Morning, or afternoon. One of the critical missions
of the Institute of Politics is to provide a forum
for the discussion of pressing issues of the day. And this certainly qualifies. Whatever you think about
Edward Snowden and his actions, and the adjectives range
from traitor to hero, he has indisputably triggered
a really vital public debate about how we strike a balance
between civil liberties and security. And so we're looking forward
to this discussion today, and there's no one better to
lead it than our own Professor Jeff Stone, who has
spent a lot of time thinking and writing
about these issues, and served on the
President's Panel after the revelations
of Edward Snowden, to think through
next steps and how to deal with the questions
that were raised. Another pressing issue today,
as it was 50 years ago, is the issue of civil
rights in our country. And this year marks
the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther
King's campaign in Chicago. And we are going to
have an event on May 19th with some of
those who participated in that event with Dr.
King, and some civil rights leaders of this day, to talk
about what happened then and to assess
where we are today. So we urge you to attend that. Let's see, that's going to
be at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Right? Chicago Theological Seminary. And now, it is my pleasure to
introduce the introducer, Brock Huebner, fourth year
student and a stalwart of the Institute of Politics. So we appreciate him a lot. Brock. The documents leaked by
Edward Snowden in 2013 exposed a massive National
Security Agency program gathering vast troves
of call records and internet data,
both internationally and among US citizens. Since these
revelations, there have been few individuals more
discussed and debated-- praised by some, pilloried by others. Though accused of espionage
by the US government and labeled a traitor by
US intelligence officials, Mr. Snowden has
also been praised as a patriot and
whistleblower, finishing as runner-up in Time's 2013
Person of the Year Award. Through his actions,
Edward Snowden forced a conversation about the
relationship between privacy and security, not only
within the upper echelons of US government, but also
on online comment boards, day-to-day conversations,
and on college campuses like the University of Chicago. Indeed, this was
Snowden's ultimate goal, claiming in an interview with
The Washington Post's Barton Gellman, quote, I didn't
want to change society. I wanted to give
society a chance to determine if it
should change itself. Already the subject of
an Academy Award winning documentary,
Citizenfour, his story will receive the
cinematic treatment in Oliver Stone's
upcoming film, Snowden. Leading this discussion
is Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levi
Distinguished Service Professor here at the law school. Professor Stone served on
President Obama's Review Group on Intelligence and
Communications Technologies. He also chaired the University
of Chicago's Committee on Freedom of Expression. Please join me in welcoming
Edward Snowden and Geoffrey Stone. [APPLAUSE] Hello, Chicago. So, welcome to the
University of Chicago. It's good to see you again. Actually, tell members
of the audience that we will have
time for questions. So you should be
thinking of questions as we proceed in
our conversation. So to begin with, maybe a bit
of biographical background would be useful. How did you get involved in
the national security realm? What is it that led you
to be interested in this? And how did you, how did you
find this to be something that was a passion of yours? So I grew up, for most of
my adolescence-- sorry. There's a little
challenge with the audio. It doesn't appear to be gated. So we're getting
feedback from some mic and I'm hearing myself. But I'll do my best
to talk through it. I come from sort of
a federal family. My father worked 30
years in the military. My grandfather
retired as an Admiral. My mother worked for the
federal courts, still does. In fact, a point of irony
that I have not overlooked. And when I moved
to Maryland, about say the end of elementary
school, middle school, I was in the suburbs
surrounding Fort Meade. So like everyone
else who eventually starts going through
high school and college and looking at what
are they going to do, I saw that this was just the
natural direction of my life. Now I had always been really
interested in technology, or shall I say, sort
of naturally proficient with technology. But I was really influenced
by the claims of government, by sort of the mythology
that's grown up around our country, and
of course, Hollywood. So I thought, you know,
in the midst of the lead up to the Iraq War, when so
many other Americans were protesting, I actually
drank the Kool-Aid and I said, I'm going to
sign up for the US Army. Didn't go for the Air Force,
didn't go for the Navy. I said, I want to try
out for Special Forces. And they had a special program. It was very selective. You had to pass higher
standards than you normally would at graduation of boot
camp just to be selected for it. But I worked really
hard and I got in. Now I got injured
and I got pushed out. And that was a time
where I really looked back and reflected on my
life, well, what could I do. And the conversations
that surrounded me were, well, you've already
started on your security clearance, because of course,
you enlisted in the military. So why don't you
finish that up and go into technology contracting
for the IC agencies? And that was where I went. I went to the CIA, where I
first worked as a contractor. While I was there, I was
sort of talent scouted by one of the government
employees who said, would you like to go overseas? And I had been, again,
looking for that. It just felt like it was
something that I could do. A lot of other people
in the office were like, I don't want to go. It seems like a burden. It seems like it wouldn't be
the kind of life you want. But for me, why not? So I did that. I rolled over to being a
staff employee at the Central Intelligence Agency. On my first day, I came in and
I took the Oath of Service. Now I will point out, it's
not an oath of secrecy. In fact, no oath
of secrecy exists within the CIA or the NSA. The Oath of Service is
to support and defend the Constitution of the
United States of America against all enemies,
foreign and domestic. It's not a pledge of loyalty to
the President, to an official, to a policy, or anything else. It's to defend the
Constitution, specifically. And not just against those
outside, but also against those inside. But I didn't have
any problems there. I went overseas. I served undercover
for a number of years from a diplomatic platform. And then I came
back and went back into contracting for the NSA. And this was perhaps 2009,
2010, somewhere in there. And for a number of years
I worked-- actually, sorry. I work for the NSA
as a contractor in Japan for a number of years. Then I came back to
the United States. I worked for Dell as the lead
technologist for their CIA account, designing
sort of supercomputers for building password cracking
clusters, and things like that. And then I rolled
over to Hawaii after I developed epilepsy and
was no longer permitted to drive in Maryland. And there, I really
began to be exposed to a scope of surveillance
that I hadn't seen earlier in my career. There had been things
that made me concerned. But particularly with the
election of President Barack Obama and his claims
to really roll back some of the most
extensive policies that we saw during the Bush
era, I thought, you know, he should be given a chance. And it was with growing
concern in these last years of the National Security
Agency, particularly when I rolled over in my final
position to working directly with the tools of
mass surveillance-- although I wasn't
working terrorism, I was working counter
cyber-- that I saw that our public claims
had become entirely divorced from the private
realities of how things work in the intelligence
services in the United States. And that, I would
say, is really how the arc of my career
in full began. So you mentioned that when
you joined the CIA position, that there was not a requirement
or oath of confidentiality. But I assume when
you took the NSA position, like other
contractors or employees, you were required to
acknowledge the fact that you had an obligation not to
disclose any classified information to persons not
authorized to receive it, and were aware of the fact
that the federal law prohibited that. Yes, I'm glad that
you brought that up. Because the thing
here is that yes, you are asked when you join the
CIA as well, and of course, the US military as
well, if you gain access to classified information,
you're required by this policy to safeguard it. And of course, by
some federal laws. However, it's a civil
agreement, literally just a standard bureaucratic
form like all of the others you fill out when
you're being brought on, on-boarded to these
agencies-- there are many of them-- called SF-312. It's literally a standard
form that the government makes everyone sign. So yes, of course, I recognized
the importance of it, as did everyone
else I worked with. This is a critical thing. We don't want people just taking
all the classified they have and throwing it up in
the air and just saying, you know, it'll all
sort out in the end. That is a very valid concern. At the same time,
it is not an oath. And this is where we start
to get in to the challenges. What happens when your
obligations that the government has itself asked you to
take upon yourself are in conflict with themselves? Do you obeyed the
oath of service, or the standard Form 312? So you reached a
point clearly where you'd concluded that despite
the fact that there are, as you acknowledged,
federal laws prohibiting the disclosure of classified
information to persons authorized to receive it,
that it was the right thing to do to make a
fairly large amount of classified
information public. So I'm curious, what led
you to the conclusion that it was the
right thing to do, and who did you consult
in making that decision? I think it's the
critical thing when we start to get into this
is setting out the context. Now I wasn't new to the
intelligence community. I'd been working in it for eight
years before I came public. Actually I believe
more than eight years. And the thing here is that over
time, particularly in the Obama administration, we were given
the impression in the press that things were changing, that
programs were shutting down. Again, the President
promised to shut down Guantanamo, a thing
which, again, he should be applauded for. But he didn't actually do it. Now that's not something we
can assign entirely to him, because obviously
it's Congress involved and other things like that. But particularly in the
progress of the laws, the progress of the
policies, the progress of the technologies that I
work with directly, and in fact helped build and design some
of these systems, a point which perhaps we'll have a chance to
discuss later in the evening. But for me, it really
came to a head. I had thought prior
to this that there was something that must be done. But I hadn't gotten to
the point of, should I light my own life on fire. Because I knew the risks. We had seen other whistleblowers
previously-- Thomas Drake, now we see recently Thomas
Tamm, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis-- many other
whistleblowers who had had their careers
destroyed for going through the established process. But it eventually
reached a point where public officials
were having conflicts within Congress
where congressmen felt the public needed to
know the truth of programs. And yet the most senior
official in the United States, General James
Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence,
felt comfortable enough in his position that he was
willing to lie under oath. Does the NSA collect
any type of data at all on millions or hundreds
of millions of Americans? No, sir. It does not? Not wittingly. There are cases where they
could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly. Now if I could just
make one point here, because I think it is important
for sort of the timeline of how people understand this. And this was not public
until quite recently. Laura Poitras, the first
journalist which I was, with which I was in contact
with, was at that point communicating with an
anonymous source who said look, there are serious
things going on in terms of mass surveillance. But she wrote in her
journal that the source was unwilling to actually
provide classified information to her at this point. He was willing to hint,
he was willing to talk about the programs,
but he wasn't actually willing to
provide documentation. 10 days after that
session in Congress, she said the source--
which was me-- had said they were ready
to provide documentation. That for me was
the Rubicon moment. Remains the question of
when it is appropriate for, with all respect, a
relatively low level official in the
national security realm to take it upon himself
to decide that it is in the national
interest to disclose the existence of programs that
have been approved by the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees, by the Executive Branch,
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and
to decide for himself, well, I think they're wrong. I think these programs
are not justified. I think they're illegal. And therefore, even though
it might have serious effects on the effectiveness of the
programs to make them public, I think the public
needs to know. When is it appropriate
to make that judgment to override the decisions
of all the elected branches of the
government who've reached a contrary decision? I think is a really
important question. I mean, this is one
that I struggled with for quite some time. And that's why when I
worked with journalists, I made sure that I never
had to make that decision. I wanted to remove from
myself the authority, the sort of
positional capability to publish any
document on my own. And that's the reason why
now, we're sitting in 2016, I've never made public a
single classified document. Now what I did do is
try to replicate that same system of checks
and balances, which had failed in our government. Again, clearly Senator Ron Wyden
felt that he should have made, or that this program
should have been public when he was questioning
the Director of National Intelligence about does this
program exist, basically. We had seen earlier in that
year, in February of 2013, the courts had an opportunity
to assess the same thing, and actually validate the
constitutionality of laws, validate sort of, do an
independent assessment of the propriety of these
mass surveillance programs, in a court case called
Amnesty versus Clapper, which was brought
forward by the ACLU. But they demurred. They said the executive branch
was asserting state secrets, right? And courts, by long tradition,
tend to defer to the executive when they go, look, it's a
secret, don't get involved. And beyond that, they
went, the plaintiffs couldn't prove that
they had been spied on. Which, of course,
raises the question of would the court have
decided differently if the court-- if the plaintiffs
actually could prove, yes, in fact, we had been spied on. And the President and sort
of the executive branch in general, of course,
could have rolled back these programs, but they didn't. In fact, they were clearly
trying to shelter themselves in many different
ways where they didn't have to take any
sort of a stance where they would
publicly explain, what is the value of
these programs, what is the efficacy
of these programs, and what is truly a
necessity of these programs. And this, I think,
clearly goes to the heart of the issue, which
is that 2013 isn't wholly about surveillance. Surveillance is obviously
a critical factor of it. That's much of what
we've discussed. But what we're
talking about here now isn't really about
surveillance at all. It's about democracy, right? And democracies, right, our
government's open liberal Western democracies
tend to derive their legitimacy, their
ability to pass laws, to rule, to enforce policies
on the principle of the consent of the government. But as anyone in this
room could tell you, consent is only meaningful
if it is informed. So then how do we bridge that
gap where the system does fail? And as you say, we
suddenly have a case, the system has failed
comprehensively. The only people who can
actually right the system are individuals. But these individuals aren't
all at the top level, right? There are, of course, you
know, senior directives and executives who could
have done the same thing. But there are also people
at the working level who can do the same thing. Is your seniority really
more critical than what you've witnessed. Right? There are many people at the
top level of these programs who know how the policies work. They know every
letter of the law. But they have never
actually run a query through a system of mass
surveillance in their life. They know the theory of
how it's implemented, but they don't know the
fact of how it is executed. And so for me, I recognize
that I wasn't perfectly placed, as you implied--
actually, as you stated. And no offense taken by it. I was not sitting
next to the table of the Secretary
of Defense having this conversation with him. But this is why we
have a free press. This is why the First
Amendment is first, right? We need to have a truly
independent, apolitical faction within a free society
that can challenge the government for control
over information on which they will base their votes. And so I talked to the
journalist and I said look, I'm going to make an independent
assessment of the documents that are available to me on
the basis of the things that are known to me of what
you need to know to make that independent judgment about
the lawfulness, the efficacy, the propriety, of
these programs. I do not want you to publish
all of these documents. In fact, I don't want you
to publish any detail, any fact that you do not believe
to be necessary, and serve a vital role in the public
interest for us to know about. And then further beyond
this, beyond my review, beyond the
journalist's review, I required them to
agree that they would go to the government, in advance
of publishing every story, and give the government
sort of a almost an opportunity to do sort
of a negotiated injunction here, where the government
would have the opportunity to review the documents
on which they were based and make an independent
assessment of would these cause specific harm to any policy,
any program, or critically, most critically, any individual. And in all cases, that
process has been followed to the best of my knowledge. And the government
does not dispute that. The only thing that
is in contention is that the journalists--
and these aren't just sort of radical journals. We're not talking
leftists or anything. We're talking about The
Washington Post, The New York Times. Said that in no case of
the stories they published did they believe they
put a life at risk. And that's why I think--
now we are in 2016, right, not 2013-- when it was
quite reasonable to go, this could cost lives. This seems really dangerous. And in fact, it could have been. I don't discount the fact that
risks we're involved in this. But the operation
of a free press necessarily involves risk. Living in a free
society involves risk. That is not a weakness. That is a strength. Though let me do a little
bit of devil's advocate to that position to
point out that we live, as you say-- first
of all, I want to point out the First Amendment
is first because the first two amendments didn't get adopted. So, that's neither
here nor there. The notion of a free
press is to give the press a regular freedom. But in a democracy, the
notion is that the people get to decide things. One of the things
they get to decide is they get to elect
their representatives. And the representatives
get to make decisions. Everything's not a plebiscite. And there are certain
areas in which it's always been understood that there's
a degree of secrecy that's necessary. So the problem with secrecy
is that on the one hand, it can quite legitimately
further important interests on the part of the government. And it can also be
used as a device for shielding wrongdoing
or abusive authority from criticism. And one of the
difficult questions is knowing which of those
two types of secrecy is going on in any
given circumstance. And one of the reasons
why we put in place a series of oversight
over national security activities, which didn't
exist before the late '70s, by creating the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, by creating the House and
Senate Intelligence Committees, was to basically create a
series of checks and balances within the government to provide
a mechanism by which democracy could operate. Not in the sense that
there can't be secrets, but in the sense
that secrets can be kept only if there is
a persuasive case that's made to the elected
representatives, to the judiciary, that
that secrecy is necessary. So there's still the
underlying conundrum of when it's appropriate to
make this decision that I think, or journalists who, journalists
have self-interests which are not necessarily the
interest of the nation, when they should be put
in the position of making these decisions other than the
representatives of the people themselves. Let me go to another
point though, and ask what was the outcome of all this. So to what extent, in
your view, has the law changed about these
programs in ways that you think
solve the problems or address the concerns
that motivated you in the first place to
disclose this information? Well, as was said in the
introduction I think, it's important to understand
that I wasn't setting out to change policy. I was setting out to restore the
balance between the governing and the governed, which had
started to get a little bit out of whack. I mean, as you say, we elect
representatives for a reason, right? But the only way that
we can understand whether we want to re-elect
them or support their policies, continue this, is if we
actually know what they are in at least broad outlines. Now I'm not saying we
need to know the name of every terrorist target. I'm not saying we need to know
the name of every company we penetrated, or whatever. But if we don't know at
least those broad outlines, we're starting to enter a system
where actually our votes begin to become ineffective. Because as you say, we elect
people to represent us. But if we don't know
what they're doing, and if we don't know what
the other candidates who are their alternatives
would be doing, what are our votes
doing really doing? So I think necessarily there
is a bias toward an informed public, rather than
one that's in the dark. Now there are
exceptions to this. But these exceptions
are, I would argue, extraordinarily rare. When we're in
times of total war, for example U boats
in the harbor, we're already
engaging in policies. We've rolled back
civil liberties in ways that we would never approve
of during peace time, and we very likely
should not, in peacetime, thinking about things
like Japanese internment. But regardless of
our desires, in fact, we see the human
nature they often do, these things
become more clear, because we're starting to
talk about existential threats to the nation. Now there are no serious
officials, including the President of
the United States does not consider terrorism
to be an existential threat to the United States. I think that's fair. But when we think about
how this balance is done, and I think you're starting
to get onto a theme, which is that are we
throwing open the doors if we allow whistleblowing
to occur without punishment, if we allow people who are at
the working level to reveal evidence of serious wrongdoing
or policy failures-- waste, fraud, and abuse,
or however you want to classify it-- is this
something that will very rapidly get out of control? Will there be sort
of an anarchic rise of all of these
low level employees whenever a policy
decision is made, saying I don't
agree with that, I don't agree with that,
running to the newspaper, and things will fall apart. Well, I would argue the record
shows that's not likely. Because let's look at the
case in the status quo today. Are there any cases of
successful whistleblowers who have changed policy in the
national security space, right, in this classified
space we're discussing, who have not been
retaliated against severely? Daniel Ellsberg was
literally charged with treason for his activities
back on the Pentagon Papers in the '70s. And this was, again,
referring to a huge report. I believe it was
thousands of pages. But something that was, he was
revealing after it happened. The information was
a little bit stale. Despite this, treason-- it
was during a time of war, technically his life
was on the line. The only reason he was
not actually convicted was because of the
government's wrongdoing. I think he wrote a book
on the Espionage Act, and pointed out that there's
often no defense at all against these charges. We've seen Thomas
Drake, again, who was trying to reveal the Bush
era warrantless wiretapping program, which I believe
you've spoken out against. And yet he was subject to
criminal investigation. His career was over. He lost his wife. He lost his home. Now rather than working
as a senior executive at the National
Security Agency where he was drawing an SES level
paygrade-- for those of you who aren't in the government,
the senior executives have an entirely different pay
grade, which is shall we say, very well accommodating,
and now he works at an Apple
store selling iPods-- I would argue that
there is enough natural countervailing weight
against whistleblowing. There are enough
counterarguments there that we don't need to
worry about that so much. But I'm entirely open to
being persuaded otherwise. So the interesting thing
though about what you just said is that you're right in
saying that one needs a balance, that there are
certainly circumstances where whistleblowing is
important and valuable and justified. But there's also circumstances
where you don't want it, where it does much
more harm than good. And the question is how to
strike the right balance there. So one thing, and your point
is that we don't really have that many whistleblowers
because of the way we treat whistleblowers. So maybe that's striking
the right balance. I mean, maybe the bottom
line is to basically say, OK, we have to make
these people suffer. Some people will have
enough integrity, as arguably you do, to
say I'm willing to pay the price because I think
that's important for the nation. And they will blow
the whistle on things. But if you make it
painless, then you might wind up with having all
these Tom, Dick, and Harrys doing it in situations where
it's actually much more harmful than beneficial. So maybe we're doing it
right at the present time. And that if we don't
penalize the whistleblowers, even if they've done
more good than harm, right, we'll wind up inviting
too much whistleblowing, which will do more harm than good. So that is a fair
argument, but I would also say it's a very utilitarian
argument, right? It's an argument without ethics. We're thinking about the
ends without thinking about the means. Is it right to
basically sacrifice people who are
acting in, what we're taking for granted
in this example, is the public service, right? Should we throw the village
girl into the volcano to appease Pele, so there's
no volcanic eruption? You can make an
argument for that. But there is actually,
I would argue, a problem down the road, which is you've
run out of whistleblowers very quickly. Whistleblowing is already rare
enough as it is, as we've said. And in most of
these cases, we see individuals who
actually are bringing things of public interest. Now the President
of the United States was certainly not my
biggest fan in June of 2013 when this first came out. He spoke at a press
conference where he seemed quite uncomfortable. And he said look, basically
there's nothing to see here. We've drawn the right balance. Don't worry about it. But by January of
2014, his position had gained an awful
lot of nuance. By then he had appointed you and
I believe a number of his peers to write the report,
Liberty and Security in a Changing World,
which by the way I thought was excellent. But he also said, while he
can't condone what I did, this has made us
stronger as a nation. And so if we lose that, we're
either losing opportunities for us to become
stronger as a nation, or we're actually starting
to face a countervailing risk of decay,
where we don't have these natural whistleblowing
events, which are basically steam release valves, right? Whistleblowers,
because of the risks, only come out when the system
fails comprehensively, right? I tried to work in the system. I went to my supervisor. I went to my peers. And they all said, you have no
idea what you're getting into. You really don't want
to play that game. Whereas Thomas Drake,
for example, he went to the NSA
Inspector General, he went to the Department of
Defense's Inspector General, he went to the NSA's
Office of General Counsel, I believe, and he
went to Congress. He did everything right,
and yet they absolutely destroyed his life anyway. And I think to contextualize
this, this is key, for a moment I'd like
you to put yourself in the position of
whistleblower, right? Don't take my case, for example. Imagine your own case. You see something,
you witness something that is so contrary to
the values of this nation, to our black letter
laws-- for example, let's take the Bush
era warrantless wiretapping program, which was
what Thomas Drake was trying to blow the whistle on-- and you
try to fix this in the system. Because I think this
is the solution, right? We should have official
whistleblowing paths, right? You should be able to work
within the system in a way where you can get the
grievance redressed, right? You can get the bad
policy corrected. You can get the
violations of law and those who have
broken those laws held to account and remediated. But right now when you
go through that system, the government is
not particularly, I would argue, especially
responsive to that. The lawyer, the deputy
general counsel, right, number two lawyer
at the NSA, who Tom Drake came to his
complaints with, said this, If he came to me, someone who
was not read in to the program, and told me that we were
running amok, essentially, and violating the Constitution. There's no doubt in my mind I
would have told him, go talk to your management. Don't bother me with this. The minute he said,
if he did say, you're 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, than anything after
that, I probably wasn't listening to anyway. I take it what he meant
by that-- I hadn't seen that before--
but I would take it what he meant by
that was, we weren't violating the Constitution. And we thought about this,
we have lawyers looked at it, they said it was OK. Somebody comes and complains
to us about it, I know better. So that's how I would interpret
what you just showed there, which is not necessarily wrong. Right, but that's entire-- I didn't like the
program either, but that sounds to me
like what he's saying. You're absolutely right. There's a much greater need
in the system for review and checks and balances and
so on than existed in the past and that exists at
the present time. And there's also clearly
a need for better avenues for whistleblowers to bring
their concerns to the attention of people who have
the authority to act upon those concerns
within the system. And those are real failings
that continue to exist. But I do want to go back to the
question I asked earlier, which is, have the changes that
have occurred in the laws as a result of your
disclosures, in your view, made a real difference? Or are they just pretty
much window dressing. No, absolutely, I mean,
we've seen the very first law restricting powers of the
intelligence community, rather than expanding them,
passed in the wake of these. Now again, these
are the programs that everyone was
defending in June of 2013, including I believe, you. This is, again, no disrespect. But it's just to show that even
individuals such as yourself, who have come down very strongly
throughout their history, on the side of civil liberties--
no one would say you're sort of an agent of
the state or anything like that-- were persuaded. You said, you know, there's
nothing in these programs that we've seen that's illegal,
that's unconstitutional. But since then, when we got
that extra layer of review, right, once we take
that NSA Deputy General Counsel, who goes look, I
don't have time for this. I'm not going to listen to this,
because we've already looked at this as lawyers, right? We're not just
brushing this off. We've said, all right,
this is constitutional. What about the independent
review, the review that comes from the courts? Now so again, in
February of 2013, Amnesty versus Clapper got
flushed from the courts. But in 2014, we
saw the same cases that had been brought
forth-- again by the ACLU, because they were a customer
of Verizon Business, who was subject to that
very first document that was revealed-- get them into the
courts, and on appeal they won. We had had other judges who said
these programs were illegal, they were likely
unconstitutional, they were Orwellian
in their scope. And of course, we had had
counter from other courts and things like
that, but suddenly it begins to percolate up
to the Supreme Court where we get an actual matter
of vital public importance-- you know, this really shapes the
relationship between the public and the government-- answered
in what one would believe would be the traditional
American sense. Because as you say, right,
we've got the executive branch of government saying look,
we looked at these policies. We're comfortable with them. Fair enough. But that's not what the
whistleblower is necessarily coming forward to do, right? They need to get this addressed
by the whole of government. And ultimately, I'm no lawyer. You're the professor here. I was raised to believe that
when we have those major cases and controversies, it is
the courts that should be able to decide upon these. But the courts
increasingly, because of the overclassification
problem, the reflexive assertion of
state secrets privilege, they do not get to weigh
in on these matters of what would be sort of critical
public importance. And I would wonder, you
know, is this perhaps, would you consider this to
be another method of getting these controversies answered in
a safer or more internal way, where we get public
advocate organizations like the ACLU or others, who
can actually go before courts and get these things
answered in a way. Create some sort
of procedure where, rather than the government
saying, you know, courts don't have
an answer or can't have any involvement
in this all, except the rubber stamp
FISA court that in 33 years, said no only 11 times
out of 33,900 requests. If we could get a real
court, a normal court out there, an open court
that even in careful ways, providing opinions
in careful ways, could get to the
heart of controversies without requiring individual
employees to put themselves on the line like that. Perhaps ones who
are not qualified or make the wrong call. To the audience, about the real,
regular courts, real courts and the FISA court,
historically the problem with having real courts,
regular courts deal with issues of national security
is that those courts don't have clearances for access
to top secret information. Their law clerks, their
messengers, their secretaries, their facilities, are
not made for that. And so you can't
actually have them address issues that are meant
to be classified because they're not capable of handling
the security issues. So in Congress in 1978 created
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, which was
a special court consisting of regular federal judges who
serve on a rotating basis, within the national
security realm, who act as regular judges
for the purpose of being able to rule on the legality
or constitutionality of secret programs. And it's the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance court that is meant to
serve that function. And one of the questions
that Mr. Snowden raises is whether the court has
actually served that function effectively. And I think there are
legitimate questions about whether that's so. Let me ask you this. In what circumstances would
you come back and face charges? So I have already said
from the very first moment, that if the government
was willing to provide a fair trial, if I had access
to public interest defenses and other things
like that, I would want to come home and
make my case to the jury. But as I think you're
quite familiar, the Espionage Act does not
permit a public interest defense. You're not allowed to speak the
word whistleblower at trial. That was in the case
of Thomas Drake. And it's this kind
of thing where, it's a very popular
criticism, right, that I think many people would
innately understand and feel is reasonable, right? Why don't you face the music? But if the only
tune they're playing is an unfair trial
where you are literally deprived of the only defense
that actually matters in the case, is that
really something that we would consider to
be in America's interest? Do we want to create
sort of a precedent that dissidents should be
volunteering themselves not for the 11 days in
jail of Martin Luther King, or the single night
in jail of Thoreau for not paying his poll
tax, but 30 years or more in prison for what is an
act of public service? Now the reason that Thoreau and
Martin Luther King put forth this brand of civil
disobedience is to put the burden across
many members of society in the mass movement
to create change that could not be ignored. If all of the weight is
borne by a single individual, right, you can't
build a mass movement, because the first one to step
forward is put in jail forever. So what you're
saying is, unless you can make the case to the
jury that I was justified in doing this, and there is
a defense of I was justified in whistleblowing, that
you wouldn't come back. So why doesn't Congress pass a
law that creates that defense? It's perfectly within
their authority? Professor, I would
have to say, that's a better question
for you than I. I'm not quite so expert in the
intricacies of the Espionage Act. But democracy doesn't
seem to agree with you. Well, I wouldn't
say that's the case. They could easily
make a defense. They don't, because they
don't think it's a good idea. Well, do we have them
even consider it? Do we have them even debate it? Congress is desperate to
pass so many laws today, you may have noticed,
but they're not doing so well in
actually getting anything legislation passed. They're having trouble
passing a budget, and now you're asking
them to restructure laws that are 100
years old, right, that may be absolutely
atrocious, that everyone in Congress realizes
are just obscene. But at the same
time, they're still focusing on getting that
budget passed, right? There's priorities. But more generally, let me
turn that around a little bit. Do you think it's
appropriate, do you think it's fair that someone
who has done something, that has done more good than
bad, presumptively, goes to jail for the rest of
their life for a public service without being able to make
a defense of their action? The argument I would make, as
playing devil's advocate here, against that
position is that you don't want to encourage every
Tom, Dick, and Harry government employee with access to national
security classified information to think that it's OK for them
to disclose this information. The benefit outweighs the harm. You just don't want
people doing that. And therefore, you
can't create the defense because the defense creates
more problems than it solves. That's the argument
on the other side. So if you look at
it not in terms of the injustice to the
particular individual, but to the systemic
incentives it creates, I can see why Congress has
no interest in doing this. Even if they're sympathetic
to you, they may say, you know, we're going to create
a lot more Snowdens who are not actually having the
benefit outweigh the harm, but they think it is,
and therefore are going to do these harmful leaks. And we don't want
to encourage that. But isn't that why
we have jury trials? Isn't that a question
for the jury? No, the jury only
operates under the law as it's been established by
courts or by legislatures. They don't get to
make up the law. So the question-- I'm not talking about jury
nullification or anything like that. I'm saying if a law were
past, it's not a given. It's not taken for
granted that suddenly you have this anarchic
release of everything. These people still get
charged, but now they just have a defense so they
can make sure the jury, the jury goes you cause more
harm than you did benefit. No, you go to jail. The same is with
manslaughter or self-defense, all of these other laws. Right. What is the exceptional
act of whistleblowing that would make it
unreasonable for a jury to weigh the same facts, the
same harms, as other crimes? Again, I think the answer
that one would give is that the incentive
effects it creates are dangerous,
because again, you have this problem of
relatively low level employees who think that they know
enough to make a wise decision on this, and they're wrong. And if they're
wrong, it arguably has real harm to the national
security and to the nation, and you don't want
to encourage that. So I think the stakes
are perceived as very great on the negative side. And that isn't to say I
wouldn't be in favor of this. It's that I'm playing
devil's advocate here, right? But I think that's the
argument on the other side. One, I guess, last question
before we open it up to the audience. What's it like
for you in Russia? Strange. I have to say though,
it's also kind of amazing, because right now,
I'm not in Russia. I'm in Chicago. A few hours earlier, I was
in Zurich, Switzerland, giving a talk to an
IT security company. Tomorrow, I'll be at Princeton
speaking with researchers, cryptographers, and
technologists, computer scientists, to try to solve
some of these mass surveillance issues that we're
dealing with today. So while it is true
I do sleep in Russia, I live all over the world. [INAUDIBLE] person? I'm sorry. I lost the first part of that. Do you get to walk around
and be like a regular person in Russia? Yeah, of course. There's not like a
wire fence with a guard and a tower or
something like that. I ride the subway
like everybody else. How do you pay for like lunch? With money. How do you pay for stuff? I mean, where do you get it? I get paid to speak at
many of these events. And I provide an
enormous portion of that. Are we paying you? I don't know. That would be a
question for Ben. I'll let you pass on that. I believe this is an unpaid
event, particularly right, particularly because
you and Mr. Axelrod, I believe, who were--
thank you, by the way, for arranging this talk--
Mr. Obama might not be excited to hear
that you were arranging paid talks on my behalf. Actually, before we
go to the audience, there was one other
question I wanted to go to you on, because you've
got a lot of expertise here. That I've thought about this
before, and it's fascinating. So the premise
that you put forth for the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance court, and this is not contested,
is that we couldn't trust normal judges with
it, because they're not placed to handle sort of
this sensitive information. But is the fact
that we are actually monitoring this
specific terrorist-- they're creating this specific
plot, we want to thwart it here or there-- more sensitive,
or even sensitive in a particular
different character than it is for the police or
the FBI to go to a normal judge, in an ordinary court
and say, we are tracking a serial killer who we
think will kill again, or we're monitoring this burglar
or this organized crime figure, and things like that? Courts have handled
extraordinarily sensitive material for hundreds,
perhaps thousands of years. What is it that makes
this so different, and is it really different? Or do we take it for
granted that the bargain we made in the '70s, and
have now tried out, actually hasn't worked out, and maybe
we should restructure it? The assumption, I think, is
that in the national security realm where you're dealing
with international relations, and you're dealing
with much higher stakes than in domestic
criminal conduct, except in very
rare circumstances, is that there is a
need to keep secret your investigative methodologies
and surveillance techniques. Because if they're known,
people can circumvent them. And that's the key argument. The key argument is that if
people know what we're doing, it's not just our American
citizens who know it, but it's the targets
of the surveillance. And once they know
it, they can avoid it, and then we lose the
information and then we have terrorist attacks. That is a fair argument. How true that is, but
that's the argument. That's, I think, the concern. The danger, just to go back
to the point I made earlier, the danger is that that's
not really what's going on. What's really what's
going on is the people in this secret world want to
be able to do what they want to be able to do without having
anybody else question them-- actually nobody wants to be
questioned if they can avoid it, in terms of
their authority-- and that this is actually an
illegitimate use of secrecy in the guise of protecting
national security, which is really in the guise of
creative autonomy for people that don't want to be bothered. And sorting that out is
a critical challenge. Let me turn to some questions. Hi, Mr. Snowden. Thank you for joining us. My name is Matt Enlow,
I'm a first year student at the law school. And I'd like to ask if you
would support efforts to access and disseminate classified
information from the FSB? Absolutely. I mean, who wouldn't? But if I could actually
get back on-- sorry, is there a follow up? Is the FSB, for anybody
who doesn't know. No, apology. Yeah, Chinese Ministry of
State Security, Russian FSB, whatever. If we have understandings
of these organizations, particularly in more
authoritarian states, I don't think it's
particularly controversial to think that would necessarily
serve a public interest. However, I didn't
work for the FSB. I didn't work for
the Chinese MSS. I worked for the US
National Security Agency. If I can get back to just
one point about the challenge [INAUDIBLE] orthodoxy
that Professor Stone, you put forth,
which is very fair, of when people know that
these capabilities exist, do they suddenly
become ineffective? And I would actually
argue, again, this is something that's
taken for granted, just like we need a
secret spy court to deal with spy programs. But when we look at the
history, is that really true? Everyone in the room
knows that your phone calls could be tapped, and they
knew that before 2013, right? This has been in movies
for more than 60 years. These programs have been
public for, since you know, the 19 teens, I believe. And yet every day, we
are still collecting evidence of criminal
activity on open phone lines. We're still intercepting
terrorist's phone calls, even though Osama
bin Laden stopped using a cell phone in 1998
after Bill Clinton fired a missile at his training camp. And even Angela Merkel,
as was published in one of the things--
this is a head of state-- is making open phone calls about
matters of foreign affairs. The fact that a capability
is known, I would argue, does not render as ineffective
as we might presume. Hi, my name is Melissa, and I'm
a second year in the college. Looking ahead to the 2016
presidential election, as well as the
Congressional elections, do you foresee any change
occurring in the system you've been talking about? We have already seen the
beginning of an effort to challenge, or perhaps
modify Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. This is a program that
involves mass interception, but targeted reading, you
could argue, of communications that have one and foreign. So one side of them is
in the United States, other side's are overseas. And they sort of grope through
everything with their tools and pull things
out of the bucket. They also use it for going
to US service providers. There's a famous slide, I
won't pop it up for you, but showing sort of Yahoo,
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, all of those guys,
and the times in which they voluntarily joined this NSA
program to simplify beyond what the law allowed, right? The law required them to
respond to subpoenas and what not, but all these
providers created sort of boutique
tailored processes for American
intelligence agencies to go forward and get
whatever they wanted. Now if it's about
an American citizen, they had to get a
warrant for this. But if it's anybody
else in the world, doesn't matter whether
they're French, German, or something else, they're
fair game without a warrant. Hello, Mr. Snowden. Thank you for being
in Chicago today. It's my favorite thing. My name is Nico. I'm from Berlin, Germany. And I remember in 2013, your
leaks and all these stories about the NSA have been on the
news in Germany and in Europe, generally for months. And I would say a large majority
of the public there knows your name, and even more people
are informed about the NSA surveillance systems. However, in the
United States, I've talked to people even
on this very campus that have never heard your
name, or even aware of NSA surveillance. So how do you explain,
or what's your take on these discrepancies between
Europe and the United States? So there's something,
I mean, this is a really complex question. I'm not best qualified
to answer it. But if you ask me
to speculate on why that is, we have a broadcast
media body in the United States that is very
politically charged, it's very hyper partisan that
goes in one way or another. And they pick narratives and
they run with those narratives and they go with them,
whatever sort of draws the most viewership and doesn't
destabilize sort of their commercial incentives. When we look at the portion
of the United States public that gets the majority
of their news online, we've seen polls
that show they have greater familiarity with
the NSA revelations, and things like that. I imagine this correlation
also exists overseas. But countries that were
not the United States didn't have the same
hero vs. traitor ratings grab available to them
because for them, of course, they're not Americans. They don't care about that. They don't see that
as an issue at all. They're only focused on
what is the public interest of this information. Whereas sort of the traditional
broadcast anchors in the United States, they found--
and we've seen this, I mean, I did an interview
with Brian Williams where their whole lede
was to do an online poll at the same time of hero versus
traitor, hero versus traitor. They were not so interested in
dealing with the controversies as they were with actually
making their product, which is whether it's a
news product, it's an entertainment
product, whatever, it is very much a business. Hi, Mr. Snowden. I'm Mark, I'm a first
year in the college. I've got a two pronged question. So the first is,
do you have reason to believe that
NSA is compromised either 40, 96-bit RSA, or
any of the common ECC curves. And for the rest
of the audience, what are the
consequences if or when NSA breaks strong encryption. So the gentleman is referring
to common encryption algorithms that are seen as
very strong today. One of them is the one that's
typically used by, for example, GPG Communications. And as of the time I was
at NSA, it was not broken. And the NSA doesn't
even dispute this. I believe that as a form
of asymmetric encryption using the RSA, I
think once we start to get quantum computers
that are actually effective in quantum algorithms
that work on the search space, it'll reduce the
security of it by half. It won't break it entirely,
it won't break it immediately. I could be wrong here. I'm not a cryptographer. Hopefully someone
in the room is, and you guys can meet after. But the second one
about elliptic curves, there are real questions
about how some of the elliptic curves, again, for those
in the room who are not mathematicians, this is a
very difficult math problem that we basically use to
protect your information. If you can't solve
the math problem, you can't read what
people were doing. And the way we make
this work for encryption is, we just share the answer to
the problem between the people who should be able to read it. Anybody who doesn't
have the answer, right, who can't cheat
on it, the problem is just too hard
to work through. Some of these sort of
initial seed values, we don't know how
they were generated. So we have alternative
curves called like, nothing up my sleeves curves,
that were created in response to some of these concerns. So there are choices there. But in general we
have seen the NSA make efforts to break or weaken
cryptographic algorithms, information security processes,
in products and services that are used in
the United States. And this does expose
us to a lot of risk. But we have a growing
cohort within government, and those who sort
of support government and write reports
on their behalf and share their expertise,
such as Professor still here-- and I think people in
the room should give him credit for his report--
where I believe Professor Stone, correct me
if I'm wrong here, you recommended in your 46
recommendations for the United States government in response
to these revelations, that the NSA not weaken
encryption standards. And in fact, they work to
increase the security of them. Is that correct? That's correct. Absolutely. Thank you for coming today. My question is about, what's
your reaction to third party portrayals of your
story, whether it's Oliver Stone's forthcoming
movie, or my favorite, John Oliver, coming over, equating
your leaks to pictures of genitalia. What's your reaction to that? Did you expect to become
a celebrity in this way? You know, it's really funny. If you go back to June 2013,
you know, I was very forceful in my first interviews. And I said, look guys,
stop talking about me. Talk about the NSA. I am the least important
part of the story here. But again, when we
get into how does media sell attention, right? How do they buy attention? How do they actually
get you to watch things? People care about characters,
for whatever reason. Just our biology, our brains,
the way we relate to things is about character stories. So they simply
would not let me go. I was hoping so
hard that we would get some other
figurehead, somebody to stand up and start
talking about them, who didn't have the
common criticisms against their character
that I do, right? Because regardless of
how you feel about me, there are people who
dislike me, right? There are people who
disapprove of what I did. If we could divorce
that from the narrative, that would be
extraordinarily helpful. But we didn't see it happen. At least, the media didn't
have an interest in it. At this point now, three
years down the road, the way I look at it is
these different portrayals in these different
third party things, I don't care how they
want to talk about me as long as they're
getting people interested in the matters of
governance, democracy, and security for
our communications around the world. Talking about what the world
is today in the status quo, but more importantly, what kind
of world do we want to live in. I don't care how
they do it, and I think it's a great thing that
we, at least of the public, can have those conversations. I think it's great that in the
United States, we don't have, hopefully, secret services
that are kicking in the doors and shredding hard drives of
journalists, like they did in the United
Kingdom, or god knows, more authoritarian countries
are doing all the time. So I guess I kind
of rambled there. But I would say, look, one of
the weird things about being thrust into these
positions where everybody's talking about you is
about 80% of it's wrong. And you just pray for
the 5% they get right. Hi, there. I'm Lilly. I'm a first year in the college. So I found it very interesting
that in a recent article you wrote, you encouraged people to
whistleblow only if they feel like it's the right moment. So how do people know when
it's the right moment, and how much of the attention
you received in 2013 would you attribute
to good timing? That's a really good question. In fact, I think I
missed my moment. I think had I had a better
understanding of these programs earlier on, had
I understand sort of the nature of that Senate
Intelligence Committee relationship with the Director
of National Intelligence where he was totally comfortable
giving false testimony when he had sworn an oath,
I should have come forward when people could
have actually talked about this during the election. But at the same time, it has
worked extraordinarily well. Ultimately, the fact that so
many people do know about this, and the fact that our government
has changed its policies, its positions comprehensively
across the board, you know, again,
prior to June 2013, everybody was defending
these programs. Everybody was supporting these
programs, without change. Since then, we've seen
the President put forth new changes, new
executive orders. Again, they're not
the reform we need, but it's a start, right,
which is important. We have seen the Congress
pass new laws in response. We have seen the courts
consider these questions. We have seen and
consider these questions, and again, actually find
these laws unconstitutional, saying they had
never been authorized by statute from the
beginning of their operation. We have seen the United Nations
declare mass surveillance of exactly the character
we've been discussing today-- and of course this is not
specific to the United States, this is a global
problem, we're dealing with this in many countries--
is a violation of human rights. We have seen the European
Court of Justice strike down the Data Retention
Directive, which was a mass surveillance
sort of mandate where you had to log all of the
access of your citizenry, like every website they
touched, and things like that, every phone call they
made, and so on and so forth. And it just goes
on and on and on. I mean, I can't actually give
these things with the times that we have available. But more than anything else,
we know about it, right? Not everybody has to care
about every issue, right? Not everything is the most
important thing in the world. But the fact that we can
assess these for ourselves, we can make informed
decisions about how we want to communicate,
how we want to protect against the
sort of depredations of people using groups who have
access to these technologies. And also, ultimately, what
we want to advocate for, what we want to campaign
for, the kind of candidates that we want to support to
actually get the kind of reform we need when we cast our vote. That's a win. I apologize. It looks like you've
lost my video feed, so I'll go on audio. Hi, I'm Andrea. I'm getting my master's
in social science here. And I was reading
a story that was saying how Henry
Kissinger, on Monday, received an award from
the Department of Defense. And you could make
the argument that he was a party to
government misdoings. And so I guess my
question is, what do you see is the role of a
whistleblower in calling out individuals that are party to
the kind of government abuse, and does pointing out
individuals strengthen the argument, or does it
just create scapegoats when you're really trying to
target the government entity itself? Well, actually if I could
defer this one to you, Professor Stone, at least
for a first take on it, given that you have
the concerns about how this grows into a practice,
and the potential concerns. How would you feel about that? I am embarrassed to say,
Edward, looking at the screen and trying to figure out
when the picture's going to come back, and I did
not listen to the question. I apologize. No, no. I feel like a
student in class who just got called on when I
was looking at my iPhone. OK. We all have a finite
amount of attention, right? Could you repeat the
question for the professor? No problem. Basically, when a
whistleblower comes forward, what do you see is their role
in pointing out individuals that are party to the system? Does it heighten by
creating examples and really making it tangible
for individuals, or does it seem to
undermine the entire system that whistleblowers are
trying to point out, by creating a scapegoat? The scapegoat meaning
other people they identify? More that the government
can point to an individual's wrongdoing than
taking responsibility that the whistleblower's
trying to point out. So if the question
is to what extent does the focus on the
issue of the whistleblower divert attention from the
substantive question that's been raised, so we're
all sitting here today talking with Edward Snowden
about Edward Snowden. If we had an event today
about the substantive issues that Mr. Snowden
raised, my guess is we would not have nearly
the demand in the audience that we have here. So now the question is whether
that diversion takes attention away from the substantive issue,
or whether people are actually much more interested
in the celebrity than the substantive issue. And I think probably
both are true. But I have no doubt
that, I know we had huge demand for this event
so we could watch Mr. Snowden up on a video screen. And I have no doubt if I
were having this conversation here about the very same
issues that Mr. Snowden raised, that the vast
majority of students who wanted to attend this
event wouldn't be here. But I don't know that's
a negative thing. I think it's two
different elements of it. There's interest
in the substance, and there's an interest
in the celebrity. And they don't, I think,
take away from each other. Sure. If I could just follow
on that real quick. I do think there's actually
a peripheral issue that's a little bit different,
which is if we get a lot of whistleblowers who
are focused on individual's criminalities, right, rather
than programmatic wrongdoing, whistleblowing can start, or
at least the individual acts of it, can start
to look partisan. It can start to look like
this is actually about people you don't like, or trying to
get your boss out of his chair so you can occupy it, as
was the case with Mark Felt, I believe, the Deep Throat
back in the Watergate era. But we don't know
for sure that that's one of the sort of
leading theories. It's more helpful
when we actually start to focus again on
the problematic things. Now as Mr. Stone said, can
you draw the same crowd when you don't have the
individual story, I'm not sure. I tried my best, but they
wouldn't really let go. One last point. If, technologically, we can
restore the video if we just reset the call right
now, I'm not sure if the audio room is prepared
to do that, if they are, we can do that. Otherwise, we can just forge
ahead with audio only right now. Can we get the next question in
the meantime while they decide? Hi, Mr. Snowden. My name is Isabell [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a first year in a college,
and my question actually works nicely with that
last point you were making. I'd like to talk about the
path that you mentioned a little bit earlier
for whistleblowers in the government. And I'm wondering if you
foresee any sort of problems with partisanship with politics,
if the path could be abused by any sort of
government official to use that path for their
own political soapbox, and to abuse it, taking
away the spotlight from the heart of the
issue and focusing it on the politics of whatever
that government official may be viewing. Do you foresee any
sort of problems if that path were to be set up? So this creates,
actually, or starts to get at a very serious
problem, which has not been discussed at all publicly
in any substantive way, at least in the open side. Professor Stone
may have seen some of this when they were talking
internally around the White House and related agencies. But regardless of what
you think about me, regardless of if what I
did was the right thing or the wrong thing,
what does it mean that a 29-year-old contractor
could walk into the NSA, walk out with what the
government contends is an unknowable
number of files, provide these to
journalists in secret, and the government
doesn't know about it until this individual
is sitting down in the room with
the journalists? What if that individual,
or a similar individual, weren't going to the press? What if they weren't
interested in the furtherance of our methods of government? What if they weren't
trying to help things? What if they were trying
to help themselves, right? What if they were spying
on people's communications or sharing them
for monetary gain or that they were actually a
foreign intelligence agents or something like that? The fact that controls are
so lax in an agency with so much power, so much capability,
should concern everyone. Thank you. Hi, Mr. Snowden. My question has to do with,
earlier one of the questions mentioned that there
is surprising, possibly surprising level of
unawareness of your name and your leaks in the US. And earlier we also
touched upon the interest in the contents of these
leaks, about whether people would show up at events if
the leaker wasn't a celebrity, somewhat of a celebrity. So I also noticed
that even among people who are aware of the massive
level of interception of information and
communications, a sort of apathy towards
the content of these leaks, despite their gravity. So I was wondering if you
expected that sort of reaction to your leaks, and
why you think that is. So I pretty famously
talked to the journalists, for those who
followed the story, and said I was pretty
confident this was going to be a three day story. You know, it was going
to be on the front page, there was going to be
reaction the next day, and then there was going be
some commentary the next day, and then they were
going to move on and nobody was going to be
talking about it anymore. The response that we
have gotten has so far outpaced any reasonable
expectations, right? There has been so much
interest in this topic. There's been so much
that people want to do to try to address these
problems, real or perceived, in terms of the
mass surveillance of the American people, and
of course, those overseas to a much greater extent. Now at the same time, what
you really read as apathy, I think it comes down to
what is the origin of that. Because I don't think
you're wrong in saying that a lot of people
give a shrug at it. But I believe that's actually
a feeling of disempowerment, that people don't
actually feel they have any agency, any capability
to change their circumstances in this regard. Because we're talking about
extraordinarily complex technical systems that are
inaccessible in the most part to many laymen. And even for specialists, right? This is a very complex topic. And even if you can go, you
know, we can solve this issue or we can solve that issue,
trying solve everything comprehensively so we
can go, this is the goal, this is the policy, this is the
plan, this is how we fix it, feels like it's unreachably
large for people who don't have their entire
life to dedicate to it. And there are many people
out there who are doing that. But I think the
response that we should have here is to think
about what you can do. And one of the most
important things you can do is just talk about it. When you mention
there are people that don't know about this,
who are apathetic about it, think about what's
really at stake here. Because it's not
about surveillance, it's about rights. When people say, you know,
I don't care about privacy because I've got
nothing to hide, they don't really understand
what privacy is about. Privacy isn't about
something to hide. Privacy is about
something to protect. That thing, privacy, is the
right to the self, right? Privacy is what allows you to
decide what it is you believe, what it is you think about. Freedom of speech
doesn't have much meaning unless you have the
freedom and space to think. Freedom of religion
doesn't mean anything unless you have the freedom from
prejudice, from outside forces, right, the space within
yourself to decide what it is that you truly want to worship. Even when we get down to the
language of private property, you cannot have a claim to your
self unless there is a right to the self. Otherwise, you are simply
entirely subject to the whims of the collective. Saying that you don't care about
privacy because you don't have anything to hide is no
different than saying you don't care about
freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. It is the most fundamentally
anti-social thing I can think about. Because even if you
honestly did not need it, and many people who
are in positions of privilege, positions of power, really
don't, because the authorities are never going to
come after them. They're who the authorities
are there to support. They're who the authorities
are there to protect. But if you are a
minority, if you are a little bit
different in any way, if you are a little bit
radical or you dissent in any way against
the prerogatives or the privileges of
people in the most power, rights are for you. If you want to have
them, you better stand up and defend them. Thank you, and thank you
so much for all your work. Thank you. On that eloquent note,
we have run out of time. Please join me in thanking Mr.
Snowden, particularly-- wait, wait, wait. Particularly because,
in fact, we did not pay him to join us today.
