Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky discuss Edward Snowden and the NSA

on behalf of Harvard bookstore it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this evening's event with Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky discussing discussing Greenwald's new book no place to hide Edward Snowden the NSA and the US surveillance state Greenwald is the best-selling author of how the Patriot Act and with liberty and justice for some his reporting on the NSA has won him numerous awards and he has been acclaimed as one of the most influential political commentators today he is joined tonight by Noam Chomsky one of the world's leading public intellectuals Chomsky has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955 and his political and philosophical writings are known and acclaimed worldwide in no place to hide Greenwald recounts his trip to Hong Kong to meet with an anonymous source who had information on pervasive government spying that source turned out to be Edward Snowden examining the broader implications of the surveillance and revealing fresh information on the NSA's abuse of power Greenwald also takes on the establishment media for their avoidance of adversarial reporting on the government he asks what it means for both individuals and the nation when a government prize so invasively into the private lives of its citizens we are so very pleased to be hosting them tonight please join me in welcoming Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky good evening everyone and thank you so much on behalf of professor Chomsky myself for that really warm and generous welcome and thank you so much as well to Professor Chomsky for agreeing to participate in this evening's event I was here actually two years ago or so from my prior book with Professor Chomsky and what I said at the time was that writing a book is a really solitary process you sit there and write it and you struggle with it and the only people who are reading it are your editors who are constantly telling you how awful it is to justify the changes that they want to do that you're fighting against and you really have no idea how people are gonna react and and you can't wait to get it out into the world and what I said two years ago is that there really is no greater honor than writing a book and then having the opportunity to discuss it with one of your premier intellectual heroes really one of the most fearless and accomplished public intellectuals on the planet and I certainly continue to think that and it's a huge honor to you know it's funny it's particularly generous of him to be here because as he knows before or as Edward Snowden sort of wormed his way into my existence I happened to be working on a book about the way in which the establishment media constricts the range of acceptable political discourse and was writing a book about how he had been treated and by by the US media as a window into understanding those those dynamics so he sort of got bumped by Edward Snowden when when somebody comes to you and says hey I'd like to give you tens of thousands of top-secret documents from the most secretive agency of the world's most powerful government you tend to put your current projects on hold so I did but I hope to return to that I want to just talk a little bit about the reason I wrote the book because there's a lot of obvious component parts that that are worth discussing I think but I think it's a good idea to step back and talk about the impetus behind the book because as I said writing a book is a really grueling process especially when you're trying to report on stories and do a variety of other things and you need good reasons to do it and I spend a good amount of time thinking about whether I wanted to do it and whether there was a sufficient reason to do it and there are some general reasons why it made sense for one ever since I got these documents I felt a very cumbersome obligation to my source who unraveled his existence to bring this information to the public and to galvanize a debate around the world and also to the material and to the public which had a right to not only see it but to understand it and interact with it and writing a book is a unique opportunity to reach people who don't spend their time reading newspapers or following debates you can go around the world and talk about the importance of privacy in the Menace of a secret surveillance state and really help catalyze the debate even further and I thought I had the obligation to do that and the other part about writing a book is that when you're reporting on and writing on something every single day you're focused on the immediate story before you and it's hard to understand some of the underlying application and when you write a book you're sort of forced to take steps back in and look at how these issues connect with one another and what some of the underlying themes are the sort of contacts for the reporting that you've been doing and I think I had an opportunity to do that with this book and it was really fulfilling and helpful to me and I hope will inform the debate on in a lot of ways but a really significant reason why I decided to write the book is because so much has been said over the last year about Edward Snowden about the reporting that we did about the documents that we have about the way in which we disclosed them so much of which has been completely untrue and I really wanted to take the opportunity to present the definitive set of events as I saw them to sort of as a corrective and you know one of the things is if you're somebody who enjoys bashing the American media and I am somebody who enjoys that immensely you know it comes as no surprise that in in the abstract you recognize that the American media all the time disseminates wildly false claims I mean that doesn't surprise I'm sure anybody in this room you sort of see it from a distance you know that they're they're making falsehoods and and deceiving people and and that's something that we abstractly understand but when you're actually at the center of one of the stories and you know firsthand what actually happened your appreciation for their eagerness and capacity to mislead substantially increases it has really been I don't know maybe I was a little bit naive I don't think so but it has been a remarkable experience to watch the extent to which people in public life you have significant platforms just routinely and without the slightest thought spout all kinds of blatant falsehoods you know I was I remember when when I was in Hong Kong after we unveiled Snowden's identity for the first time there was this consensus that arose among certain members of the media in the political class that this was clearly a spying operation run out of Beijing that Snowden was almost certainly a Chinese spy there were weeks of people you were saying this and then once the Chinese government told him you know what you have to leave and he flew to Russia on his way to Ecuador and got trapped in Moscow by the US government revoking his passport and bullying the Cubans into rescinding their guarantee of safe passage on his way to Ecuador those very same people who had been saying just two weeks earlier that he were was clearly a Chinese by suddenly switched on a dime and started saying obviously he this is an operation run by Vladimir Putin and I guarantee you tomorrow if he like flew to I don't know like Lima these same people would say oh he's obviously a Peruvian agent engaged in an espionage operation they'll just say whatever they need to say to demonize him and there was even a Wall Street Journal op-ed several days ago saying we know for certain that this was either a Chinese espionage operation a Russian espionage operation or possibly a joint sino-russian plot and and it's really been just remarkable how seriously all of that has been taken despite the fact that there's zero evidence to support any of it and enormous mountains of evidence that negate it similarly there was this two-week period after we really after we revealed Snowden that was incredible when I was in Hong Kong I really wasn't paying attention to the extremely important musings of people like David Brooks and David Ignatius and Bob Shafer and Jeffrey Toobin because I was a little bit busy but I did go back and the course I'm writing this book to look at what the discourse was and the immediate aftermath of Snowden's unveiling and I was really amazed because I've been pretty scornful of the notion that there's this active plotting among journalists and media outlets to coordinate their their storyline I I generally think that they don't need to plot they're just sort of appendages of a certain culture and it just kind of comes naturally the way they all embrace each other's conventional wisdom but within 24 to 48 hours literally after we first introduced Edward Snowden to the world there was this immediate consensus among all of these media elites that they were completely capable of taking this person that they had never heard of before and didn't know the first thing about and like diagnosing her my clinically diagnosing him like psychologically assessing his pathologies and they all somehow settled on this incredibly coordinated script that he was a Fame seeking narcissist this is I mean if you google it you'll find this phrase over and over and over again that this was the the mental imbalance that led him to do what he did it was obviously not any genuine dissatisfaction with the US government or what it was doing because how could any sane person possibly be dissatisfied with the US government there must be a mental condition that led him to do what he did and that was the one they settled on and it didn't just amaze me how coordinated it was like where did they all get that how did they where did that come from that that fame-seeking narcissist theme I really want to know but what really struck me about it was the very first conversation that I ever had with Edward Snowden ever online before I knew who he was what he said to me was I want to do this and I'm gonna give you these documents and when I give them to you I am adamant about the fact that I want to identify myself as the source for these disclosures and I want to come forward and explain to the world why I did what I did and he said the reason is that I feel I owed the world an a duty to explain the motives and rationale behind what I did and not to allow other people to be falsely accused and I'm proud of the choice that I made so I want to stand up and take responsibility for it and and then he said once I do that once I make that public statement I'm going to just disappear from Mediasite because he knew that the objective of the national security state and its apologists and defenders would be to try and shift the focus away from the substance of the revelations away from the fact that they were engaged in the largest and most pervasive system of suspicionless surveillance ever created in human history and talk about his mental afflictions and why he was where he was and how he missed his girlfriend and what he did to her and all of that and and so he wanted to just disappear from sight and prevent them from doing that you know there's this fascinating history of how things are done to whistleblowers you know might one of my childhood heroes politically was Daniel Ellsberg and I've gotten to become friends with him he's a colleague of mine and I've talked to him about this before because I never used to be able to understand why in response to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers the response of the Nixon administration was to break into the office of his psychiatrist in the hope of obtaining his psycho sexual secrets it never made any sense to me like it seemed like the ultimate non sequitur like oh look we have documents showing that the US government has been systematically lying to the American people for years about the Vietnam War and the response would be well Daniel Ellsberg is a swinger like I never quite understood why they thought that would be effective and I asked him about that and what he said is you're thinking about this way too rationally that once you sufficiently demonize a person on a level that makes people uncomfortable though everybody will want to avoid not just that person but all of the fruits of their work and the message that they're delivering it's an incredibly effective means of excluding somebody from decent company and making everything that they say instantly dismiss for that reason you saw the same thing done to Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and anybody who has delivered in the comfortable message and so Snowden was determined not to let that happen and so literally four months after we revealed his identity I got telephone calls on a daily basis literally on a daily basis from all of the very shining American TV personalities the actors who play the role of journalists on TV pleading with me to arrange for them to get an interview with him that they could put on prime-time television he could have spent months and months and months on every single major world television networks spouting and talking and pontificating and become the most famous person in the world and yet he has steadfastly refused in fact to date he has never given an interview to an American television network precisely because he was completely uninterested in Fame in fact he wanted to avoid it so that the focus could remain on the substance and that is the person that all of our brilliant media pundits accused of being motivated by Fame and being a narcissist you can't find a person to whom that description applies less I want to talk to you about the the the idea that the disclosures have helped the terrorists and been treasonous and all of those cliches that I'm sure you're already very familiar with and the thing that makes me amazed about the extent to which this is voiced and you know I'm on a book tour so I've done I don't know countless interviews with all kinds of establishment media outlets and I don't think there has been a single interview I've done that didn't include some kind of question along the lines of like they put their very serious somber faces on to signal that this is important and they say mr. Greenwald general Keith Alexander the longtime chief of the NSA said in an interview last week that he is certain that people will lose their lives as a result of these disclosures innocent people will be killed as a result of what you have revealed does that keep you up at night the the prospect that your reporting will result in other people's deaths and what makes that so amazing to me isn't just that the these officials are allowed to make these claims and have the media go forth and amplify them without the slightest expectation that there will be any evidence presented at all that any of that is true right I mean that's not really remarkable anymore the idea that media officials mindlessly amplify whatever government officials tell them without expecting any evidence to support it that's the reason why we have the media debacle leading up to the Iraq war that's not what surprises me what surprises me is the fact that there is no awareness that in virtually ever every single case over the last 50 years where there have been whistleblowers who come for unauthorized disclosures up top media figures call it unauthorized disclosures meaning reporting things that the government didn't give you permission to report in every single one of those cases the same exact script is immediately and reflexively read from and it continuously is proven to be false over and over and over again and there's never any hesitation or thought of well maybe because they've said this every single time there's a story and it always turns out to be true that we oughta treat it with a tad of skepticism there's just a kind of immediate reflexive reaction that it ought to be taken seriously because they wear medals on their chest and so a big part of writing this book is to detail just how capable of and devoted to deceit and public lying these same officials are in the hope that their pronouncements will be treated much more skeptically in the future so I just want to talk about a couple of other brief points in terms of the the falsity of the public discourse that I was hoping to correct and one of them is about the way in which we've reported these documents and the intentions that Edward Snowden had when he gave them to us we have been criticized very predictably and very inconsequential II from what I will call just for lack of a better term the right which is you know primarily Democrats who voiced this this was critique that our disclosures are gonna help the terrorists and result in the deaths of innocent people and all of that I was on c-span two days ago and every time the host said and now we're gonna go to the Democrat line I knew I was about to be called a traitor it was like completely reliable so you know that's the critique from the right and there's a much more interesting and I think reasonable and even more valid critique that for again want of a better term alcohol from the left that has also been critical of how we've done the reporting that has said actually you haven't released too much you've actually released too little and we think you should just take these documents and put them all online or you should release them a lot more aggressively or a lot more quickly you have all these documents and you've released only a small four and so I wanted to make clear exactly what happened so that there's no confusion about how the story have evolved and the reasons why and when that is that when Edward Snowden came to us he had a very very clear and determined understanding of how he wanted these documents to be reported he didn't want all of the documents uploaded to the Internet if he wanted that obviously he didn't need me to do it he's extremely capable much more so than I am of doing that had he wanted that to happen he could have just done it himself or he could have given it to other groups and asked that they do it or he could have given it to me and asked that I do it that isn't what happened he was inspired by prior whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks and Thomas Drake and others and wanted to learn from the ways in which they had been effectively attacked and the importance of their revelations diluted and undermined and he was determined not to let the debate be all about why is there this reckless indiscriminate disclosures even though that wasn't the case for any of those prior instances that was the attack that was made and so he said I want you to go very carefully through each of these documents and to report them journalistically one by one meaning explain to the public exactly what these documents are do reporting to make them even clearer and let each story breathe so that people can react and debate and let the story unfold and that we can say credibly that we're releasing these documents in a manner that's systemic so that they couldn't demonize the disclosures and that was a framework to which I agreed when I took the documents which for me ends the debate even if I didn't think that was the right approach I would never violate my agreement to him no matter who doesn't like it but I also think it was the right thing to do in the evidence I think that vindicates that strategy is the fact that I've been writing about surveillance for eight years and it's a very hard thing to get people to pay attention to or care about they think it's remote they think it's abstract it can be complicated and yet here we are a year later and interest in this topic is more sustained and more intense than it was back in June when we first started revealing the stories there are incredible reform movements around the world people's changing to how they think not just about surveillance and privacy but about the role of the United States and the dangers of investing their own government with power to be exercised in secret and the proper role of journalism visa via the state I think these issues have been debated in a more serious way and in a more intense way around the world for a longer period of time than almost any other story that I've seen and I think that really vindicates the strategy that he insisted upon and that we agreed to undertake and whatever else is true that strategy is not what has been depicted it is the opposite of a reckless and indiscriminate strategy it is a very strategically precise strategy of trying to make sure that the debate proceeds constructively by choosing the documents to release in a way that the public can best understand which I think is the duty of an activist and the duty of a journalist as well the last point I want to make and then I will turn it over to Professor Chomsky is there is a much more important point to me to the Edward Snowden story into telling you than just correcting the record and clearing up all those misconceptions and that is that for me there is an extraordinarily valuable lesson to learn from everything that has happened here I have been going around talking about all sorts of issues relating to war on terror abuses and fundamental defects in the American criminal justice system and all of these other kinds of issues and invariably the question that everybody asks is well what can I do about it and embedded in that question oftentimes is a sense of the feed ISM the idea that these forces are so formidable that I don't really feel as though as outraged as I may get that I have within me the capacity to do anything about them and I know professor Chomsky has talked about that question and that mindset a lot before and said he really only hears it in the United States or in the West and and not typically in other countries where they feel like they have an outlet and know what to do which is take it upon themselves to change it but the reason I think there's such a valuable lesson here is that whatever else do you think about headward Snowden when I met him he was 29 years old he was raised in a lower middle class to middle-class environment by a father who was in the Coast Guard for 30 years he has no family connections he had no power no prestige he was as ordinary as it gets completely obscured no support institutionally in any way he was just an ordinary individual who through nothing more than an act of conscience acting more or less alone literally change the world and the lesson for me that profoundly influenced how I think and how I did everything from that point forward and what I think probably for the rest of my life is really clear to me which is that no matter who you are and no matter how inadequate you think you are when arrayed against these very powerful forces we all have within us the ability when we summon the proper will and really make the choice to do so in defense of the things that we say we believe to a fact not minor but radical and fundamental change in the world and I think the decision and choice that he made should be the permanent antidote to that kind of defeatism and I wanted to convey that lesson in writing the book and going around and talking about it and and I hope I did so thanks very much and I think I quite agree with you what he achieved does drive home that lesson which is one that we should really be familiar with almost every significant change that's ever happened was sparked by often isolated individuals who were willing to take a stand on something so it takes a the modern civil rights movement civil rights movement goes back centuries but it really took off in the modern period around 1960 and if you just look at the incidents that were involved it very much underscores what Glenn is saying so in 1960 in Greensboro North Carolina a couple of black students decided to sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter and asked to be served of course they were immediately arrested and brutalized set off could have been the end of it except the next day more students came pretty soon you had the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he had Freedom Riders going through the South really risking their lives it was not it was not easy beaten attacked killed some northerners came down number of them were murdered finally you had legislative changes which were partial victories but nevertheless significant victories and I think this is true in every case I know then they take one of a very different kind in in 1975 the Indonesian government invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor nearby mainly because they wanted to gain control of the oil of the region the invasion was murderous that led virtual jenis I probably killed quarter third of the population the u.s. strongly supported it from the very beginning so it Britain so other allies that mainly because Indonesia is a rich prize a lot of resources a lot of investments make a lot of profit from a very significant and strategically there were about three or four people I could name who some of them students who dropped out of school devoted their lives to trying to organize on this topic their names are said like Snowden you don't nobody knows their names practically nobody except those who were involved they don't want to be known but they succeeded over in bringing other people to become involved a lot of the speaking that I did was organized by them testimony at the General Assembly was organized by them the spread of the countries there finally in 1979 1999 September 1999 twenty four five years after this genocide Allah salt a Bill Clinton president said a couple of words he informed the Indonesian generals that the game's over after mr. OH prior to the October saying they'd never withdraw this was their territory they did next it they got a word from the White House and they instantly withdraw a few people were responsible for this let's go to the media covered the media knew all about this for 25 years there was extensive reporting in Australia there were all kind of leaks take a look at the record virtually nothing and then look what happened when a Clinton declared it over the reporting wasn't look this shows that you guys are incredible criminals you were responsible for what happened all these years the response was magnificent act of humanitarian intervention because Clinton intervened stopped the crimes the Indonesian army withdrew that allowed a UN peacekeeping force to enter a wonderful tribute of humanitarian intervention mark we'd magnificent this happens over and over again when you were talking about the sino-soviet conspiracy what came to my mind is an interesting case that there's a wonderful book that I'd urge you to read if you haven't by old friend of mine Jim Peck is very good the China scholar the book is called Washington's China that what he did was go through the records of the Declassified records of the National Security Council you know for the entire period up to what had been released when he wrote the book and presented their account of what the Chinese but what their analysis of China's role in the world there was a conclusion that was consistent through all the accounts China's a terrible threat but what changed over the years is the reasons when China was more or less friendly to Russia or looked that way China's a terrible threat because it's puppet of Moscow when China was proclaimed war with Russia a couple of years later China's a terrible threat because the Russians are kind of more or less moderate and the Chinese are extreme and no matter what the facts were you always got the same conclusion the most interesting case and one that you really people really ought to be taught in elementary school is what happened with regard to Indochina in the late 19th that come the late 1940s of the US was kind of ambivalent about which third-world movements to destroy and which ones to support that were conflicting goals the u.s. was not had objections to traditional European imperialism because it kept out US interest so they wanted it dismantled on the other hand third-world nationalist movements are even more of a threat so various choices were made in the case of Indochina in the late 1940s the US was more or less supported to the Viet Minh towards the Vietnamese independence movement it had fought with the u.s. during the war fought against the Japanese and so on around 1950 the government US government decided to support the French in their effort to reconquer Indochina at that point orders went out to the intelligence agencies to prove that Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of China or Russia or the sino-soviet conspiracy anything would do you know it's very much like what you described and for a couple of years they worked on it and there's also pretty interesting they finally felt like the final reports couple years later where that very strange but Hanoi seems to be the only place in the region where there's no contacts with China or Russia well the conclusion that was drawn by the wise men in the State Department Dean Acheson so on is that proves their point they're such a loyal puppet of take your choice okay taking pay paying as it was called the Moscow of the conspiracy that they don't even have to give him orders you take a look at the reporting over the years it follows whatever the conclusion is religiously and it's the same way on just about every issue you can think of I'm there's kind of an interesting case within the case of the Iraq war and the when when George Bush and his gang decided they were going to invade Iraq they spread all kind of stories about you know mushroom cloud over New York and so on and so forth immediate have totally reported those no occasional questions not much just solid from bead of approval the reason for the war if you look back was a single question that's what Bush Blair repeated over and over there's a single question will Saddam Hussein put it into his programs of development of nuclear weapons that was the single question well as you remember after a couple of years of investigation the single question got the wrong answer there never happened in any there hadn't been any such programs with an interesting exception apart from the ones that the u.s. supported what you won't see reported is that George Bush number one was such an unwritten were such enthusiastic supporters of Saddam Hussein that it when the war with the ground was over they Bush was then president he actually invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to come to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production well that's not the final thing to report anyhow after you know as tenure has been no programs what happened the story changed it wasn't nuclear weapons that was not the reason why we had we entered because of our love of democracy this was part of our democracy promotion project and in fact if you look back in November 2003 which gave a well advertised speech National Endowment for democracy in Washington of rating about our love of democracy and that's why we had to invade Iraq to bring democracy to the directive people and so take a look at the journalism like you said turned on a dime of course there were some things they didn't public opinion kind of more or less follows not entirely though there were international polls asking people that what they thought about the US democracy promotion program and one place they asked them was in Iraq I think about 1% of the population took it seriously they have a little experience with it that goes on the right to the present we have a democracy promotion program in the Middle East that's why we supported the Arab Spring and we're posted dictators and so on there are international polls asking people what they think about this in the Arab world that was maybe 5% think maybe it's serious almost everybody regards it as total nonsense can you get that recorded here no in fact the things that can't be reported are pretty spectacular last December for example there was a poll International fold top folding agencies Gallup in the United States their counterpart in England and asking various questions one of the questions that was asked was which country in the world is the greatest threat to world peace guess what the United States was so far on the lead nobody was even close way below was Pakistan and that was inflated because of the Indians vote I had a friend to a database check there was one report on it in the United States in a Murdoch Journal right-wing Murdoch Journal New York Post they reported it and said this this is very interesting it shows how crazy the world what I think I I think it's redundant to say that I urge you to read the book but I really do it does bring this home in a very remarkable way also it brings home some other lessons which lended mentioned but I think are worth stressing it's it's common discourse if you you know you studied in political science or international relations read the press governments are committed to security that's their major goal they're committed to security against their enemies there's a couple of things that are not asked security for whom and who are the enemies well it turns out that one of the major enemies is you one of the major enemies of every government is its own population there are dangerous we got to know everything about them that we can we have to control them we have to make sure they don't get out of hand every power system believes this certainly governments do and this is demonstrated with spectacular clarity than the especially in the especially in the book which brings it together you know I mean I'd read the reports when they came out reading it together and the book was different you should see it much more dramatically second point is whose security are they concerned with is it security the population well certainly not in fact after the plan of the book reports the spectacular - Obama I you know he thought examiner's high officials about how this this operation is protecting us from I think the first claim was 54 terrorist attacks before and then it went down to about a dozen terrorist attacks with foil and finally there was a government Commission which was appointed to investigate how many terrorist attacks were foiled they had access to high-level security internal documents all the best sources they did find something one one person had sent eight thousand dollars to Somalia that's what this massive operation of control of everything you do is about well that tells you whose security is being let's put an example of who security is being protected it's the security of state power from its enemy and one of the main enemies is the population occasionally array of light comes through on this tribute to Harvard I'll quote the professor of the science of Government at Harvard I always liked that table all those professor the science of Government at Harvard Samuel Huntington back in 1981 he pointed out that I forget his exact words something like this that power has to operate in the dark when it's exposed to sunlight it wilts and evaporates and then he went on the same time to say that ever since the Truman Doctrine 1947 it's been necessary to try to convince the American people that we're defending them from the Russians of course we're not other goals but that's we have to convince them and that requires the power operate in the dark that's the reason for secrecy this all of this demonstrates it clearly you can find it just by searching through declassified documents if you go through that bore and occasionally illuminating activity you find that's genuine security is almost never an issue what is the main issue is making sure that power can operate in the dark for its own reasons support for state power and support for private power one of the striking things that emerge from the Snowden revelations then emphasized in his book is the extent to which economic espionage is at the core of these massive operations and not just the United States like for example Canada big mining country uses these techniques to try to find out what's happening in the British in the Brazilian the mining and energy industries u.s. does the same trading partners and so on you have to expose everything for the benefit of the forces that really matter which are not the population the population has to be controlled subdued a frightened misled and these are among the lessons that I think come out with a dramatic clarity from the revelations and particularly for the book which put together so what we want to do is have a a Q&A session and I'm not sure I think they told you what the format was what the instructions are I wasn't part of that so I don't know I guess people just line up in this middle aisle here and then we'll just take them one by one for as long as we can I was very acrobatic professor Chomsky given that American power only seems constrained by two things the first being that which is required to avoid a revolution and second is technological capability for abuses and excesses and I'm not even sure of the first frankly I'd like to know what your thoughts are on where the surveillance state is proceeding because it as I said it seems to be simply limited by the technological capability to exploit the population and to spy on it and so there may be a time when we look back on today and I admire the amount of freedoms that we had given that constraint particularly the development with the Obama administration having essentially normalized the procedures of the Bush administration critically before the first primaries but he has surprised me on one thing his attack on civil liberties I just I really don't see the point of this and it's the attack on the Fourth Amendment which of course is a devastating attack on the Fourth Amendment any reasonable reading of it because we'll be on also taking mentioned two other cases which are not that well-known one of them is a case if you want to look it up its holder Attorney General V humanitarian law project it's a case for our party Obama administration against humanitarian law project but Supreme Court Court justify has validated the Obama position the Obama position humanitarian law project was a legal aid group it was giving legal advice to a group that's on the government's terrorist list the government's terrorist list incidentally is an abomination it should not be tolerated in a free society you can be on the terrorist list if the government if the president says I don't like you then you're on a terrorist list and if you take a look at who was on the terrorist list it's pretty remarkable so for example Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist list until a couple of years ago because the Reagan administration had determined that he's one of the more notorious terrorists in the world on the other hand Saddam Hussein was taken off the terrorist list in 1982 because the Reagan administration wanted to provide him with aid for his attack on Iraq so he was off the terrorists list the whole idea that his grotesque it is never questioned but putting that aside they gave legal advice to a group on the terrorist list that was described by the Obama administration we can lead legal proceedings as material assistance to terrorism okay material assistance used to mean you give it terrorists a gun or something now it means you give them legal advice and if you read these colloquy you know the discussion and the court it could extend as far as having an interview with Hasan Nasrallah a head of Hezbollah which I've had anything that gives any credibility to people they call terrorists is material assistance there's another one the NDAA which is sort of similar that's the National Defense budget for the military it has a provision in it which allows the military to hold people permanently without charge to detain them permanently without charge primarily their talk about foreign citizens but it has a provision that in principle makes it open to American citizens there is a court case initiated by Chris Hedges against this provision on one of the plaintiffs but wasn't very happy about it frankly because the case is concentrated on American citizens and the kind of tacit assumption is if you want to pick up somebody who isn't an American citizen and hold him indefinitely without charge apparently that's that's okay we shouldn't be conceding that but anyway the case went through it at the district level the it won the plaintiffs won but but then the government immediately appealed it higher levels it's been sustained and it extends the notion of material assistance to terrorism to substantial aid to terrorism whatever that means like talking to them for example this is no good Supreme Court will be ratified now what does Obama kept out of pressing home an attack on civil liberties that goes well beyond anything you could even get a political gain out of that's the one thing about the administration that's really surprised me and you're quite right every one of these things sets a standard which the next president can go beyond doesn't have to but it tends to work that way and if we accept it if we don't do what Snowden Glenn Greenwald and other people are doing and really struggle against it that we're complicit and the further erosion of the liberties that we have and a-440 people have fought for for years I can rest safely now knowing that we're all we've all provided material support to terrorists hi thank you both for your work so mr. Greenwald one of the things that has stood out about this Snowden saga is its international scope you know traveling to Hong Kong to Russia correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that you're no longer you are not based in the United and people have become exiled over this over the affairs with WikiLeaks they are no longer welcome in their own countries with in endeavors like first look media how are you stepping outside of national boundaries in order to more effectively report on these kinds of issues that can eliminate you so intensely if you are embedded in a national culture that's a great question I think one of the most overlooked aspects of the story has been exactly what you just raised which is that the story really is global in nature the first story that I really concentrated on after I started writing about politics in 2005 was the revelation about NSA eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law and that story involved companies like Verizon and Sprint and AT&T which are overwhelmingly domestic and it involved only the communication of American citizens and was exclusively a domestic controversy and what made this story so explosive not in the United States only but globally was the fact that the Internet is a global means of communication you can't invade it and segregate the impact only to certain countries you invade the Internet it means that you're invading communications internationally and beyond that the companies that are implicated who have eagerly participated with the NSA for all sorts of reasons such as Facebook and Google and Skype and Microsoft and and Yahoo are the means that hundreds of millions of people not in the United States but around the world use as their primary means of communication and then beyond that there was this incredible international scope to the story it wasn't just me working outside of the country but my close collaborator and partner Laura Poitras who worked from Berlin because as a filmmaker she had been long afraid to be in the United States because she thought that her film would be subpoenaed on the stories that we did we purposely partnered with media outlets in every country around the world so that the people most affected by the revelations would have their own media outlets reporting on it with journalists in those countries who knew them best to maximum the impact internationally and you know when I go around the United States sometimes people say well what really has changed what are the big significant reforms and outcomes and usually that question is confined domestically and there are lots of changes in in the United States and I think there are a lot more to come as more reporting unfolds in the like but the real changes invent I think in terms of the dynamic internationally you know this is there's so many things that have happened in the story that some really significant ones get overlooked but one of my favorite events that has happened happened way back in June of 2013 when the United States for two weeks after we unveiled Snowden in Hong Kong was demanding with increasing levels of aggression that the government in Hong Kong turned Snowden over to them in order for them to arrest him and bring him back to the United States and rather than comply which is what everyone in the American media thought they would do to the point they were mocking Snowden for his choice of Hong Kong which was a stupid choice they said because of course Hong Kong is gonna obey the dictate of the United States instead the government of Hong Kong said we'd like to put you on this plane and have you go wherever you want and then the day they did that and if you haven't seen it please go look at it when you get home because it's the funniest thing ever they issued this statement saying the United States government has submitted a request to the government of Hong Kong to detain Edward Snowden and turn him over unfortunately the documents of the United States government submitted were filled out improperly and we therefore have no choice but to let him go and then the last paragraph said it began with the word meanwhile we have recently learned that the United States government is invading the communications of our civilian infrastructure Zoar research facilities are no universities and we think an investigation is warranted and the reason that was so significant aside from how hilarious it is is that it's signaled that there was going to be this change of tenor in how the United States was perceived and after that happened country after country government after government publicly defied the US and a really brazen an unapologetic way unlike what almost never happened and you saw Russia do it when they granted him asylum and refused to turn him over when he was in the airport and he saw latin-american countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua in Bolivia all formally offer him asylum and you saw Ecuador publicly argue for his asylum and then you saw Brazil which has always had this sort of complex of being subservient to the United States because it been dominated through all kinds of colonial and imperialist policies not only canceled the state visit the first that they honored the Brazilian president within forty years but then the president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff whose conversations were themselves targeted and invaded as we reported in Brazil went to the UN and vehemently denounced the United States and very harsh terms of human rights and privacy while President Obama lurked angrily out in the hallway and Germany has done the same thing at his damaged international relations it has changed the way that people think about the United States all over the world and when you start changing consciousness and not just consciousness about how people think about surveillance or privacy but about how they think about their own governments power and the role of the United States and a whole variety of other issues fundamental change will emerge and it will emerge quickly and probably in ways that we can't even anticipate and I think the most exciting part of the story is exactly what you asked about which is the international scope really the global scope of how the story has played out I was a Chomsky if there is a theme to your book I finished I just I'm sorry oh if there is a theme to your book which I just finished reading is that for me was quotes not only from your laptop getting stolen from your house and that can you resolution to how hard you were going to tackle the issues even harder to learn how to install a program a computer program for hacking purposes or for you know communicating on so for me the team notebook was really gross your personal growth and I think that's what I see for the last year and I guess my question is sir what has this last year taught you personally and for professor Chomsky you're real quick it was really hard to find a book of you in Spanish and it took me like I want I would be honored if you could please sign for me that you could sign the book for me that I think we're gonna both be around a little bit after all to sign so you know just as far as the question you asked I mean I talked a lot about the primary lesson that I feel like I learned from from being able to observe Edward Snowden but you know I also and then I've obviously learned you know specific kinds of information such as how to encrypt my communications which is proven to be very important and you know that's one of the things the importance of which shouldn't be underestimated is if we all start encrypting our communications it makes it impossible for the NSA or close to impossible for them to invade our communications that's something we can do to empower ourselves now that we know how much our privacy is being compromised but there is another really crucial lesson that you know I think I learned which is you know Laura and I have talked about this a lot which is once we realize the fearlessness that drove Edward Snowden's choice we felt an obligation to have our work be driven by the same spirit of fearlessness and once we started doing that other people with whom we were working including a very large media institution that has all the same impediments and concerns which is the Guardian actually began being infected by that same sort of spirit and did actually give me an enormous support to report the story as aggressively as I thought it should be reported and then huge numbers of people around the world that I hear from all the time journalism students and other kinds of people who thought they were gonna go work for tech companies and have decided not to or journalist students who say I now understand that the purpose of journalism is to keep people in power in check there's this massive ripple effect and I do think that this phrase courage is contagious it's probably something that if somebody said to me five years ago or two years ago I would have sort of abstractly agreed with it's now something that is a statement of principle that I know is true on a really visceral level and it can happen really quickly and the ways in which you can impact other people's thought process and choices is virtually limitless if if you act with passion and fearlessness mr. Greenwald professor Chomsky if you would both comment on the various roles of the other various professions of a journalist and an academic in the world today in light of their the freedom the effectiveness and the limitations of both roles for example I would imagine being a journalist it would be limited by what the public finds interesting you know some of the less than savory characteristics of media and then as an academic I would imagine you would be limited by feeling obligated to help students navigate through a system that is not like entirely beneficial and that the government itself considers its primary threat to be the people of the country itself I'll start with that you know I have always resisted pretty vigorously any kind of label that feels self-limiting it's one of the reasons why I resist ideological labels because it sort of announces in advance that you're supposed to have a certain belief system regardless of how you engage on an issue and where your rationality takes you and the same is true of this these roles like okay there was a debate early on about whether or not I was an activist or a journalist as though they were mutually exclusive and I actually found the debate really confusing because I absolutely consider myself to be both and I don't think they distract from one another in any way I think they fuel themselves I think journalists who don't have a sense of activism meaning a desire to have what they're doing have positive effects in the world are practicing this really impotent neutered Solich dead-end boring form of the practice that has actually killed it and then ate it not only corrupted but really just boring and uninteresting and so I think that if you whatever you do in in your job or in your life if you think that there are limits on what that role entails intrinsically just ignore them violate those rules and and do the things that you want that you think can help you transcend those limits I mean he is a professor but he's way more than that right and so I think that that's kind of what I was saying before was that you know I think we all have it within ourselves to have this profound effect on the world and the question is finding how what what is in yourself and and creating your own rules to maximize that not let it be limited it's a sound question it questions like this brings up my mind interesting comment by George Orwell which isn't as well-known as it should be his book Animal Farm everybody's read probably in elementary school he had an introduction to Animal Farm which very few people read that's one reason it wasn't published was found 30 years later after his death in the introduction the book of course is a bitter satiric critique of the totalitarian enemy and in the introduction he addresses himself to the people of England free England and he says you shouldn't feel too self-righteous when you read this because in England under freedom unpopular ideas can suppressed without the use of force and he doesn't go into the reasons very much but one line is relevant to your question he says one of the reasons is because a good education if you have a good education it's going to the best schools you know Oxford Cambridge you have internalized the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say and I think students should be liberated from that internal internalized indoctrination what how they decided to navigate through the perils of their lives yes that's difficult and you know I I wouldn't feel that I'd have any reason to give them advice about it but they should at least gain the understanding of it not only of the nature of the system of indoctrination and control the kind of things going stalking about but also the internal fact that you have been trained since childhood to have it instilled into you so you don't ask the questions you don't think about it that's a form of entrapment and attack on personal integrity that is very extreme in some ways you could say worse than torture and people ought to be liberated from that so just as a note we have time for just one more question and then we will begin the book signing thank you for a remarkable fearless work mr. Greenwald I have actually two quick questions for you one is how do you choose the order in which to release the documents and also the second one is can you elaborate a little bit on whether and how the American government has targeted you as a person and especially in the last year I guess so we better understand you know what what have what happens Thanks yeah you know the way that we choose to release the document is a pretty simple formula which is that we go through them continuously and have been going through them continuously for the past 11 months as soon as we find something that we think is significant and interesting and newsworthy we work as hard as we can as fast as we can to get it ready to be published it is a frustrating process because if you're going to publish top-secret documents the position of the US government is is that you're committing a felony even if you are working within a media organization and nobody's going to do that without going through a vetting process of editors and lawyers and it has been a little bit irritating to try and get this done more quickly because there are always lots of impediments but you know war and I and lots of other journalists have both been working literally 15 hours a day seven days a week for 11 months on nothing but this archive and there still are a lot of other stories that are left to be done including some huge ones not because I'm purposely saving them but because the reporting is really difficult if you're gonna report for example on who exactly the US government has targeted in terms of surveillance and you want to name those people so you can illustrate the kinds of abuses that are taking place you want to make sure that you're not injuring people's reputations or harming them against their will and you want to make sure that you're extremely careful and certain about the things that you're saying and these things take time which isn't you know I know frustrating for people out there waiting for stories and also for me but it's a necessary part of the process as far as being targeted you know I mean it really is true and it's not just false humility I mean journalists all over the world old hoodoo good journalism almost by definition get targeted in all sorts of ways and and usually they work in obscurity as opposed to great visibility and and the ways in which they're targeted are much worse than anything I've endure endure no let's go to war and get killed I was on a panel once with this Brazilian journalist who uncovered massive corruption in the local police force where he lived and a totally obscure and anonymous way he investigated this police force for two years he got death threats he got rocks burned through his window he got beaten up his wife left him because she felt like he was subjecting their children to danger and he just continued I would never have known his name had I not been on this panel with him it got the entire police force fired and new police officers put in and that happens all over the world all the time to journalists I really have had a newfound respect for the ability of journalism to achieve positive change when it's done correctly but of course I mean the the the intention of the US government from its continuous public statements at the highest levels of the Obama administration that what I specifically was doing and the work I was doing was criminal was a felony constituted selling documents was something I ought to be arrested for was a very deliberate strategy to create this climate of fear around the journalism that was taking place so that every time we went to publish a document we were supposed to think is this the thing that's gonna push me over the line and make them arrest me I had lawyers who usually can get Eric Holder on the phone in two seconds who got no information every time they tried to find out whether lore and I would be arrested when we returned to the US because they deliberately wanted us to remain in this state of uncertainty obviously detaining my partner halfway across the world while I was back in Brazil and locking him in a room for 11 hours under a terrorism law and then announcing that there was a criminal investigation against him under this terrorism statute or marching into the Guardians newsroom and demanding while agents of the government oversaw that they destroyed their computers was all very thuggish attempts to do the same thing and so there was genuine concern you take those things seriously if you're at all rational that the journalism could subject you to serious danger but the thing that we vowed from the very beginning is that under no circumstances would it ever deter us from publishing a single document and honestly if anything it just absolutely embolden me to work harder because when they show their thuggish face it makes you realize how much more important than you thought before transparency is and you know we finally came back just on principle because we weren't going to be kept out of our own country four completely invalid reasons of intimidation but they often as professor Chomsky was just saying there are lots of ways to intimidate people and caused people to censor their own rights without overt shows of force and this climate of fear even talking openly about imprisoning journalists having graphics on the CNN screen like I saw multiple times should go and Greenwell be prosecuted where a little panel of pundants debates that it's all intended to make journalists think really carefully before they do this kind of reporting okay great thank you everyone very much

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 93,309

Rating: 4.9039998 out of 5

Keywords: Glenn Greenwald (Author), United States National Security Agency (Organization), Edward Snowden, Mass Surveillance (Employer), United States Of America (Country), Noam Chomsky, Politics (Professional Field)

Id: ktRzyiIK1p8

Length: 67min 35sec (4055 seconds)

Published: Mon May 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/fortnights]

Very interesting talk, I think I'll be picking up his book.