Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald & Chris Hedges on NSA Leaks, Assange & Protecting a Free Internet

[Music] this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report i'm amy goodman today a special on two people who will not be home for the holidays edward snowden and julian assange in this special broadcast we spend the hour with nsa whistleblower edward snowden along with two pulitzer prize-winning journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges i recently moderated a discussion with them at the virtual war on terror film festival after a screening of citizen four the oscar-winning documentary about edward snowden by laura poitras the documentary chronicles how snowden met with laura poitras and glenn greenwald in a hotel room in hong kong in june 2013 to share a trove of secret documents about how the united states had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on americans and people across the globe it was the biggest leak ever to come out of the nsa after sharing the documents edward snowden was charged in the united states for violating the espionage act and other laws as he attempted to flee from hong kong to latin america snowden was stranded in russia at the airport after the u.s revoked his passport he was granted political asylum and has lived in moscow ever since i began by asking edward snowden to talk about why he chose to blow the whistle on the nsa i grew up in the shadow of government um both my parents worked for the government and i expected that i would as well september 11th happened uh when i was 18 years old and it was one of those uh things that really changes the politics not only of the people but of place and at the time i didn't really question that it just seemed like you know we had this new problem everybody on tv and when everybody else was protesting the iraq war uh i was volunteering to join and that's because i believed the things that the government was saying not all of them of course but i believe that the government was mostly honest because it seemed to me on reason uh that the government would be willing to risk sort of our long-term faith in the institution but for short-term political advantage as i said i was a very young man i ended up going uh to work for the cia undercover overseas out of the diplomatic platforms then i moved into contracting which is really you're still working for the government in government offices uh taking the directives from government working on government equipment but the badge that you wear that identifies you changes from blue to green the color of only because most people go into contracting still working for the government in these classified spaces because you make basically twice as much the same work and then i worked in japan for the nsa um before eventually bouncing back and forth back and forth back and forth until i ended up in hawaii in a little place called the office of information sharing i mean it was only here uh and i was the sole employee of the office of information sharing they didn't realize how good i would be at that job and neither did i that i could see the whole picture which was at the same time that i was beginning to identify with the government the government was beginning to identify less with its citizens than the public more generally what had happened was as you know we grew up with this idea of the private citizen because we have no um power or influence relative to the great institutions of the day uh and the public official right where we know everything about them and what they're doing who they're meeting with and what their policies are and what their interests are we scrutinize them because they order our lives their directives determine what happens tomorrow now well that was being inverted and because of the new war on terror all the words all of the old ideals could be tossed away and replaced with a deuces and that was the system of mass surveillance that we were publicly told about the government knew it was likely unconstitutional and certainly uh illegal but they continued with it anyway because they argued to themselves at least it was necessary it was not necessary and it would take some time to establish that with facts and that's you know the story that we've done the years since but in brief realizing this through the documentation of the architecture of the system how it came to be who was involved in building it and authorizing it and constricting it which fell to people like me who did not realize at each step of our careers what it was we were actually building because the need to know principal uh collapsed your universe to your work you didn't realize what the office next door to you was doing you weren't supposed to for those of us who didn't know i mean it was only by breaking down those barriers the fact that i moved from ciu to say that i moved from uh actual uh officer of government to contractor working for private companies extending the work of government and then finally working in this uh office where i could see sort of everything not just at my agency but many other agencies that i saw the large picture um and that was fundamentally that the government had lied not only to me but to all of us um and this to me seemed like something broadly we had to know because if uh government is in a democracy intended to be mandated by the consent of the government but we don't know what it is that they're doing then that's not consent or it's not informed consent consent is not informed it's not meaningful uh and so i started writing to journalists that brought me eventually to glenn and that's where the story goes from there can you talk about that that reaching out to laura poitras and glenn and yes i want you to tell the story again because there are many who haven't seen the film and it is that act that then we'll introduce glenn uh when you decided to leave everything that you knew so well where you felt so safe to enter a world where as you said you had no idea where you would end up well when you first enter on duty at the cia they take you in a dark room it's a very solemn ceremony you raise your hand and say you know i state your name whatever um do solemnly swear to uh support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies foreign and domestic uh they talk about the oath of secrecy there is no both of secrecy um there is a uh standard form 312 classified non-disclosure agreement the government you sign which is what they're actually referring to but it's not an oof it's a civil agreement now on the other hand you do take this oath of service as they describe it and this for me is what anime what happens when you have uh conflicting obligations on the one hand you're supposed to keep the secrets of government because this is all classified information that we're discussing um the fact that the government is breaking the law is itself in secret but when the government's law breaking is a violation of the constitution that you entered into duty to uphold what then do you do uh you know i talked to my colleagues i talked to my bosses uh they wanted nothing to do with this many of them agreed that it was wrong but they said you know it's not my job to fix it's not your job either um and they knew what would happen as a result everybody knew you know the government was going to be extremely unhappy and everybody who has done this in the past has ended up charged in prison as a result of this um but for me i felt that i had an obligation to do this and so uh i gathered information that i believed was evidence of unlawful or unconstitutional activity and i could have published it myself i could have just put it up on the internet established a website possibly could have made it so it would not likely retract back to me um however uh i thought if i just declared myself the president of secrets and that i made some mistake right there wasn't much process involved there the problem that got us into this situation was that the government itself was acting as a kind of uh unitary power the office of the executive the president of the united states was assuming that luke you know we decide what we will and won't do the courts have no role in this uh the legislature has no real role in this uh overstar site hasn't been functional for years which i'm sure the other panelists will describe but i didn't want to replicate that so i felt i could check uh my own worst impulses and suspicions by partnering with journalists right who could then take my bias out of the information look at what the document said i actually go to the government for clarification where things weren't here and to challenge government but to do their own investigation to go to companies for comment and everything like that and find the best uh possible version of the truth right what is the most accurate representation of this of that superset of their investigation what is the subset of that that's in the public interest to know um working uh in absolute secrecy again with laura poitras um greenwald eventually barton gellman and ewan mccaskill i shared this archive of information with them on conditions that they publish for example only what they believe is in the public interest to know merely what i thought was uh useful to know and that's what brought us to this hotel room in hong kong to explain what these documents actually meant for the first time because as glenn can uh sort of testify to uh these were very dense technical documents and they're the sort of thing that journalists um in the uh public world had never seen before well because they were so highly classified so that does bring us to glenn greenwald um glenn talk about your first contacts with ed snowden um when you decided to make that trip to hong kong the risks that you were taking at the time you worked for the guardian um taking on all the institutions that you knew could certainly take you down i recall you know in the weeks leading up to our ultimate meeting and was kind of fixated on the idea that we all fly to hong kong to meet with him and you know we still didn't know who he was we didn't know in which agency he worked and the fact that he wanted us to go to hong kong made everything much more confusing because why would somebody with high level access to top secret documents of the u.s security state usually you would expect to find a person like that you know in the kind of underworld of arlington virginia not you know hong kong and i remember telling ed you know look i i trust you i i feel like what you're saying intuitively is is uh genuine but before i get on a plane and fly all the way literally across the world to the other side of the world show me something that demonstrates that you're authentic that you actually have material that makes all of this worthwhile and he said i'm going to give you the tiniest tip of the iceberg um and we spent i don't know a good you know two weeks setting up just an encryption system to let him do that he sent me i think 20 documents and even though those documents were as he said just the tiniest tip of the iceberg they were shocking you know i mean just the mere fact alone that top secret documents had leaked for the first time ever from the nsa the most secretive agency within the world's most powerful government was already momentous enough independent of their content but among the documents were parts of what we were able to report as the prism program the cooperation on the part of what at the time were the nine tech giants of silicon valley with the nsa widespread data sharing giving over wholesale information about their users to the nsa with no judicial checks no legal framework no democratic accountability so suffice to say had sufficiently excited me uh and lured me i think that night i called my editor at the guardian and demanded a fly to new york the next day which i did i met with her janine gibson showed her what i had and everyone immediately knew that this was going to be one of the most important stories in the history of modern journalism just based on those tiny number of documents let alone the the full archive and that next day so it was very fast laura and i boarded a plane um from jfk direct to hong kong and you know i talked about before how i spent the 16 hours so engrossed with the documents that by that point we had had not necessarily the best operational security ever reading top secret nsa documents you know on a on a on a public passenger jet um while in them you know flying across the world but i knew this was by this point the kind of first opening ever into this sprawling undemocratic security state and i couldn't help myself i needed to see what was in there um and then we landed in hong kong 16 hours later and then the very next morning through a plan that had devised that involved lots of kind of spycraft which was really important we didn't know at the time what u.s government authorities knew about ed and what he was doing and what we were doing what chinese authorities might have known what local hong kong uh intelligence officials might have known so all of that stealth was so important um but it was a huge blur you know we were 12 hours in a different time zone had a hurdle ourselves within a very short amount of time over to hong kong to meet someone we knew nothing about um you know and i'll never forget the moment that ed walked in and i think baltimore and i we've talked about this before we're shocked by many things including his young age um you know i thought the whole time i was talking to somebody who is likely 60 or 65 years old and you know i think part because of the sophistication of of ed's insights but also you know the thing that struck me so much and that to this day you know is a critical part of my world view of how i look at things was unlike most sources who understandably when they're turning over top secret documents to journalists and doing something the government regards as a crime and therefore want to conceal their identity from the start you know ed's posture was i don't want to hide i i want to identify who i am i want to explain to the public why i'm doing what i i've done and why i think it was so important and so you know my belief was that he was probably 65 or 70. it's i think you know a lot easier to say i'm willing to risk life in prison if life in prison means 10 or 15 or 20 years of life expectancy rather than you know 60 or 70. um so we were shocked by that and we went up to ed's hotel room and and laura being laura you know immediately turned on the camera and me being me immediately began interrogating ed i think we had like maybe 10 seconds of niceties before you know i forced him into this very uh intense interrogation we were sitting maybe a few feet apart from one another in this small hotel room and by the end of the day i was convinced that ed was authentic that the documents he had given us were genuine and that this was a story that the public had an immediate right to know should have known years ago and the courage and and the kind of principled conviction that drove ed to do what he did i think immediately infected both myself and laura ewan mccaskill the guardian journalist joined us the next day and he you know i think was um contaminated by that well uh that as well and i think that um eventually that made the guardian very passionate and willing and that act as we all know created these reverberations that really to this day lasts that the government is always trying to spy on what it is that we're doing they particularly target marginalized and vulnerable groups at the time the hot you know number one on their list was obviously muslim communities around the world including in the united states and that journalism and whistleblowing is one of the few if not the only means we have to find out what they're doing and to guard against their their abuses journalist glenn greenwald he won the pulitzer prize for his reporting on edward snowden's leaked nsa documents when we come back we'll continue our discussion with glenn and ed snowden and be joined by another pulitzer prize winner the journalist chris hedges we'll talk about surveillance internet freedom julian assange and more this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report i'm amy goodman as we continue our discussion with nsa whistleblower edward snowden and pulitzer prize-winning journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges i asked ed snowden to talk about what he felt was most significant about the documents he leaked in 2013 exposing the nsa's massive surveillance apparatus the most important thing about the stories of 2013 that i think people because it was not a story about surveillance um it was a story about democracy uh the surveillance system the global mass surveillance system was the product of a failure in governance where we the public had sort of lost our seat at the table of democratic governments because uh secrecy the state secrets regime and the classification animal had grown to such a size that it was allowed to push uh public oversight further and further to the fringes of the decision-making apparatus until it was basically no longer present at all what that meant was for the first time in history uh there was the technical capability um and the political reality that it was possible to construct a system that had not existed before now what did that system do in history traditionally government surveillance has occurred in a targeted manner whether it is the police going we suspect this one this person of a crime going to a judge showing their basis for it establishing problem cause the judge okays it then they put teams they have people uh follow them when they leave their house in the morning they have another team go inside their house and place listening devices place video surveillance you know copy their notepads take photographs of whatever's going on flown their their hard disks whatever this is a human-enabled capability and that put necessarily necessary constraints on how frequently it could be used and as the government agents are sort of following this person through their life sitting down in the cafe behind them you know trying to see who they meet with right now license plates and all of these things and they don't hear every word that the person says generally but they get the idea they see who they they see how long they were there with that person they see where that person went afterwards because they sent someone to follow them this these activity records were now available for the first time in a form called metadata uh things that are analogous to what a private detective would get from following you around your life and you know taking pictures and writing down notes we're now being produced by the smartphones in our pockets by the laptops you know on our desk on the couch next to us but it was also coming from your tv it was also coming from your car uh you know the system is inside of that now it's coming from automated license plate readers all of these things for the first time we're producing information that now the government went what if we didn't have to go to a judge in every individual piece and say we thought this person was up to no good what if under the aegis of the threat of terrorism we could say we want to collect all information that could potentially theoretically be relevant to a terrorism investigation before we need it and we'll simply say look at this information if you're not suspected but we will still gather it about you as though you work this is what changed and this is what continues what has actually happened that expands this to to an even greater state of alarm is that now this is a business now corporations are getting this and they're competing against each other to see who can provide similar product and even more attractive product not just to governments who they do sell this information to as a service but also to advertisers and anyone else who's willing to pay that's what's changed which brings us to the pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges um chris you've spent decades um exposing governments wield lethal power from central america to the middle east to the balkans ed snowden said that behind his disclosures was the balance of state power versus people's power to meaningfully oppose that power can you talk about the significance of what ed just said in terms of exposing the wars that the us has engaged in to this day i would focus narrowly on what everything that ed exposed for the press so when i began reporting the war in el salvador in 83. we when we got uh secret or classified information they were documents uh we didn't transfer anything electronically um and and this was the traditional way but in order to get those documents you had contacts with people uh who were willing to pass them to you and so uh what happened and this was under the obama administration the aggressive use of the espionage act against anyone who would reach out kiriakou drake were mentioned and others a shutdown invested traditional investigative journalism which i did periodically as a foreign correspondent and then did after 9 11 when i was based in paris uh covering al qaeda in europe and the middle east uh and so friends of mine i left the paper in 2005 but friends of mine who are still doing investigative reporting at the paper said in terms of getting any information on the inner workings of power of government it has become impossible and i won't quote her but a former colleague of mine at the paper an investigative journalist said even when she speaks to someone at the doj or anyone else they're nervous about even reciting official policy over the phone something that sounds like a press release because they don't want to get tagged uh for speaking to a journalist in fact they're already tagged uh and so i think it's important to understand that what ed did and what glenn did uh is the only way left well jeremy hammond was another figure uh when i sued obama over section 1021 of the national defense authorization act which overturned the 1878 posi comet doctors act which prohibited the military from use being used as a domestic police force we used the emails i think there were some three mill million emails hammond had hacked into with stratfor a private security firm like the one ed worked for uh and the homeland security where they were they were the chat was trying to tie uh domestic opposition groups to foreign terrorist groups so i mean they were asking it was anything posted on this particular site this uh jihadist site uh so they can use terrorism laws against them uh and so the last readout for as a as a journalist comes from figures like ed but of course the cost is catastrophic uh in his case if he was not in moscow and they had grabbed him uh he would be facing the kind of charges that uh julian assange is facing uh who didn't leak by the way it didn't hack in anything he just published the material so i think for me what's been so distressing about the modern kind of period uh is that it that wholesale surveillance that ability to follow anyone has really shut down our traditional access to people with a conscience inside systems of power which is uh the only way that we can do any real reporting uh on the national security state and it's left and you see what they've done to ed what they've done to glenn i mean after he published that he wasn't sure whether he should come back to the united states um so that that for me and and then in in speaking about the crimes of empire i mean that gets into another issue which is the collapse of foreign correspondence because as revenues have fallen uh to the floor uh the all the foreign bureaus are gone there's no there's no reporting people will pull a clip from you know disseminated out of syria or something uh that some somebody has sent out but that's not reporting so there's a giant black hole about what's happening which was of course again what made the iraqi and afghan war logs so important uh and then i will just in defense of people there uh most of whom are now freelance that and and i covering a war is very expensive i mean if you want to be safe so i was driving in bosnia a 100 000 armored car uh you know sat phones all this kind of stuff um but it is dangerous it is i think the danger level is exponentially increased not so much from sorry ever where the serbs were intentionally trying to shoot journalists indeed shot 45 foreign correspondents um uh but it you can't you can't go into the caliphate i mean it's uh you can't go in with into syria with many of these groups because you'll get kidnapped but but that has created uh uh for me as somebody was overseas and just terrifying it's drawn a veil on on what the empire is doing uh and and and you know to quote thucydides the tyranny that athens imposed on others when he's attacking the death of athenian democracy and the rise of the athenian empire it opposed it imposes on itself so i i guess my last point would be that many of the techniques of surveillance and control that ed exposed were often first tested i mean gaza is a laboratory for the israeli military and intelligence service and they will talk about it as being tested against the palestinians uh so we often see uh on the outer reaches of empire the techniques that gravitate back to the united states as of course they have first off you're absolutely right about the laboratory aspect i've said before all of this stuff moves from war front to front um and we see the same kind of uh techniques that were uh present in the archive of material that i provided the journalists in 2013 um being used to you know make the movements of cell phones in afghanistan being applied by the fbi that's black lives matters protesters uh just within the span of 10 years i mean this stuff moves quite quickly uh from something that seems exceptional capability that can only be used far away against you know the other uh it moves right here home to the you know your neighbors um but you you spoke about this this dynamic that uh you know it's something i persevered on i think about this a lot uh which is uh it's become more difficult to access officials and let them tell you anything much less than the truth about everything the relationship between sources and the journalists that they work with in context of power i think all over the places threatened but those doors have really been closed and this has um i think enormously increased the necessity so the power of document releases you know things like chelsea manning provided things like pipe provided ellsberg in the 70s but also we see in the case of this uh facebook person francis hogan um it feels as though we're in it talks about this pope's truth dynamic where the actual facts of the case are uh disputed as frequently as the interpretation of them people try to then the obvious truth is and it seems like documentation has a way around that um i would just ask where do you think things are headed from if we no longer have access to factual information for the government you have a much greater history of viewing this than than a lot of us uh here do amy you've also seen this your entire life democracy now is one of the few outlets that i think reports aggressively on this government is perennially deceptive it's snowing us in regards to what is happening because they want us to view the facts of our reality through a preferred lens when they begin shutting the voting public from um you know the the facts of our reality what they actually are and at the same time any documentary release is uh quite literally criminalized uh what happens next well what happens next is east germany which i covered except that we're far more efficient than the stasi and uh i just i i'll let glenn because he's written on this better than i have i don't think the facebook whistleblower is a whistleblower i think she's a tool of the security and surveillance state and they're using her to justify the kind of censorship they want against people like you and glenn um so you know this gets into a whole other analysis but we've undergone what john ralston saw calls a corporate coup d'etat it's over any time you have a tiny cabal that seizes power in our case corporate and all of the institutions especially the democratic institutions are deformed to essentially buttress and increase that power and wealth uh then of course you're leaving the vast majority the uh you know the 99 percent if we want to use that term uh as uh your either the whole process is about disempowering them and that surveillance has to become more draconian pulitzer prize-winning journalist chris hedges formerly with the new york times we'll continue with hedges edward snowden and pulitzer prize-winning journalist glenn greenwald when we come back and we'll talk more about the imprisoned publisher julian assange this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report i'm amy goodman as we continue our discussion with national security agency whistleblower edward snowden and pulitzer prize-winning journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges i asked ed snowden to talk about u.s attempts to prosecute and extradite wikileaks founder julian assange who suffered a mini stroke in a british prison in late october as he fought to avoid extradition to the united states to face espionage charges he faces 170 years in prison a british court has now ruled in favor of the biden administration's appeal to extradite assange to face charges in the u.s in a ruling condemned by journalists around the world as a major blow to press freedom this is ed snowden i think what uh a lot of people miss um and we see this in the public responses to uh sort of leaking whistleblowing whatever you want to call that this documentary release um is uh both sides of the aisle democrat republican um honestly pick any country pick their political dynamic it doesn't matter power does not respond well to its bad behavior be exposed um that's that's very clear and that's what happened in case uh that's what will happen every case um there is no force or access to courts or process or protection for someone who makes the government uncomfortable or produces a large enough political threat an entirely political threat a non-violent um publication of truthful information this is all julian assange has ever did done all of the charges against him that you see the government talked about communicating national defense information espionage you know uh conspiracy there's a uh entirely constructed uh hacking charge under the computer fraud and abuse act uh which is supposed to show trying to hack military computers or something uh but it's absolutely ridiculous because for one it never actually happened it's the product of a 20-second conversation uh between a supposed chelsea supposed julian assange because the chat transcript is pseudonymous they don't even know it's these people um but then it's describing uh this alleged manning trying to access the administrative account for the personal machine the the the work machine that's being used uh to copy this material it's not going to provide additional access so i'll tell you i work with these kind of machines i understand how it was it was entirely a source protection conversation it was entirely about how could manning protect their identity if indeed this was manning from being discovered now the government is presenting as if you know julian assange hacked the pentagon it's absolutely ridiculous that if you look at the constellation of all of this now you know julian is one of history's greatest criminals you know less time than their threatening assange with and what was a saunders crime telling the truth about something the government did not want to be told um and then you know chris mentioned uh this other facebook person and i think a lot of people miss this it doesn't really matter why a whistleblower or anyone else publishes this material it doesn't matter whether it's you know facebook's dirty laundry it doesn't matter whether it's john podesta's risotto recipes it doesn't matter whether it's uh material regarding the the absolute government's internal truth of mass surveillance the whistleblower is the mechanism they are the lever we don't have to like them but they don't truly matter once they've done this and this is why it's wonderful the support that i received and i very much hope that julian will receive more of it he absolutely hasn't particularly from the press which is i think one of the great media tragedies i will tell you um but the response should be a little bit like you know thank you very much for your whistleblowing um but now please stop telling us you know what we should do about facebook um you are not especially placed to you know uh answer a public conversation listen to you will hear you out sure but you shouldn't be treated the speaker of god's honest truth simply because you held it in your hand and provided to someone else that's a wonderful thing it's a public interest gesture right but i i think a lot of the opposition people have to this is there's an elevation where the whistleblower label is applied to someone and then everything they say from then is supposed to receive additional weight perhaps it could but their statement shouldn't really be evaluated any differently than another person saying you know it's interesting i was uh reflecting on what i had said at the beginning which is that in some ways these events that we're convening to discuss seem like they were 10 lifetimes ago and in a lot of ways anything that happened before trump does and then in other ways it a lot of it seems like it it happened just yesterday and i think the reason for that is is because sometimes there are really important details that we've forgotten so chris mentioned and alluded to for example the stasi and i remember just now i probably haven't thought about this in several years even though it's incredibly important and revealing that when there was a report around the time we were doing the snowden reporting that the nsa had been spying under president obama on the personal cell phone of angela merkel she called obama indignant enraged by all accounts and very meaningfully given that she had grown up in communist east germany under the actual stasi it wasn't an abstraction to her but a very vivid memory invoked mem the stasi and said essentially what you're doing is what they did and that caused german newspapers to go and interview stasi agents former agents of the stasi and what they said about these snowden revelations were we would have loved to have had the capacity that the nsa developed but it was beyond anything that we could have possibly dreamed of what they have done is so far beyond anything we were capable of doing or even thought about doing this is ubiquitous surveillance that they've created and i thought that was really poignant and sometimes that the details like that have gotten lost i think the reason and on the other hand though it seems like yesterday is because so many of the the kind of battles that were waged as a result of of what ed did and the fallout are very much with us today um you know i i i think that at the time when we started the reporting and the debates uh that were provoked by them unfolded the focus was on the infringement of our right to privacy obviously that was an important part of the story but i always felt like the story was about a lot more than that one part of it was whether or not we actually have a democracy in anything other than name only if incredibly consequential events are being undertaken in the dark without anybody knowing about what's being done you know one of the things that was so striking is when we revealed these programs it wasn't just the public and the media that had no idea the nsa was doing any of these things it was members of the intelligence committee and members of the national security committees in the uk parliament who wrote op-ed saying we had no idea any of this was happening and so for me a big part of what we were doing was waging a battle on behalf of the public's right to know and so much of the reason that there was so much intense backlash against the story and against ed the reason eight years later he's still in russia and then when donald trump floated the idea of a pardon on a bipartisan basis people were so outraged the reason they're so angry about it wasn't necessarily because of the right to privacy aspect it was because of their ability to make consequential decision decisions the most consequential decisions without anyone knowing about what they're doing was in peril by these revelations and that's the same reason that julian assange is now in prison not necessarily because they're specifically angry about what he revealed in 2010 or 2016 or even the apple vault revelations what they're really angry about is that he represents still a uh a weapon that prevents them from doing what is most important to them which is the ability to run the world including societies that are ostensibly democratic without anyone knowing what they're doing but the other aspect of it i think is really important with regard to this whole you know facebook disclosures and the debate that's taking place over uh how we combat things like misinformation and fake news as a result of francis hagen but even before that is you know i had mentioned that that that first day that i interrogated ed what i wanted to know and needed to know more than anything was you know you're 29 years old you have a loving family you have a girlfriend um with whom you've had a very fulfilling relationship you have this incredibly bright future ahead of you why would you want to risk your entire life spending the rest of your life in a high security prison for this cause like why is this important enough to you to do and what finally convinced me about ed's motives was when he told me about how a free internet was so central to everything that he was able to do in his life growing up you know in a like a lower middle class home without the ability to travel internationally and lots of those privileges that people who come from world have that the internet was his gateway into exploring the world something with which i had identified so much and so in a lot of ways i saw our cause back then not necessarily this more limited uh definition of protecting the right of privacy but protecting a free internet this invention that is singularly capable of empowering people and emancipating people and enabling us to communicate and organize without centralized corporate and government control and i see so many of the current controversies about how much censorship there should be online that comes from facebook and google the anger that facebook and google aren't censoring enough which i think is the big takeaway from these disclosures from frances hagen debates about how much the government should be controlling the internet very much this a a central part of that same battle that was being waged when ed came forward that when julian came forward which is can centers of power around the world tolerate any kind of instrument like the internet that enables people to interact freely to think freely to develop ideas freely to organize freely outside of the control of centralized authority what is happening to julian assange today and wikileaks um this case as uh glenn said i don't think any any reasonable person that believes it has anything to do with what he did in 2009 uh publishing the iraq and afghanistan war logs and autonomy bay files which received rewards all over the world high prizes in journalism everyone recognizes it today as a public interest story of historic importance it is the best place the guardian the new york times every major you know news outlet around the world participated because of that recognition right absolutely and it's like just this was a positive event even though the administration obviously hated it but we're not in that world now right we're 20 20 20 21 um we are far from it and now it's dug up and now it's used against him and i think it everyone recognizes the question is why or should recognize the question is why this is a case of political character that asserts a political crime my political crimes never qualify for extradition and then what is a political crime political crime is the victim is the state itself assassination is not a political crime because the head of state is still a person right you you shoot the president the archduke whatever you are you still qualify for extradition because you formed an individual the state as an apparatus when you are publishing its misdeeds and that is itself held up to be criminal uh there is no more political crime which makes julian assange a political criminal or a political prisoner i think certainly if assange is a criminal we all are criminals because we all want to know the truth we all deserve to know the truth and we must [Music] at least the outlines of it in order to exercise our roles as citizens and free society uh glenn said again and he believes you know in 2013 the motivating force for his participation is the free internet go further and say it's the free society about the press they hate i'm talking about the institution like the times they hate julian and they hated him when he was giving them that information and the reason they hate him is because he shamed them into doing their job i've i don't know if i told you amy but every time i sat with bill keller who couldn't stand me of course and wanted me out of the new york times he would bring you up he goes well i guess she could work for a democracy now i mean i think he hated this thing about you well because you i praise you shamed him that's what the alternative press does it shames them but there's a real hatred because they want to present themselves as the journalistic and kind of moral center uh and so that's why the press after these revelations turned with a vengeance i think that uh the julian case is so important not only because he is still in belmarsh but because it does provide this prism into all of these issues it was ironically bill keller who was the first person to smear julian's personality by writing a column after where he said i've worked with julian he smells his socks are so dirty they don't even come up to his ankles this you know media the role of the media in all of these things that we're talking about the corporate media i think is so crucial um because obviously if the media were out there like they were doing under trump saying that joe biden is imperiling press freedoms and raising their voice it would be a lot more difficult to do what they're doing doing to julian but they're not and i think it gets back to what chris said um julian was doing the kind of whistleblowing and reporting like ed was doing that the government doesn't want and what they do what they think is reporting is when the cia comes to you or the fbi comes to you and says here's the information we want to be published and then they go and publish it and i think they are a huge impediment um just so many of the goals that we've been talking about trying to reach but also a crucial instrument that's being used by the centers of authority to maintain these repressive structures in place in the little time we have left uh ed you know julian assange is in the bellmarsh person um faces 170 years in prison in the united states yahoo news revealed that the cia had a was plotting to kidnap or assassinate him if we get in by you coming specifically on that and also then in your own case um what is your hope of returning home what communications are you having with the biden administration is there any hope i i definitely haven't communicated with the biden administration i didn't communicate with the trump administration um we're not really calling each other every day uh you know that that's uh quite a ways back um case i'm just going to set it aside because it's you know there's no movement on it doesn't really matter history will be the judge um if they want to force me an exile phone you know i'm not going to be miserable i will make as positive and impact the world uh as i can from the situation that i can uh about the case with julian and uh the assassination plans against some of the rendition plans against them it's really an extraordinary story you uh you are listening haven't read this uh you absolutely should uh you know the cia was planning out with the white house and their partners in in london uh having gun fights in the streets of london if you know they had to shoot out the the tires of a plane who was going to do that which service was going to do it um just absolutely you know it's crazy it's hard to believe um where it should be apart but unfortunately in the direction that our society is progressing in the post-9 11 period is becoming um more familiar and i think that's uniquely threatening it's it's funny when i came forward in 2013 in citizens i think there's a comment in the film nevermind like uh you know the embassies right up the street they could rendition me or the triads whatever uh you know just try to often whether they do it to hands-on or whether they say oops it was an accident he fell to me those things were possible and at the time even journalists who were working with me argan gelman washington post of the time said he thought that was you know a little bit ridiculous but years later as he began to see he himself was subjected to surveillance uh he saw that the u.s intelligence services had been keeping the tabs on his reporting before he was ever involved with me uh and of course now we see things like julian um force is not a barrier to the state when it comes to securing their objectives and i believe anything they could have done uh to stop this story they would have done if they believed it uh if that meant taking action against me if that meant taking action against a journalist i believe they would have done it in the case of julian assange that thinking has been vindicated uh julian assange is not a whistleblower that's not a judgment on him that's the fact he's not the source he's the publisher that means he should be less at risk than the whistleblowers and yet somehow he has ended up more at risk now the question is how is that possible has assange changed and we look at what the charges against them are not really talking about things that happened in the distant past what has changed is the nature of the state and its relationship to the press and if we let that be established with them during assange not with a gun shot in the streets of london not with a drone but with concrete in belmont or florence or uh whatever prison they put him in that is not better now whether you kill someone fast or you kill someone slow if you are killing them because you don't like what they say that is i think a final judgment on the state rather than on the victim of the state that's national security agency whistleblower edward snowden along with pulitzer prize-winning journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges i spoke to them as part of our discussion at the virtual war on terror film festival we'll link to our entire discussion at democracynow.org

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 1,120,284

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, News, Politics, democracynow, Independent Media, Breaking News, World News

Id: ky0YLV5Vt9w

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021