Glenn Greenwald: "Edward Snowden and the Secrets of the National Security State"

okay so uh why don't we get started my name is Matt Buttowski I'm a professor in the English department and the organizer of secrecy week so welcome I want to mention first let's see first please everybody turn off your cell phones or at least turn off the ringers and I want to thank our sponsors first and foremost the office of undergraduate studies which awarded me the University professorship which in turn came with a budget that allowed me to to bring Glenn Greenwald so I really appreciate that and I thank them the College of Humanities Mariette Library ASU you contributed from their speakers fund the BYU humanities center ex mission the Tanner Humanities Center and the Department of English so I really think the sponsors they've they've gone out of their way to to make this possible and I deeply appreciate that I also want to thank Heidi camp and Kristina Bailey in the humanities dean's office College of Humanities dean's office who saved me from all sorts of potential pitfalls in organizing this I've never done anything quite this big before there will be a Q&A session after a brief Q&A session so the microphones will be going around this is being live-streamed so please remember and I'll remind everybody again don't start asking your question until you have the microphone there'll be people on either side of the aisle who will identify you or you know if you identify yourself don't get your microphone so if you don't speak into the microphone the livestream won't pick it up okay but I will remind remind everybody as well I'm very pleased to introduce our speaker tonight Glenn Greenwald who's the keynote for the events of secrecy week a former a journalist former constitutional lawyer and the author of the best-selling books with liberty and justice for some how would a patriot act great American hypocrites and a tragic legacy Greenwald is best known now for his groundbreaking reporting for the Guardian on Edward Snowden's leaking of classified information about the surveillance and mass data collection activities of the National Security Agency a topic that is fortuitously returned to public discussion with John Oliver's interview with Edward Snowden this past Sunday on his show last week tonight Greenwald's most recent book no place to hide builds upon his reporting for the Guardian offering a gripping narrative that would fit very well in a spy novel Greenwald tells of his initial contacts with Snowden their clandestine meetings along with the filmmaker Laura Poitras and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong in May of 2013 the book also provides the clearest account I've read of the web of NSA programs Snowden's information revealed as well as a bracing an unapologetic critique of the idea that mass surveillance has ever made us safe from terrorism Greenwald's meeting with snowden meetings with snowden are depicted in Poitras as recent films citizen 4 which won the 2015 Academy Award for documentary feature and I understand that there's a feature film based on these events and directed by Oliver Stone now in production Greenwald has been the recipient of numerous honours including the top investigative journalism award from the online News Association the Esso award for excellence in reporting which is the I believe the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer a 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the 2013 George Polk award for national security reporting foreign policy magazine has named him one of the 100 top global thinkers the Washington Post in Guardian jointly won the 2014 pilot surprise for public service on the strength of the reporting by Greenwald Poitras and McCaskill in addition to his books in work for The Guardian Greenwald has written for many newspapers and political magazines including salon the New York Times the Los Angeles Times in the American Conservative in 2014 he co-founded a new media outlet the intercept by means of which he has continued as essential reporting on national security issues as well as other topics his talk tonight is entitled Edward Snowden and the secret of the national security state please welcome Glenn Greenwald thank you thank you very much thank you and good evening everybody and thanks so much for coming out tonight and and thanks as well to the University of Utah for inviting me here to speak I was really delighted when I got the invitation and happy I was able to come for a couple of reasons for one thing it's been the perfect complement to what has been an exciting ly unusual week for me I've been traveling for I think six days now and it's a week that began in Dallas last Friday when I found myself doing the Glenn Beck show and then that was followed by my giving the keynote address to an organization headed by former chief party congressman Allen West and in a few days I'm gonna be back in Texas where I'm gonna be doing a panel discussion with former Republican congressman Ron Paul and and and now here I am in Utah just just a few miles from the shiny sprawling new NSA facility in in Bluffdale to talk about NSA and surveillance so it's not exactly the roster of places that a lot of people would expect to find me but I'm actually really glad that that I'm able to go and speak to a really wide diverse group of places and on audiences and I actually think it reveals a really important point about the reporting that we've been able to do over the last 20 months and the debate that we've been able to provoke we are often told that in the United States every single significant political controversy is definable by whether you're on the left or whether you're on the right or whether you're a conservative or a liberal or whether you're a Republican or a Democrat and that where you are in those categories determines the position that you hold in that you all essentially never have any common views with people who are in the other group and that actually is true for a good number of issues but definitely not all of them and it for certain hasn't been true for the debate over surveillance and secrecy and privacy that we've been able to provoke over the last 20 months in fact it's been completely untrue there is a lot of support for the reporting I've been able to do and the disclosures that Edward Snowden made on the left but there's also a huge amount of support among people on the right the very first prominent national politician who contacted me after we began doing the disclosures was the two-term very conservative Senator from New Hampshire Gordon Humphrey who wrote to me and said please tell Edward Snowden on my behalf that I consider what he did patriotic and heroic and when it came time in the United States Congress for the first time to debate whether or not we should allow the NSA to collect enormous amounts of data not about the terrorists among us or the criminals among us but all of us the very first bill that was pat that was presented that was introduced was a bill to completely defund the NSA program that collects the records of every person with whom he communicate by telephone and there were two primary sponsors of that bill in the house 1 was the first term tea party Republican who's 32 years old from Michigan named Justin Amash on the one hand and his primary co-sponsor was the 35th year very liberal african-american Democratic member of the House from Detroit John Conyers and these two extraordinarily unlikely partners join together and attracted an amazingly diverse coalition drawn equally from both parties across the political spectrum even including the original author of the Patriot Act back in 2001 Jim Sensenbrenner the Republican from Wisconsin who said even those among us who were the most aggressive about enacting post 9/11 legislation never dreamed that the Patriot Act would be used to indiscriminately collect survey information and data about all Americans and they join together in a coalition to try and defund this program and if you look at polling data in terms of how Americans have reacted to the surveillance debate and the revelations of Snowden one of the least reliable indicators of how somebody will react is partisan identity or where someone falls on the ideological spectrum it almost tells you nothing about what somebody thinks about surveillance if you know that somebody is a Republican or a Democrat or a liberal or a conservative that's a nice background noise for some of the things I'm going to talk about it's like a little musical score so you know that the most reliable demographic attribute for determining how people have reacted to this question has actually been aged people who are in the younger age brackets have been overwhelmingly supportive of what Edward Snowden did and the reporting that we've done and overwhelmingly concerned by what the NSA and its allies agencies are doing to the Internet in part because of the way that younger people tend to think much differently than older people about the Internet for older people people forty five fifty and older who didn't grow up with the internet the Internet is this sort of discreet instrument that can be used to achieve certain functions you can buy a book on Amazon you can make a reservation on an Airlines you can receive pictures of family members you can do very discreet tasks and it's a helpful and useful instrument for people in those demographic age groups very generally speaking but for younger people who actually grew up with the Internet as a central part of what they do the Internet is much more than that it's actually a central part of the world it's the place where you explore the world and make friends and maintain human connections and experiment with your identity and the way in which you essentially understand the world and so to stand by and watch that instrument that human innovation the internet be turned into the most extreme and comprehensive form of human surveillance has been something really menacing in the eyes lots of Americans regardless of ideological or partisan identity and I think that's been one of the most inspiring and I think maybe one of the most enduring parts of this debate now there's another reason why I'm really glad to be here as part of this event which is usually when I when I go places and talk about Snowden and the NSA and the revelations it's cast as a talk about privacy or a talk about surveillance and of course privacy and surveillance are really important parts of the reporting that we've been able to do and the documents we've been able to reveal but the debate that has been triggered not just in the United States but around the world as a result of the revelations is about so much more than that it is been about the proper role of journalism in democracy it has been about the role that the United States plays in the world and the political identity of President Obama and the vast gap between the statements he makes about himself and the reality of what he does but it's also been at least as much if not more than all those other things a debate about the dangers of secrecy of government secrecy and so I'm really thrilled to be part of an event devoted to talking about the reasons why we ought to care so much when our government essentially builds a wall of secrecy behind which it operates I get asked all the time when I do interviews or come to events like this I get this is one of the most frequently asked questions I get over the last 20 months which is well you've you've done dozens and dozens and dozens of stories from the Snowden archive you've read many thousands of secret documents from the US government what has been the most shocking revelation the single most surprising or significant revelation that you've discovered and that's actually not a hard question for me to answer the answer is really clear for me it's not even close the most shocking revelation for me has been that the goal of the NSA the stated explicit overt goal of the NSA and its surveillance partners is captured by their motto you know like the way football teams or universities have mottos are like states have mottos the NSA has a motto that describe it's institutional function its objective and it's a model that appears over and over and over and over in many thousands of their documents and that motto is collect it all it's not like collect a lot of it or even like collect all of the terrorist communications it is collect it all it is really the institutional mandate of the NSA what they wake up every single day and devote themselves to doing to figure out how to access and collect and store all communications that take place electronically by in between other human beings which is another way of saying without any hyperbole or drama or inference or reading things into documents it's just a literal description of saying that the goal of the NSA is to eliminate privacy in the digital age by being able to access all human communications that take place electronically meaning on the internet or by the telephone and the reason I found that so stunning the reason I consider that to be the most surprising revelation when I get asked to you apply that label to something is not because of the way in which that system subverts privacy although it obviously does that the much more significant aspect to that revelation is the way in which it subverts democracy and the reason I say that is because just think about it the Internet is unquestionably one of the most significant if not the most significant human innovations of the last several centuries it has the promise to democratize and to liberalize and to radically reform and empower individuals in all sorts of ways previously inconceivable ways to take that and to turn it into a tool of unprecedented monitoring and coercion and surveillance whatever else you think about the decision to do that that decision is an extraordinarily consequential thing for a government to decide to do and yet it was done in utter and complete secrecy there wasn't a whiff of disclosure about the fact that we have government agencies working to turn the internet into a realm of mass surveillance there was no discussion of it and our presidential elections there were no press conferences about it there were no open congressional hearings there was zero information disseminated to the American public so that it could decide whether it wanted its government to be doing that now you can call something a democracy and you can even let the people who live in the country called a democracy every four years go and hide behind a curtain in punch a box next to the name of one of two political parties and decide which of it will occupy certain offices but if you have people doing that in utter ignorance of the most consequential decisions being made that really is just a hollow ritual it's the symbol of democracy without any substance behind it there was there was um this this really fascinating document it was actually kind of amusing there aren't very many amusing documents on the Snowden archive being amused is is not the most common reaction when you read through them but there was one category of documents that they actually did find amusing it was sort of like this um internal NSA newsletter almost like a magazine actually it was like they have their own magazine just like any other magazine that you can go and buy on the story except at the top it says top secret which means it's their crime for you to read it but other than that it's a lot like just the standard magazines and one of the interesting things about this magazine is that you know like every other magazine it has like features and then it has interviews where they'll interview various security officials people in the Pentagon or the NSA or other government agencies and the really interesting thing is that because they thought that what they were saying would never be seen by the public they actually are honest and like candid and the things that they say which is really weird to read government officials speaking candidly and honestly it's a very strange experience that I'm sure very few of you have had I never had it before I read the Snowden archive but that's one of the things that reading through this newsletter affords and there was this one interview in particular that I found incredibly significant and we actually reported on it and it got I think far less attention than it deserved it was an interview with the official at the NSA who was in charge of the NSA's partnerships with foreign intelligence agencies so the NSA has a partnership agreement with the Intelligence Agency in France or Spain or India or Argentina or Korea and this official is the one who oversees all of those partnerships with intelligence agencies in foreign countries and the interviewer asked a lot of really probing questions and one of the questions that he asked is he said you know here's one thing I never have understood and this was an NSA person doing the interview he said one thing I've never understood is in all these other countries with whom we partner they have elections and they have wild swings in the outcome of elections just like we do they have sometimes they'll have a really far to the left party that wins and that then runs the government and other times they have a really fun are to the right party that wins and sometimes they have a centrist party and yet the one thing I've never understood said the interviewer is no matter what the outcome of those elections is our relationship with those foreign intelligence agencies never changes it never weakens it never gets threatened it just continues exactly as it was why is that why don't these election outcomes as wildly varying as they are affect the NSA's relationship with these other agencies and what the official said was he said the reason that the relationships don't change is because almost nobody outside of the military structure and the intelligence structure in those countries even knows that these partnerships exist meaning the people that the citizens of those democracies go and elect have no idea that they have an Intelligence Agency partnering with the NSA in order to engage in mass surveillance and therefore they can't change the policies of which they are unaware and I actually I was I did a an event right before this event with some reporters from here in Utah and and one of them asked me you know have you been contacted by members of the US Congress and and what have they said have they been supportive have they have they've been critical what have they said and I said you know actually yes over the last two years I probably have spoken with I don't know how many but a lot you know probably three dozen maybe more members of Congress pretty evenly distributed from both political parties and the thing that almost all of them have said to me overwhelmingly is even though that a lot of them won't say it in public but some of them have but most of them won't but what they have told me privately is we are so happy with the reporting that you've been able to do because as members of Congress we knew almost nothing about what the NSA was doing we didn't know anything about these surveillance programs until we read about them in your articles on the Guardian or the articles that the Washington Post was publishing and this includes members of the committee's that are supposed to be engaging in oversight of these intelligence committees and it isn't just in the United States I've gone to I don't know how many countries probably 20 in the last two years why I've done reporting on intelligence programs and surveillance programs and have spoken to a lot of members of those countries Parliament's as well and I heard the same thing in Great Britain and in New Zealand and in Sweden where I just was and in Germany where I just was and in multiple countries throughout Europe which is we knew nothing about these programs until we read about them in your articles in fact there was a member of the national security advisory committee in Parliament advising the prime minister in the United Kingdom who wrote an op-ed in The Guardian which you can go and read in October of 2013 who said that my job as a member of parliament was to make sure that our country's surveillance agency was doing its job and complying with the law and how it was spying on people and yet I was kept completely in the dark about almost all of these programs it's something I heard over and over and over again now think about what that means that kind of secrecy what you actually have is a government inside of a government what it really is is you have an undemocratic apparatus making all of the decisions within a shell of a democracy something that looks like a democracy that is called a democracy but that has almost none of the properties that we are told to believe a democracy is defined by because you have decisions being made by a small group of often unelected people where those decisions are being kept completely from the people that were going to the polls and pointlessly electing to office and I think this is really something that is almost worth thinking about more than the privacy and surveillance questions is what are the implications for democracy when we allow this kind of pervasive secrecy to take hold and that's why one of the things I emphasize in terms of finding common ground and speaking to diverse groups of people is there are a lot of Americans who have really different views on the surveillance question and the privacy question I bet if you sort of gave everyone here a platform you would hear really disparate opinions on the question of the extent to which we want our government to be spying on us and the balance between security and individual liberty people or should be debating that and they have entitled to debate that and they're gonna have different opinions and it's a hard question how to calibrate that balance but regardless of your views on those questions on surveillance and privacy I think that we should all be able to agree that we are so much better off being able to have that debate and knowing about the programs which is another way of saying I would really be interested in hearing and I say this all the time to journalists who have been critical of Edward Snowden I would be really interested in hearing anybody especially a journalist but any citizen stand up and say you know what I actually think we would be better off if we were still ignorant about all of the things that our government was doing I mean to describe that viewpoint is to mock it and I think the reason for that is that you cannot have a functioning democracy if you allow the government to be making the most significant decisions without us even knowing what it is they're doing and I think that more than anything is what drove Edward Snowden to come forward with this information it's definitely what has driven our journalism now I just want to talk a little bit about about secrecy and and and kind of the magnitude of it beyond the Snowden story and and maybe on surveillance and the reasons that we should care a great deal about it most of you probably remember the 2010 series of releases that were done by WikiLeaks where they posted to the Internet many hundreds of thousands of pages detailing what the United States government did in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and I remember at the time that the US media was was very critical of those releases and in order to be critical of them they were saying to two different things at the same time they were saying on the one hand that WikiLeaks and the person who leaked this information who was unknown at the time were treasonous that they had an endangered American national security and put all kinds of people in danger and on the other hand they were saying you know what there's actually nothing new or interesting in any of these documents I mean it doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't already know which I always found to be quite contradictory right I mean how if the documents were so banal and uninformative did they simultaneously harm national security but the reality is is if you go through and actually look at those hundreds of thousands of documents that were released to the internet it actually is true that while there are some very significant revelations and there the vast majority of them are really uninteresting they're just routine they're they don't actually say anything at all warranting secrecy they're just the common sort of things that governments do and yet at the top of every one of those documents is stamped classified or secret or top secret and the same exact thing happens if you go and and spend your time reading through tens of thousands of documents from the NSA which as you might have heard is what I've been doing with my life for the past 20 months it isn't that every single page has these blockbuster jaw-dropping revelations some do but most of them are really banal they're just uninteresting and unrevealing they're really boring meetings between people and government over scheduling issues or vacation pay or or just the sorts of things that happen in my job and your job every day that aren't even interesting to us because they're happening to us let alone things that would be dangerous to release and what this reflects what this reflects the fact that there are millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of pages of government documents that are completely uninteresting and unrevealing and nonetheless marked top secret which means it's a crime for you to reveal them is that everything our government does is reflexively declared secret the presumption with everything they do is that it should be stamped classified and secret and made a crime to release it which is another way of saying that virtually nothing of what the government does is visible or transparent to us as citizens some of it is usually the stuff they want us to know that they themselves leaked to reporters is stuff that we find out because it makes some of them look good or make some of them look bad the ones that they want to make look bad but by and large most of what they do is just kept presumptively concealed now that should be a massive scandal in and of itself the fact that most of what a government is doing in a democracy is by the force of law kept secret nobody disputes that there's some things that the government does that are legitimately kept secret in rare circumstances things are supposed to be kept secret but to essentially adopt a policy that says virtually everything that we do will automatically and presumptively be kept secret is this great a subversion of democracy as I think can be imagined without hyperbole or exaggeration and I think the reason that it hasn't caused as much of a scandal as it should or really perhaps much of a scandal at all is because we've instead adopted this idea that secrecy excessive abusive secrecy in and of itself is actually not bothersome or dangerous what's dangerous is when there is somebody in power that we dislike or distrust and only then is it bothersome so if there's a Democrat in office and we're a Democrat we're not worried because there's a really good person exercising power and we don't have to worry of what he's doing is kept secret because we trust that person to do good things but if we're a Democrat and there's a Republican in office that's when there's true political danger and it happens the reverse way as well and I know this kind of from personal experience I began writing about politics in late 2005 and I was a lawyer at the time a constitutional lawyer and my principal concern was about what I perceived to be lots of abuses of political power abuses of secrecy power abuses of executive power putting people in prison without charges or due process eavesdropping on people without the warrants required by the Constitution and so when I began writing about politics most of what I was writing was highly critical the Bush administration and as a result liberals and progressives and Democrats were really enthusiastic fans of the work I was doing they thought it was fantastic in fact their who built the political platform that I ended up having by cheering for the work I was doing and supporting it and at the same time most of my most vociferous critics were Republicans and conservatives who thought that the criticisms I were voicing were were terrible and harmful and destructive and starting around January 20th 2009 my whole world reversed and all of the liberals and progressives and Democrat two of my really good friends well not all of them but a lot of them decided that well actually he's not really that good of a person at all and at the same time I had all these new Republican and conservative friends and the reason was that despite the campaign planks on which he he ran to reverse most of these policies there was a great deal of continuity that President Obama embraced on policies of executive power and secrecy and obviously surveillance and so I was criticizing the same policies but doing so under a Democratic president rather than a Republican one and therefore people who liked what I was doing changed dramatically and I think it's so important I mean if there's someone said to me you know I'm a genie and I'm gonna grant you one political ways you can make everyone in the United States realized one thing that you want them to realize what is it that you wish people would realize what I would say is that the reason that transparency and checks and balances and limitations on what people who wield power can do the reason that's so important is not because sometimes we're gonna have bad men and women in these offices wielding this power and when in those cases we have bad men and women who can't be trusted we protections instead it's exactly the opposite it's that what it means to be human just the properties of human nature is such that it is inevitable not likely or probable but inevitable that people who wield political power and are permitted to do so in the dark and without lots of checks and accountability and transparency will abuse that power and abuse it severely we're all familiar with the phrase that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely we usually invoke it when we're talking about those bad tyrants and those other countries but it actually is grounded in a recognition of what human nature is and if you look at what the American founders talk more about than anything else we love to talk about the American founders like they're a monolith like they all agreed on everything they actually were at each other's throats at least as much as we are with one another and in contemporary society they disagreed about a huge range of things they fought over all kinds of political disputes but there were several core principles on which they all agreed and their principal preoccupation the thing that kept them up at night more than anything else was this question we just thought this incredibly dangerous draining bloody war against the world's most powerful empire to liberate ourselves from this oppressive tyrannical monarch and now we're about to create this new centralized federal government invest it with all kinds of power how can we possibly be sure that we're not just replicating the same abuses that we just fought a war to liberate ourselves from how can we prevent the same kind of abuses of power as was so as they're so prevalent with the king and the answer they devised was that we should assume that no human being not just the bad ones from the other party no human being can be trusted to wield power without immense amounts of sunshine and limitations and I just want to share with you a couple rep Quotes so you can get a sense for how absolute and an in agreement they were about this here's what Thomas Jefferson said in questions of power let no more be heard of confidence and man instead bind him from mischief with the chains of the Constitution just don't even try and talk about how certain people can be trusted with power none of them can be the only thing that will bind them down our legal limitations on what they're permitted to do and John Adams was just as equivocal if not more so he said there is danger from all men not from all men in the Republican Party from all men period and then he said the only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man with power to endanger public liberty I mean this is supposed to be embedded in our DNA that we do not trust anyone to real power without all of these safeguards and yet we have permitted ourselves through a combination of genuine threats but also deliberate exploitation and X exaggeration of those threats to be put in a position of fear where we acquiesce to the very things that the founders of this country when creating the Constitution most eagerly wanted to avoid and I really think that for me at least is is what the Snowden story has been about more than anything else I just want to talk about a couple more issues related to that what it is you know I think it's worth thinking about what happens in a free society when it comes to secrecy and privacy and what happens in a tyrannical Society we love to talk about countries that we have tension with as being tyrannical whether it's Russia or Iran or China and North Korea and we have to talk about ourselves as a free society but the United States is not guaranteed to be free forever we can succumb to tyranny and all sorts of other erosions of freedom just like every other country in the world can in fact Benjamin Franklin made that point when he came out of the Constitutional Convention and was famously asked what is it that you created in there and he said a republic if you can keep it meaning just because we guaranteed this piece of paper isn't gonna be very significant if you the citizenry don't stay vigilant and fight for it and so I think it's worth thinking about what that means what it means to be a Free Republic what it means to live in a tyranny and one of the things I would say is this that in a free Republic you have public officials people who wield public power political power and public officials are supposed to have huge amounts of transparency they're supposed to do things in public hence the name public officials public agencies the public sector with very few exceptions when they can hide things legitimately but by and large they're supposed to have transparency meanwhile private citizens are supposed to have almost no transparency we're supposed to be able to do things without other people watching and monitoring and storing what we do with very few exceptions namely when the government has reason to believe that we're engaged in some kind of criminal conduct that's the definition of a free society we know about what people who wield political power are doing they have transparency they don't keep track of monitor and store information or keep dossiers about us in a tyrannical Society the exact opposite is true and it's pretty much true of every tyrannical society you want to think of it's exactly the opposite dynamic those who wield political power know everything about the citizenry they monitor them they store information about them they keep dossiers on them but the citizenry knows almost nothing about what those who wield political power doing because they hide behind walls of secrecy I would submit and I don't think it's actually that controversial that we are far closer at least in this regard to the tyrannical model been to the free model where the government is storing literally billions of communication data every single day I talked earlier about collect at all this is not some kind of like fictitious futuristic aspiration on the part of the NSA they're very close to achieving that they literally collect billions of telephone records and email events every single day not only about foreigners but about the American population indiscriminately in fact think about the reason that that facility in Bluffdale exists the reason that exists is because if you look at NSA documents in 2009 and 2010 the biggest problem that they have is that they are storing collecting rather so much information about Americans and the world that they don't have any ability to store it just physical space to store the data they're collecting and the reason that's so shocking is because you can now store gargantuan amounts of digital data and tiny little thumb drives so if the problem that you have is that you don't have enough physical space to store the electronic data that you're collecting it means that you are collecting a mind-bending amount of information about the world and that's why that facility was built it's basically just a storage closet for the NSA and the bigger their capacity becomes the more they can collect and the longer they can keep it which means the more they can search it and troll through it and use it that's the dynamic in which we're living is they want to know everything about us while we know essentially nothing about them I'm sure most of you heard of the recent controversy involving Hillary Clinton and her email server and there's lots of reasons why people found that fascinating almost none of which interested me at all in terms of what it says about her character or anything else like that or the 2016 election about which I can almost not care less at the moment but the thing that did really fascinate me about this is that when the Snowden reporting first began one of the most vigorous defenders of what the NSA was doing and one of the most vocal critics of Edward Snowden was Hillary Clinton she was totally fine with the idea that the NSA is collecting enormous amounts of data about the people with whom you are communicating and what it is that you're doing and saying and at the very same time she was certainly extremely eager to make sure that nobody knew with whom she was communicating she built her own server in her house to make sure that it didn't happen and then delete it and cleaned it down to its core and I think this is something that you see over and over and over again I remember early on when we first revealed the metadata program the fact that the government was collecting the list of all the people with whom you're communicating two senators the the the two senior senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee one Republican one Democrat saxby chambliss and Dianne Feinstein came out and said you know what this program that is collecting all of your quote metadata the list of all the people with whom you're communicating I don't even think this is surveillance they said because it's not actually reading the content of your email it's just keeping track of all the people with whom you're communicating that's all so like if you call a drug or alcohol addiction center or a suicide hotline or a physician who specializes in particular diseases or you speak with somebody who isn't your spouse late at night for whatever perfectly legitimate reasons this is something that the government is going to track and know about but according to Dianne Feinstein in saxby chambliss this isn't really spying because they're not actually listening to the content of what you're saying and I remember there was this campaign that instantly arose that said okay saxby chambliss and Dianne Feinstein if metadata isn't actually spying what we would like you to do is every single day just have one of your staffers go online and post the identities of all the people with whom you've spoken on the telephone and all the people with whom you've exchanged emails and all the people with whom you physically met and where you were when you did it and the duration of the conversations don't worry we're not going to know the content of what you've said we're just gonna know that and of course it's inconceivable that they would do that because of how invasive it is I think it reveals this really prevailing and dangerous mentality that they should know everything about us while we're entitled to know nothing about them now to end I just want to talk a little bit about privacy and why IVA see matters because they think this is a hard conversation to have and I think it's been a really central part of the debate and I think that it's a difficult question to really wrap your head around like why should I care if the government is keeping track of this information about me I'm not a terrorist I'm not plotting to blow innocent people up and I'm not even a criminal like I'm not a drug trafficker and I'm not a pedophile and I haven't killed anybody so I don't really mind if the government monitors everything that I'm saying and doing because I'm actually not doing anything wrong and therefore I have nothing to hide this is a very common mentality that I hear all the time as a reason why people might Karen on an abstract level about surveillance but don't ultimately really mind if the government is monitoring them and I just want to say a few things about that way of thinking first of all and I hope you'll test this whether you have friends who think that or you yourself think that by recognizing the following fact the people who say that they don't care about privacy and they have nothing to hide they don't actually mean it I can promise you that here's how I know this the people who say that they don't care about privacy and have nothing to hide are people who put locks and use locks on their bedroom and their bathroom doors they put password protection on their email accounts and their social media accounts they take all kinds of steps to make sure that things that they do and say and think are unknown to other people in fact every single time for the last two years there's somebody has said to me you know what I don't have anything to hide because I'm not doing anything wrong so I don't mind if I'm being monitored and watch people are free to watch me all I want I'm not worried I say the same thing I get out of pen like this one and I write down on a piece of paper my email address and I say okay here's my email address what I want you to do when you get home is I want you to email me all of the passwords to your email and your social media accounts like not just the respectable work your name but all of them like all the ones that you use and I want to be able to just troll through them at my leisure and then just publish whatever it is that I find interesting about you online why would you not do that like you are not a bad person you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide to this day not one single person has taken me up on this offer it's a I check that email account all the time it's a very lonely and desolate place no one ever emails me there and there's a really good reason for that why people don't do that it's because they instinctively understand what the value of privacy is every single one of you in this room and every single person that you know have things to hide there are things that you tell your spouse or your best friend or your psychiatrist or your physician or your lawyer that you don't want other people to know about not because you're terrorists or because you're criminals but because as complicated adults who are free and interesting we do and say things that we simply don't want others to know about because it would make us vulnerable we all have things to hide we all understand that privacy is a critical part of what it means to be a free adult a place to go where people can not judge us or monitor us or keep track of what it is that we're doing and thinking and saying which is another way of saying that having a private realm a place that you can go or nobody watches you is critical because it's the place in which human creativity and individuality and dissent and the opportunity to explore exclusively reside there are all kinds of really fascinating social science studies though I bet you don't need them because you know this already just from personal experience these studies prove that when somebody not just is being watched but thinks that they might be watched they make much different behavioral choices the range of available options to you for what you choose to do is it free human being is significantly reduced when you think that you're being watched when you think you're being watched the choice that you make are the byproduct not of your own autonomy and agency and individuality but the byproduct of what you think societal expectations are of you or what orthodoxy demands of you and that's the reason that a surveilled society a watch society is incredibly compliant and submissive and obedient and meek it's the reason that every tyrant from the most overt and violent to the pettiest and most subtle crave surveillance because it keeps people in line and so even if you think that you're not someone who has things to hide just the fact that you live in a world in which everything that you do is susceptible to being watched and monitored and recorded radically changes the freedom available to you and what it means to be a free individual and that's something that whether we recognize it or not is a huge damage that is inflicted upon us from surveillance now I just want to end with one last observation about the work that I did with Edward Snowden and a lesson that I learned from from doing that work and I especially like to talk about this when I talk of college campuses because I think it's so relevant to the college experience but I actually talk about it in lots of other places as well because it's a lesson that really profoundly influenced how I think about the world and while I'm sure influenced me for the rest of my life and it's this when I flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden I knew essentially nothing about him I mean I knew that he was somebody who claimed to have amazingly interesting top-secret documents that revealed mass surveillance programs I knew that he had some documents because I made him send me a few before I got on the plane to Hong Kong but I didn't know how much he had I didn't know his name I didn't know where he worked I didn't know his gender and I definitely didn't know his age and when I got to Hong Kong the thing and then met him the thing that shocked me the most about him was how young he was he was 29 years old at the time but he looked much younger you look you know probably 22 or 23 just like a very ordinary kind of vaguely nerdish kid that you see everyday in the shopping mall and it was actually alarming because I I was thinking you know dis is it possible this person really has access to the things that he claims and it made us do a lot more investigating but ultimately once we were able to determine his bonafide ease the authenticity of what he was saying that he was who he said he was and and was doing what he said for the reasons that he said it really struck me in in a profound way because not only was was he so young but he was also as I said I mean just a very ordinary he grew up in a lower middle-class home at best I mean his father was in the Coast Guard for 30 years he was somebody who had no power or position or prestige of any kind he was working for a massive corporation Booz Allen and had worked prior to that for Dell and the CIA and the NSA just in huge institutions kind of a very obscure anonymous person and yet through this incredible act of courage and act of conscience and whatever else you think of him it was those things by definition he he took action that he thought would send him to prison for the rest of his life in defense of political values that he believed in through an act of conscience and an act of courage he literally changed the world I mean he did he changed the world he grat radically changed how hundreds of millions of people not just in the United States but around the world think about a huge array of issues it spawned legislative reform in multiple countries it it has caused very fundamental changes and how the individuals behave in on the Internet and think of the internet and think of their own privacy rights and the the threat of government secrecy the effects of it are things that we won't know in full for many years if not decades and the reason I find that so profoundly important and so striking is that ever since I began writing about political issues I've sensed this really intense defeatism on the part of almost everybody it's a really powerful temptation it's it's a sense that tells you that no matter what injustice is you think you've confronted that you really can't do much about them because you're just kind of powerless and these institutions are are really formidable and there's no way for you to do much about them it's almost a relief to tell yourself that because it means that you don't have to do anything about them right well I can't change it so I'm gonna go ahead and just you know put my feet up and and and relax and tell myself that I can't and there's all kinds of examples throughout human history I would say probably most of the most significant societal changes that have come exactly from that from really ordinary powerless people changing the world through acts of conscience whether it's you know Rosa Parks totally obscure and powerless just taking a stand in spawning and fueling a civil rights movement not just in the US but around the world or a Tunisian street vendor who sets himself on fire and sparks this incredible democratic revolution that brings down some of the world's most entrenched here needs I mean that to me is the lesson of Edward Snowden that we should all always keep in the forefront of our minds which is that every single institution built by human beings no matter how formidable or powerful it seems can always be undermined and altered and even torn down and replaced by other human beings just by individuals who are acting with a sufficient amount of political conviction and courage and conscience and I think that to me is the most important lesson of the last 20 months so with that I thank you very much for listening and I look forward to the Q&A session thank you very much thank you thank you much thank you okay mr. Greenwald has agreed to take some questions so just a reminder since we're live-streaming this please make sure before you ask that you have a microphone in your hand and you speak into the microphone mr. Greenwald thanks for coming on my Utah University of Utah alumni I have two questions one before Edward Snowden you mentioned that you were writing a book about Noam Chomsky and his exclusion by the US media so I was wondering if you're finishing that book but secondly I wanted to push back a little bit on what you said at the end of your talk and the reason I say this is that if you look at Benjamin page study from Princeton that he looked at the last 30 years 40 years of policy public policy and then he looked at public opinion and what he found was that if you're in the bottom 70% of the income scale you have statistically zero influence on policy if you're on the 1% you have policy made accession essentially so I'm wondering how optimistic are you that change can happen and why haven't we seen something like the Church Committee in the 1970s I haven't seen very much movement especially from I would say the elite in this country towards something like that and I don't I wonder without that how much change can we really have for people who are not in the most powerful or that highest 1% thank you that's a great question as far as the the book that was my plan and I've noticed this interesting phenomenon that when you're working on things and then somebody suddenly appears in your life and hands you many tens of thousands of documents from the most secretive agency of the world's most powerful government it does disrupt your plans and and you do tend to work on that to the exclusion of other things so I'm starting now to think about what I might do next and and that's a possibility as far as the question that you asked about sort of the powerlessness of people and you know it's something I actually been thinking about the last 24 hours because I think you mentioned the the John Oliver segment right I don't know how many of you saw that but it was a really interesting 30 minute discussion about surveillance and and democratic debate by John Oliver which included a kind of interview that he did with with Edward Snowden two weeks ago in Moscow and it was interesting and good but one of the parts about it that I actually didn't like was that a lot of people took away from it was they they sent cameras to Times Square and they just randomly asked people hey what do you think about would Snowden and a large number of them said Edward who like they didn't know who Edward Snowden was or if they knew it oh yeah that's that guy who likes old documents to Wikileaks it was you know like stuff like that and John Oliver tried to make this point well look you know you kind of unraveled your life for this political cause and obviously the whole thing failed because huge numbers of people don't even know who you are I thought was a really misleading point because if you look at the American public broadly there is an enormous amount of widespread almost full-scale political disengagement in our presidential elections alone like the peak of political involvement forty to fifty percent of Americans of the voting age population simply don't vote even in presidential elections like they just choose not to participate in midterm elections just once every two years we elect who's gonna run the Congress two-thirds of Americans or I don't think it's worth going and even voting if you look at what they know and don't know it's even more shocking if you ask Americans who is the current vice president not like who was the ninth vice president thank you right now at who's the vice president forty-two percent of Americans will not know which means like if you go to Times Square and do that same thing that John Oliver did but instead of saying who's Edward Snowden you say hey by the way what do you think of Joe Biden people gonna be like Joe Joe who and you know it gets even worse I think fifteen percent of Americans are capable of naming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and it's easy to kind of scoff at that and may I go that shows Americans are lazy or not very smart I don't think that's the lesson at all actually think the lesson is is that huge number of Americans have chosen to turn away from the political process because they perceive that they have no role in it that they can't influence it and that it's outcomes don't really make much of a difference in their lives and there's good reason for it I mean if you have a Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush Manaka called contest I mean presidential election you're gonna have exactly the same people literally exactly the same people providing most of the funding people on Wall Street will provide most of the funding equally to both of those candidates because they know that they'll have their interest served with each and so yeah I agree I think those studies are clear that like if you're in the bottom 70% socioeconomically or politically you don't have any influence so I wasn't when I say I'm optimistic about people's ability to change things I don't mean by going to the polls and choosing between one of the two political parties I mean by stepping out of that process and you know as I said at the end I mean there is no such thing as a political system created by human beings invulnerable to very radical fundamental change that could be revolution it could be something much short of it but when the population gets discontent enough they find ways to refuse to continue to assent to the assertion of unjust power and however that happens I think it's clearly always possible quick two and a half questions the first is do you think that Edward Snowden given rumors that he's possibly considering coming back to America would have would have perhaps been better off moving to the People's Republic of Portland Oregon and saying arrest me but give me a big microphone secondly regarding presidential leadership what would you have President Obama say publicly and maybe do privately that would be different I get the sense you think he's devolved on the issue rather than evolved I mean about surveillance secrecy surveillance and and say all these issues kind of intertwined and then the half question is do you or mr. stone maybe have any regrets about how things happen is there anything you would have done differently okay so those are I would think three full waveform questions I might need some help actually remembering them all see actually the first one was about Snowden returning to the u.s. so that's a complicated question but there's a great op ed by Daniel Ellsberg in June of 2013 in the Washington Post which I would encourage you to read on this topic because I remember early on when we first unveiled Snowden people said well he's not like that heroic Daniel's burger and hallsburg stayed and faced the music and Edward Snowden fled and if he had stayed in the u.s. I would be supportive but it bothers me that he's in China he was in Hong Kong at the time and and Daniel Ellsberg wrote an op-ed and said actually Edward Snowden is totally right to a flood and the reason is is that we live in a completely different country than the one we lived in a 1971 when I Daniel Ellsberg stood up and said yes I did leaked the Pentagon Papers and let's go to court where I can argue that I did the right thing and I can spend the weeks and months leading up to the trial holding press conferences engaging the public about why I did it we now have such a overwhelming national security ethos in the United States that somebody who is accused of violating espionage laws and national secure and harmony national security instantly detained and put incommunicado in prison so they can't engage the public even worse they're charged under this very extreme law that was never intended for this purpose I mean Edward Snowden is charged under a World War one statute that criminalized espionage now whatever you think of Edward Snowden and what he did what he did was not espionage he didn't spy for other countries he took material and came to journalists he didn't pass any to foreign governments he didn't sell any classified documents of things we traditionally think of as espionage and under this statute if you're charged with violation of the Espionage Act and you go to court what people in Washington all the time say is Edward Snowden should face the music he should come home and if he thinks he did the right thing go to court and argue he did the right thing by disclosing this information what I assume they know is that that is completely deceitful because under the law if you're charged with violation of the Espionage Act you are barred barred from raising that as a defense you are not allowed to go into court and to say yes I disclose classified information and the reason I did it is because this information should never have been kept secret in the first place I was justified in leaking it if you leak classified information as a government employee you are guilty of espionage period and justification is not a defense so he feels like he wouldn't get a fair trial he believes I think with great justification that he would be immediately detained and put into prison allowed no contact with the outside world and there would be no benefit to it and there'd be no fair trial and he would spend the next 40 years in the cage and it I think is easy to say okay well he probably would spend the next 40 years in the cage but I think you should do it anyway because there's political value or it's the right thing to do it's really easy to call for people to submit to a penal stain I much rather have Edward Snowden free to participate in the political debate that he helped to start writing op-eds giving interviews defending what it is that he did as far as President Obama you know I think that he should just do what he said he was going to do I think he should have the most transparent administration ever I think he should reign in the surveillance state and you know he himself has said that the debate that has been started is a really healthy debate to have and most people will say that as I said earlier no one will say I think it's we're better off and we had remain ignorant I think it's such a weird thing to go around saying this is a really great debate that we're having it's really healthy and valuable and I want to take the person who started that debate and throw them into jail like that to me just really doesn't follow and then the final question you know about whether we regret things yeah I mean if you are making hugely consequential choices as a journalist about information that should be public or shouldn't be if you're making really difficult choices about how to engage the public about the things you're arguing about how you're arguing them of course you're gonna make a ton of mistakes and I mean I could easily reel off the top of my head you know five or six things that I wish I had have done differently you know and I think Edward Snowden has talked about mistakes he made - like the time that he agreed to ask Matt Amir Putin a question thinking he could stand up to Putin and challenge him aggressively and instead he got turned into this propaganda coup yeah we're human beings and we're imperfect and we made a lot of mistakes but if you look back at what we thought we were gonna what was going to happen in Hong Kong and what the range of likely outcomes was the debate that we were able to provoke around the world which continues to rage to this day 20 months later is unbelievably gratifying and I think way better than anything we in our wildest dreams thought we could achieve thanks for being here Glenn I was one of your four or five Republican supporters during the Bush administration I wanted to actually dovetail on your last response to that half of a question about having to make those tough decisions between what to disclose and what not to disclose I understand that as a condition of being given the snowden archive you made assurances or promises to add to snowden that you would not disclose certain things or that you would take some care to do that on the same hand you said that to describe this situation is to mock it that being that you know were better off for the debate that we've had and we you know much prefer to be ignorant that type of thing would you see it as a net benefit and that Harmer and that help if somebody if WikiLeaks or somebody else were to obtain access to that archive and just publish the entire thing do we need journalists to filter it and only selectively disclose or should we would we be benefited as a society more broadly to be informed about the entire cache so I have pretty radical views of transparency I think compared to say the standard population like I definitely fall in the far end of the pro disclosure Pro transparency anti-secrecy spectrum that said there are things in that archive that I have zeroed out should not be disclosed for example I'm not going to disclose and I'm just going to describe it I'm sorry to get you all excited oh he's going to break a huge story that he just said shouldn't be broken there there are mature their materials in the archive that are essentially emails that the NSA has collected and gathered from people they were interested in or transcripts of their telephone calls or their chats if I were to take that material and just indiscriminately publish it that would be an extraordinary violation of those people's privacy why would I possibly publish private communication between people that the NSA has collected or there are internal discussions that the NSA has about various people that they think are bad in some way or another I think that person is a terrorist I think that person is an extremist I think he's plotting to do bad things I think he's done this why would I take information and destroy people's reputation by publishing unvetted accusations that the US government internally has made about huge numbers of people there is information about what the NSA has done in Afghanistan in Iraq and to a large extent is still doing to find roadside bombs that when they blow up kill not just US service members but also innocent people why would I want to ruin programs that are finding roadside bombs in Yemen and Somalia in Afghanistan and Iraq so you know yeah I and then there's the identity of lots of individuals where if you publish the information you could expose them in all kinds of ways and then there's information that in there that's very difficult to understand even for technical experts because you only have part of the information but you don't have all of it so publishing it it's almost impossible to predict what the consequences is because you don't actually know what you're publishing so you know it is interesting to have been put in the position where in some sense I'm actually keeping some of the same secrets of the NSA has been keeping and we've been criticized by WikiLeaks and other people who I guess are even further down that spectrum than I am you know saying that look what you're doing is wrong you should be just taking all that stuff and throwing it up on the Internet you know but for one thing we had a source who if he wanted all that information thrown up on the internet he could have just thrown it all on the internet himself he didn't need me or the Washington Post or the Guardian to do it he could have just done that that's not what he wanted he wanted us to very carefully that the material only published the stuff that was needed for the public to have a meaningful debate and not publish things that could legitimately endanger people or otherwise destroy their reputations and we just add on one one anecdote about that about nine months ago we did a story on identifying Muslim American leaders in the United States who had been targeted with a really invasive surveillance a member of the Homeland Security Department who ran for Congress and he was a lawyer a leader of the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country care and several other prominent Muslim when we were gonna do the reporting we had 25 people who we wanted to identify as just abusive inappropriate surveillance targets people who were targeted for their ethnicity or their political activism not because they conceivably pose any threat and before we did the reporting and identified them we went to them and we said kind of have some bad news your name appears continuously an NSA document and they've been reading all your emails and listening to your calls and we don't think it was the right thing for do and so we want to report this we want to name you as a person that they've targeted and the vast majority of people that we went to who are overwhelmingly Muslim American said please do not do that because if you do that it will forever be attached to my name that the u.s. government was suspicious of me and thought I was doing something wrong and it will stigmatize me in front of my neighbors and my colleagues and my future job my future job and professional opportunities and it will destroy my reputation and I desperately want you not to do it should we have just ignored their wishes and just thrown that stuff up on the internet and name them anyway I would never do that and so it has been a really difficult balancing act all the time because we also as journalists have a duty to the public not to let things that shouldn't be kept secret be kept secret but it's been a really difficult choice and that's why I said I'm sure we've made lots of mistakes in trying to balance that but that's the job that you undertake when you accept this hi my name is Kevin I'm in the communication department thanks for the inspiring talk in the eloquent defense of privacy it helps kind of recharge depleted batteries of optimism so I appreciate that and in terms of changes you've made my partner I did a social network analysis about conversations networks about surveillance before and after the Snowden revelations and it's a market change that happens to super-crook questions one say yes or no the first question is watching the movie and citizen for you all are careful worried about to being surveilled all that kind of stuff even the red mantle of power but then you do all the revelations and Snowden reveals themselves staying in the same Hong Kong hotel well what's up with that today I'm gonna think about him like going to where he wanted to go before doing that and I'm just curious and the other question was you know environmental issues are so important nowadays globally and they have military on vacations they have corporate ramifications I was just wondering if the NSA documents reveal anything about environmental issues or environmental activism and surveillance Thanks yeah so just on the second question I mean it's interesting that even people who pay close attention there have been so many revelations that you can actually overlook some or forget some actually when they were when I went to do my book and the editor said you know you're gonna do all these new revelations but you've got to kind of describe what has been revealed so far and I went back and looked at all the articles that have been written I actually forgot about a lot of big stories including ones that I had to reported so you know it's been a really complicated thing but yeah there's been stories about that we've done about NSA spying on environmental conferences on climate treaties trying to manipulate the process to gain advantage for American industry at the expense of other countries emission standards so yeah there's there there's definitely environmental objectives as part of the surveillance scheme as far as the first question which was yeah yeah okay I got it I just momentarily stopped my mind which happens with multi-part questions so one of the things that that I think people don't quite fully get about Snowden it's how genuinely selfless his decision was because the reason that he chose Hong Kong to go to is because his only goal and if you think about it it's totally understandable was to make sure that if he was going to take this enormous risk and leave a trail that he took all these documents and leave his job and his family and everything else he wanted to make sure that the reporting actually happened that he got the documents into our hands and that we were then able to get the reporting done and that nothing could interfere with that and so he wanted to make sure to go to a place where the United States government would have a really difficult time even if they discovered what he was doing a difficult time disrupting you which is why chose Hong Kong so every choice that he made was always about how do I make sure this reporting happens that's what he was obsessed with and he thought very very little about what would happen to him once he got revealed and I remember on a couple of occasions both Laura and I said to him well you know like what's your exit plan like you know once we start doing these stories and then we identify you where you're worried where are you going and like what is your plan are you gonna just turn yourself in you have a hiding spot you plan to go somewhere and he said to us I want you not to know about any of those plans for two reasons number one is he said I don't want anybody be able to say that you've helped me flee because I'm worried that you can be arrested and that will prevent you from doing the reporting and secondly um you know he said it's just better if you don't know it'll just help you in your work and I want you to focus on your work so he really did keep us out of that part of the plan and once you know I don't I genuinely don't think I think he thought about it a little bit but you know obviously if he were really worried about what was gonna happen to him he wouldn't have done what he did in the first place his overriding preoccupation was getting this material out to the public and everything else he meticulously planned that what everything else after that as you saw in the film it was just sort of by the seat of his pants Wow it's it's such an honor sir thank you my name is John fast I came from Idaho I have a podcast in it anyway it doesn't matter so I wrote it down because I didn't want to I didn't want to screw it up I started my podcast because I was inspired by Edward Snowden well partials mostly and we actually anyway Mike I don't know what I can do I don't know how you said how I'm certainly not the 1% I can't but I have an idea I want to start a crowdsourcing crowdfunded campaign to deliver a pizza to Edward Snowden I'm not even kidding because I know he loves pizza I I want to know if I started this crowd campaign would you help me get it to him the pizza yes even if it has to be some like weird like drop-off like we have the Russian Domino's guy like bring it to a coab mailbox so like put it underneath and like he has to go get it because I will do it if you'll help you get it - well I think you found lots of supporters probably just in this room I think you could gather the necessary funds to know they'll be breadsticks - Oh Brad today probably have to go outside the room yeah I mean yes I you know I think it's a nice thought and you know one of the interesting things is that when you're in the middle of the store of a story like this people who are not all that happy with what you've done tend to make themselves really vocal and and people who are supportive tend not to express themselves as much and and I often remind him when I talked to him that there are a huge number of people around the world everywhere I go in fact when his name is mentioned you you know explode with a pause and are are really supportive so I think expressions of support that are great and if you're serious about it just send me an email you can find my email address online and I'll be happy to talk about that nice okay thank you I don't know how to follow that question / so a moment ago you mentioned all these harsh laws that are totally outdated that penalize whistleblowers so I just was curious what you see in the future for future whistleblowers do you think people will come out after they've seen what's happened to Snowden and other people like who's been penalized so so badly from exposing this information yeah it's a it's a great question and it's actually a really important issue because you know we talked earlier about the unprecedented punishment of whistleblowers under the Obama administration and you know it's not just vindictive like they didn't just wake up one day and say we want to go on this rampage there's actually a rationale to it and the rationale is this it is really hard in the digital age to safeguard huge amounts of information from disclosure in fact it's almost impossible I'll tell you what I mean my childhood er growing up my childhood here growing up was Daniel Ellsberg and one of the great honors of writing about politics and stuff is that I've gotten to become friends of Daniel Ellsberg and if you talk to the Ellsberg about leaking the Pentagon Papers and the challenges that he faced what he says is the greatest challenge that he had was he was inside the RAND Corporation working with the Pentagon and saw this multi-volume top-secret document filled with I think it's 16,000 pages that proved that the American government had been systematically lying to the American people about the Vietnam War telling Americans were on the verge of winning but these documents show at the very same time they were claiming that internally they were saying the war was unwinnable all these really significant revelations and his greatest challenge was how do I get 16,000 pages to the New York Times do I like do I go to a drugstore with a bag of quarters and like Xerox them you know like Topsy just at a mimeograph machine that was his greatest challenge it was there was a logistical problem they could just keep two or three copies in a locked filing cabinet and it was really hard just physically delete them now all of this material is stored digitally on tiny little thumb drives when chelsea manning formerly bradley manning leaked all of that material to wikileaks it was many many hundreds of thousands of pages which were downloaded I think in about an hour and a half you know and shipped off to WikiLeaks without any detection it's impossible for the government to prevent these kinds of disclosures physically prevented and so what do they left to do and what they're left to do is to create a climate of fear where they say if you or somebody who's contemplating doing this we want you to look at what we've done to the people who have done it in the past we have prosecuted them aggressively under felony charges that could send them to prison for the rest of their lives we put them in solitary confinement we forced them into exile and Russia where they can't leave the country we will destroy you if if you do it it's a way of just deterring people by making them fear the consequences of what people in Washington have been doing for many many decades and on which our act democracy actually depends which is leaking classified information to journalists or the public that is necessary to inform the public of what's taking place what's really interesting about it though is as aggressive as they've been and is you know sort of destructive as they've been to people's lives who have done it more and more people keep doing it and I don't know how many of you have seen citizen four but the last scene of that film is about a very very significant source inside the US government who has come to us inspired by Edward Snowden and provided us with I can't say anything much about it but very sensitive material that is going to enable us to do some really significant reporting inspired by Snowden not intimidated by the government and I think the reason for that is is that the it's almost this kind of interesting counterproductive dynamic we're the more abusive and aggressive the government gets the more people inside government start thinking well this is a government that really needs transparency I don't actually trust them any longer to do these things in secret and the more people come forward in reaction to it so I think the tactic that they're using probably deters some people but is producing a lot more future Daniel Ellsberg's or Edward Snowden's and it's a really counterproductive cycle for them that I actually hope continues thank you for coming to the University and articulating what I think can only be described as a crisis and legitimacy here in our government it's certainly my experience I would putting my life experience to these facts that you've presented it seems to me that one can only say that the existence of this data collection says that it will be abused the very fact that it exists says that this data collection will be abused I believe you made a very interesting point that I hadn't really thought about today and that is that the fact that the population knows it's being surveilled in itself has its own effect and and sort of bringing the herd into into compliance do you think you are an unwitting accomplice in that just in fact that you're letting everybody know what's gone on and maybe maybe there are powers to be that like the fact that you're doing this and this is sort of part of quieter objectives and if so you know it isn't the case that before the Snowden reporting began that people were entirely unaware that electronic surveillance existed we're even that there had been pretty significant cases of surveillance abuses in the past in 2005 the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that the NSA was eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of Americans without first going to the five court and obtaining it weren't for it in 2006 USA Today revealed that there was a phone metadata program where millions of Americans were having data stored about them and in 2010 the Washington Post ran this three-part series called top secret America by Dana priest and Bill Arkin that said among other things that the NSA was collecting 1.8 billion communication events about people every single day so the existence of a a surveillance state had been known but the glimpses into it were very isolated and not nearly as comprehensive as they needed to be to spur a meaningful debate so I don't think that what the snowden reporting did was switch people from completely unaware to the fact that they might be being watched too aware for the first time about it I think we've all been aware that things like the internet and our telephone calls are susceptible to being monitored I mean we're a country that lived through 50 or 60 years of Jagger Hoover's FBI and all of the infiltration of anti-war groups and anti-government groups and the civil rights movement so none of this is as a concept entirely new so no I don't think that it's only because of Edward Snowden that for the first time Americans realize that they they might be watch but I I mean it may be a side effect it might be sort of a cost of doing it that it can almost write a sort of paranoia but you know as a journalist or somebody who's inside of the US government as Edward Snowden was I mean I think that the primary consideration you have to ask is what is it that my fellow citizens ought to know in a democracy so that they can do something about it and you know between having everybody be subjected to a surveillance state that they don't know about and therefore can't do anything about and having them objected to a surveillance state that they know about and therefore it can do something about I think the latter outcome is infinitely preferable so thank you again everybody very much thanks Lynn greenwalt you you

Channel: University of Utah

Views: 71,995

Rating: 4.7276788 out of 5

Keywords: Glenn Greenwald (Author), Edward Snowden, University Of Utah (College/University)

Id: -1jAOJHvll0

Length: 88min 39sec (5319 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/e-Pat]

An important aspect that has not been mentioned is the fact that democracy cannot exist if every single person can be blackmailed. - Blackmailed with facts that were obtained by means of surveillance or by planting false evidence. And this not only includes every single person in power but also everybody who is in the process of obtaining such a position. Numerous such examples from the last years come to mind (officials being entangled in some sort of scandal that ended their careers prematurely).

With regards to the pizza: as if there was no way to buy one in Russia ! There is a good chance that it would even have far greater resemblance to the Italian original than anything a US chain could produce. And if really desperate: flour, yeast, olive oil, salt and milk (or water) plus toppings are all it requires to make the best pizza in the world.

[u/NetPotionNr9]

Somewhat ironic to have that in Utah, the closes thing we have to an authoritarian regime with all its Mormon secret police and fundamentalist extremists.