybody relies on around the world I started going beyond what the law required to cooperate with the government and give them access to people's data without warrants now the US government will go not oh this isn't true this isn't true and in a very narrow sense they have an argument about Americans if you're a US citizen they have to get a warrant before they can force these providers to give this information to them the providers can still voluntarily give it to them and this is in fact a business model for places like 8080 we'll give your information to the government 18 to s one of the largest telecommunications providers in the United States they will give this information to the government as long as they pay for it even without a warrant they'll use lower standards of requests like subpoenas but it's not just prism there's also what's called the upstream collection program now this happens both under that same authority section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act that's a BFA t-72 at the top this is the transatlantic internet cables and the ones that are happening under the ground this was happening not only in the United States and every sort of bound border exchange point every major internet exchange point in the United States but happening in Germany through the BND they have their own code names for it and they were kind of trading communications with the NSA of German communications that they were baseball cards we saw programs that were being used to analyze these right which were not what you would expect this wasn't about thwarting plots from Osama bin Laden but rather the NSA's own documents there's a top-secret classified report that's being reported on here they were using this information everything that's pulled from these internet service providers everything that's pulled from these communications are the strands of the world to spy on things like the pornography viewing habits of people that they consider to be radicalized now these were individuals that their own documents said were not terrorists they were not knowing to be associated with violence they were not promoting violence but they considered they were considered to be people who had persuasive arguments about why a more radical version of Islam would be more attractive and so they wanted to stop it by going this as a conservative religion maybe we can leak this and discredit these you might think that's appropriate but you know this is these are the kind of questions that we should answer publicly politically rather than have a few officials behind closed doors to the GCHQ the British NSA was intercepting webcam images from people around the world anybody who's using Yahoo Messenger back in the day I believe it was every five minutes it was snapping a picture from the webcam or it was intercepting a picture from the web stream every five minutes and saving those largely permanently very long periods of time they the British government knew it had sexually explicit images in I knew a lot of their employees had looked at them they kept it going anyway it was happening in Australia this is recently actually post 2013 where new metadata bulk collection laws right this is a government's preferred way of describing mass surveillance which is this indiscriminate targeting of surveillance where you collect everyone's communications whether they're terrorists whether it's you whether it's the person sitting next to you whether it's your mother whether it's the person you walk by on the street everybody's communications are collected these kind of laws are sweeping the world it's legal in the United States legal in candidates legal in Australia I believe Germany is actually beginning to embrace this as well under laws that they say are reform laws but are actually making things worse but when they have access to these laws what are these well in Australia the Australian Federal Police used it to try and identify the source of a journalist who's reporting they didn't like very much we saw in the US Australian exchange they were trading information about the communications of American law firms which by the way the u.s. NSA is prohibited from spying on without a warrant but the Australians did it for us and then passed the information to us so that was all okay even though that's supposed to technically be violation of law and what were these lawyers doing right they weren't negotiating arms deals this wasn't about transnational terrorism they were representing the trade partners of Australia I believe it was Indonesia a trade deal about the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes we saw the British we're hacking the Belgian telecommunications provider even though they had legal ways to get at that information split by asking the Belgians for support but all of these things get back to something quite simple here which is the idea that governments don't like to ask permission governments don't like to follow procedures governments don't like to be bound by the same laws that you and I are when they draft these laws they create exceptions when there aren't enough exceptions they make their own and as long as they have this shield of the state-secrets privilege this is sort of shade of secrecy that they can cover their actions with by the time we the people by the time journalists by the time the public learns about them the officials who are most responsible for these violations of our rights are often out of office and this is why the only reason this continues sorry the only reason this kind of paradigm can continue is because we don't punish officials who do this even in the most egregious cases yes Barack Obama authorized the warrantless wiretapping of everyone in the world in the United States Americans he collected their communications unconstitutionally seized them which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment the courts ruled that his programs of mass surveillance related to telephony metadata had not only been unlawful from the time they were authorized more than 10 years before but were likely unconstitutional and they described it as Orwellian in their scope but that's surveillance right you might go all right it's terrible as that is he's just spying on everyone in the Bush White House he literally tortured people right he committed clear war crimes Obama to his credit did end the torture program in its most direct incarnation he continued the drone program he's expanded the surveillance program but he did not investigate the Bush administration and when we have this two-tiered system of justice where when you're a whistleblower and you go to the number-two lawyer in the NSA and you go hey you know these new programs might be violating the law they might be the violating the Constitution he tells you to get lost he puts the Department of Justice on you you get investigated you lose your job you lose your house you lose your wife you lose your freedom because you go to jail you get arrested but if you are the President and you torture people you have people killed people who you don't know people who you don't have identified people who just happen to be holding a cell phone the spy agency tells you that at one point was associated with terrorism you will never see the inside of a courtroom instead you'll see a book deal instead you'll get you know medals of freedom pinned around your neck by all these other people I this creates a system of incentives that will shape human behavior in obvious ways if you were the president you had unlimited power you knew that you could get away literally with murder and no one would hold you to account for it why wouldn't you now there are some people who might have the moral fiber to hold back from that there might be some who'll go I won't do this I won't do that and that's better than nothing but how do we get powerful officials whether it's the President of the United States whether it's the Chancellor in Germany where's the president Russia or China or anywhere else to abide by all rights to respect all people everywhere at all times the only way we can actually make sure that happens is if we can see what they're doing when they're doing it we can witness crimes and then we can enforce penalties that's something that's missing and until we change that we an ultimately liberal society around the world will be at risk so Edward I like to run one last question from us and and some publix of forgive us if we take a few more minutes of your time in 1975 Senator Frank church we just talked about with the Church Committee appeared on NBC and said if this government ever became a tyranny if a dictator ever took charge in this country the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government no matter how private it was done is within the reach of the government to know this was 1975 and you've been saying this to do you think the Trump and power now this warning will turn to a reality I think the focus on Trump is a mistake you can look anywhere look at any newspaper look at any sort of public commentator and you can see all of the criticisms of the Trump policies and administration's and all of the issues that they have they're right they're clear it's obvious yes we are in uncharted times yes we are facing a period not just a localized risk but a systemic risk but what should we actually be looking at right faith in elected leaders to fix our problems is the mistake that we keep repeating when President Obama was elected the White House when President Obama was elected to the White House he said all of the right things right he said he was going to make a more equal America we were going to move into a period of cooperation rather than partisanship he said he was going to close Guantanamo on day one of his administration it's still going to be open on his last day as presidency he said there's going to be no more warrantless wiretapping in America we don't do that we don't need that that's not who we are in fact he expanded it he made it worse it went deeper it got better it got more sophisticated you got more pervasive and it continues right if we're hoping for a champion if we're waiting for a hero we'll be waiting forever because it's not a politician that you're looking for it's the people in this room it's you it's the person sitting next to you all of us have a responsibility we can't fix it by ourselves as individuals but we don't need to what we have to do is make one change a small change a positive change that can be replicated that can be shared we need to create our ideas we need to think about these problems we need to identify not the Trump is a bad person but why he is so threatening and we need to start creating defences for it moreover we need to realize that defense is not enough we need to create an offense for free and open society we need to recognize that one of the central problems right now is one a debate words no longer have the same meaning that they want meant we hear words like terrorism and we go whoo that's terrible as long as it's terrorism we have to stop everything and when you think about terrorism like a normal person that makes a lot of sense nobody wants people flying planes into towers nobody wants people detonating bombs and marketplaces are on subways or shootings on the street right the terrorism doesn't have a single agreed-upon definition there are government's charging people with terrorism who are simply acting in ways that are traditionally considered to be political protest right many governments particularly the British government is particularly bad here where they consider any threat to sort of that systemic stability even if it's an act of journalism even if it's an act of speech suddenly is transformed into an act of terrorism right but it's not just terrorism it also happens on the positive side of our language in addition to the negative side of our language when we think about things like freedom and openness democracy Liberty human rights and we've moved from a belief that as long as things are proper and appropriate as long as things are moral they're sustainable they're supportable they're things that we should back to a belief that legality is the same thing as more as long as the government says someone broke the law we infer we believe instinctively it means they did the wrong thing but ladies and gentlemen sometimes the only moral action the only moral choice is to break the law Germans know this far better than many other countries but it's not a uniquely German problem in the United States whether we're talking about the abolition of slavery the prohibition of alcohol whether we're talking about the enfranchisement of women allowing them to vote all of these activities were considered to be threats to some stability of the days these were things that terrorized institutions and government officials these made these individuals uncomfortable made them feel vulnerable it made them feel threatened and you know what that was exactly the right choice when people are progressing the boundaries that when they're expounded expanding the borders of human rights right that always begins as a riot against orthodoxy whether it happens on the street whether it happens in the newspaper whether it happens in writing whether it happens on the TV it is a contest against the status quo you have to remember that all of these and justices that happen all throughout history the worst things that you can imagine whether it's in your domestic history or international history we're legal at the time abuses of human rights are always legal in the national context when the government wants to do those kinds of things at least for the period of operation it may be years later that it's condemned it may be years later that it's disowned it may be years later that someone sees the inside of the courtroom but power is its own law and we have to think about how do we mediate that how do we make things a little bit better there and this is difficult question I can't claim that I have the answer but I think one of the things that we start forgetting about is to recirculate basic principles basic ideas that everybody needs to share if we're really going to live in a free society if we're really going to live in a free world and that's the human rights belong to everyone the worst excesses of the u.s. surveillance system our premise upon a single idea which is that Americans get one set of rights everybody else gets basically no rights and you know if you're an American that might sound fine and that's the reason these pop visa policies still enjoy some support as they go whether it's not having me I don't care right I'm not the one being threatened but 95% of the world's population lives beyond the borders of the United States and the same is true of practically every country right the percentages change here and there but it's a big world and we have a lot of people and if we're going to protect the rights of anyone we have to be able to protect the rights of everyone and this gets back to thinking about well why do we have rights what are we protecting what are we trying to create what are we envisioning where are we trying to go and I would argue this is the idea of Liberty but if you ask people ask the person next to you what Liberty means to them right they might not be able to articulate it very clearly everybody will have a different answer right and we need to think again about what Liberty means today I think Liberty is the right to ask sorry Liberty is the right to act without permission it's the ability to take a choice without worrying what it's going to look like in some government databases without having to worry about what some government bureaucrat is going to do are they going to be upset are they going to retaliate are they going to do something that will impact your rights your freedoms right Liberty is being able to live day to day moment to moment in an instant from your own head from your own self from your own community thinking about your family rather than thinking about structures that owe you no loyalty that see you as more of a potential threat than a potential ally right and this is something that really is a solution right but it is a beginning if we can agree that in a free country in an open society the number of times people have to ask permission to do things the times people have to register to do things the times the people have to worry that government officials are going to be trawling through their web history they're going to be looking at the records of who is in this room right now because I hate to tell you ladies and gentlemen if you have a cellphone on you right now you've left a permanent record of being at this talk not that it's going to get you thrown in jail but that it's discoverable and an intelligence agent who might be sitting like me in Hawaii or sitting in Darmstadt or Rammstein or one of these other areas bod island could look at these and make inferences about who you are about what you believe about what you're likely to do I don't believe that we should live in a world where every time you pick up the phone to call someone loves to talk to a friend to share an idea to just tell someone about what was happening in your day that you need to think what's this going to look like that is many things ladies and gentlemen but I would argue that that is fundamentally illiberal it is fundamentally unfree and it is fundamentally unjust and it should change Oh sulla from college where how does a normal day for you look like I do talk to Munich no but seriously uh one of the most extraordinary things about my life past twenty thirteen is that I ended up in exile right my government did absolutely everything it could to make sure that I wouldn't be hurt they canceled my passport when I was flying to Latin America which would consider to be considered to be a fairly neutral region of the world when they knew I was transiting through Russia we don't know why right the government won't actually reveal the decision-making at the time here but no one had informed me my passport had been cancelled by the time I left the government of Hong Kong has said that the US government might have been in the process but they hadn't actually officially cancelled it so far as they were concerned but by the time I landed in Russia I could no longer travel and when I was trapped in the Russian Airport I couldn't leave right I didn't say hey let's go into Russia this is good enough I applied for asylum in 21 different countries around the world one of which was Germany right others were France places like Norway all of them found reasons not to respond or to say no except those countries those neutral countries in Latin America when it was heard that maybe the Bolivian President Evo Morales during a trade summit in Russia might secretly take me back to Bolivia to enjoy asylum there which by the way the United States itself recognizes what they consider to be a fundamental human right to seek and enjoy a sign this is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and many other international agreements which in the u.s. systems of law are actually superior to statutory obligations superior to for example the Espionage Act they're on a higher tier law with the Constitution considered the supreme law of the land because the Constitution has provisions in it about the treatment of treaties but despite this when they thought I might be in a presidential plane that has diplomatic immunity that can't be interfered with crossing Europe to go to Latin America for European countries closed their airspace to block a vote Morales from traveling back home just on the mere rumor that I was on board and this man I couldn't travel I still can't travel because they were afraid of what I might say they're afraid of what people might think if they heard other opinions other viewpoints right now this is a long way of saying that yeah now I live in exile and you know you would think it would be really difficult and there are costs you know I'm not home I'm away for the holidays it's difficult to see my family and of course there's a lot that anybody misses about being at home you know he can speaking their own language on the street right Russia is a very different society but well I put my head down at night on a pillow in Russia I wake up and I speak every day around the world I'm part of a different conversation global conversation that today thanks to technology can no longer be stopped and this for me is a source of hope because for the longest period government's loved exile it was their favorite tool right for for countering revolutionaries and radicals because they executed people right it would lose them favorability people would think the government was too harsh but if they simply forced people out kept them outside the borders wouldn't allow them to enter freely on penalty of imprisonment or death they could stop the conversation and for them that was the most important part but those old bad tools of political repression are beginning to fail and not just for the United States ladies and gentlemen because the United States is not contrary to what may be popular in some radical sources there circles the biggest danger is most bullying threat to human rights in the world there are other countries countries that are even worse countries that are more intrusive we have new surveillance laws being passed in Russia that are incredibly extreme Russians call it the Big Brother law and if Russians are calling it the Big Brother law you got to watch out United Kingdom the United Kingdom passed the most extreme surveillance measure in the history of the Western world in a free and open society that was backed by their now Prime Minister called the investigatory powers bill right doesn't sound particularly threatening doesn't sound particularly dangerous but it encoded in enshrined in law the mass surveillance regime the kind of bulk collection that we were discussing before all kinds of different government agencies in the UK can now trade around people's web histories not just the intelligence services not just mi5 not just mi6 not people you would think like James Bond type to not just police but places like tax agencies places like health administration's like local bureaucracies simple government agencies that should never have access to this type of information now can because it's being collected it's being protected it considered the proper action of government we see in countries like China they're passing new surveillance legislation under the same guise of anti-terrorism legislation that the United States has used a sort of political cover for taling rights and when they were challenged on it Chinese official said why are you bothering us we're doing the same thing the United States did and the sad thing here is that they have a point this should never be the state of the world right the reason we were so successful coming through the Cold War the reason the Berlin Wall falling down was such an extraordinary accomplishment not just for people in Germany but people throughout Eastern Europe and beyond was we had a clash of cultural values where there were governments on one side that said we will stop at nothing particularly in terms of domestic surveillance and things like that organizations such as the Stasi which would be running extraordinary huge informant networks throughout communities and things like that and on the other side we had government that would accept some restraints and would say this was actually distinguisher this wasn't they've been good this was made them just this was how you could see that their example was worth emulating because they could foreclose upon these methods at least to some extent we know it's not true in all cases because of what we just described earlier with Martin Luther King jr. but largely in the most aggressive sense they could say we don't need these powers we reject these powers because they are corrosive not just to civil participation right not just to what people feel in their communities but to trust in government if people can't trust us if people can't identify with us we can't be successful and this is something that you see in most societies around the world that have serious struggles with low-level corruption right the question is when somebody encounters upon a police officer what do they think do they think this is a problem do they think they need to get a bribe ready or do they feel safer right I grew up in a mindset in the United States justified or unjustified just the way I was raised the political systems into which I was indoctrinated when I saw a police officer I felt better right that's no longer the case for me now but not just for me a lot of people around the United States look at police and they go these don't look like policemen or these look like soldiers we have military equipment that's being transferred to police and again and again when we look at these things when we look at how we live when we look at the choices we have you know you ask me how do I live every day I wake up in the morning and I smile glad for the decisions that I took before yes they cost a lot right yes they were not enough we got new reforms but they don't make a dent in the level and injustice that we see sort of surging around the world across borders and every place in every region right now but I had an idea of what I can do next and I would ask you turn that question around on yourself I don't mean this as criticism I mean this is an opportunity and think how are you living your life when you wake up in the morning you think about going to work right you think about what you've got to do your obligations to your family you know having to go to the grocery store whatever what shows are on tonight this is normal human life nobody looks down for this nobody should look down for this but think about the opportunities that you have right because there are no heroes nobody's going to save you right there are only heroic actions there are only her own choices there are only people who moment-by-moment see bad things and recognize maybe I can do something maybe I can't fix everything but maybe I can make progress maybe I can make things better maybe I am the one that I'm waiting for and as soon as you start thinking like that you'll realize that you are Edward Snowden Edward Snowden human rights advocate activist invisiblur thank you so much for joining us today maybe next year we'll do the Kentucky [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: acTVism Munich

Views: 522,276

Rating: 4.8221455 out of 5

Keywords: Edward Snowden, Snowden, NSA, FBI, CIA, Surveillance, Liberty, Zain Raza, acTVism Munich, acTVism, Activism Munich, COINTELPRO, MK ULTRA, Deep State, Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, NSA Leaks, Privacy, Freedom, Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras, Wikileaks, United States, Oliver Stone, Citizen Four, Citizen 4, Putin, Russia, NSA Scandal, Leaks, Covert Operations, Julian Assange, ASSANGE, DEEP state, spy, Obama, Trump, Sanders, Abby Martin, Permanent Record, Joe Rogan

Id: kTyvLpNpa9E

Length: 55min 18sec (3318 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

No difference can be made he’s probably part of the satanic pedo mafia as well nobody will believe the damage and destruction we have faced from these crimes or the implosion of our psyches