Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide

yours thank you thanks so much hey good evening thank you thanks very much thanks so much for that warm welcome and and thank you to the john adams institute for arranging this event in such a spectacular venue and thank you to all of you for coming out this evening let me begin by apologizing for the fact that i'm not going to be able to stay for the after event book signing and conversation with all of you which is typically my favorite part of these events the ability to interact with people um the tyranny of a book tour yields to no person and when you have art on a book tour every minute of your time is claimed by somebody else and publishers are extremely efficient about using every last minute of your time and being very efficient at creating your schedule except for the part where you're supposed to have some time to sleep they get a little forgetful when it comes to that but otherwise they're they're very regimented and so unfortunately you need to run to the airport um but hopefully it'll it'll be a great event and you'll enjoy it um this was actually a pretty difficult book to write and the reason it was difficult was because it's been such a rich 11 months or almost a full year now of events that have given rise to all sorts of i think pretty profound implications and so it was very challenging to think about how to structure the book but also how to narrow down all the things i wanted to say into 270 pages and it's even more difficult to think about what to say in 20 minutes that gives a meaningful glimpse into what i think is the core of the book and i think the best way to do that is to talk about the reasons why i wrote the book because the impetus for the book the reason why someone sits down to do the very grueling task of writing a book i think gives a fairly meaningful insight into what the heart and soul of the message is and of the points that are attempting to be conveyed and the first reason that i wrote the book and this might actually be the most significant is that over the last 12 months i have spent every single day working on story after story and document after document that reveal what the nsa and its surveillance partners around the world are doing to people's privacy both on the internet and in telecommunication systems and when you work on stories one after the next and are so focused on very complicated documents you're really adept at communicating what each story reveals but you can easily lose sight of the broader implications of what the debate has been about and one of the things that was amazing to me is when i went down when i went to write the book i went to look at all of the nsa stories that had been published around the world the dozens and dozens and dozens of stories over the last year and not only did i discovered that there were some really significant stories reported on by other journalists that i actually was unaware of but even more strange and even almost disturbing was that there were stories that i myself wrote from a few months earlier that i had completely forgotten about there have just been such a huge volume of disclosures that i think it's impossible for anybody even someone like me who has been in the middle of it and kept very close attention to it to fully digest the meaning and so being able to write a book lets you take a step or two back and think about things in a more deliberative way and i think try to analyze what has happened and to appreciate the the sort of deeper and and more profound consequences of what these disclosures and the ensuing debate have meant for the world and and that's what i tried to do in the book was to give the broader context to what all of these stories have meant and and to think about the reason why it has resonated around the world the way that it has but a second reason for for writing the book um and this might have been the one that triggered my greatest passion is that so much has been said about this story about the nsa about edward snowden about the work that we did about the reporting and a huge amount of what has been said publicly and in the media and by the us government and its allies is just completely untrue and for those of you who like to bash the journal bash journalism or bash the media and i am definitely somebody who loves to do that that's one of my favorite pastimes is to criticize the media i don't think you actually need to be reminded that it is very easy for media outlets around the world to disseminate all sorts of false messages and false claims anybody who sat through the debate in the run-up to the iraq war knows the power of the political media to convince hundreds of millions of people of things that are absolutely false so we all know that in the abstract but when you're actually at the center of one of these stories that all sorts of things are being said about your appreciation for the ability and willingness and even eagerness of large media organizations to turn out absolute propaganda factually false statements enhances greatly i mean it's almost as though their willingness to do that is unlimited and you know that when you're at the middle of a story because you know the truth because you've witnessed it firsthand and can compare what is being said to what you know to be true and the the the disparity between those two things is actually quite stunning so many times so i'll just give you a few examples of what i think have been the most amazing examples of just patently false claims being disseminated with great regularity in fact through to today when edward snowden was in hong kong and we unveiled him to the world at his insistence on june 10th of last year he remained in hong kong for almost two weeks from june 10th until june 23rd when he finally left hong kong and went to latin america or tried to go to latin america by transiting through russia and for those two weeks and you can go back and and easily find this the consensus among at least the american media and i know lots of british journalists and i think even people throughout the west was that edward snowden was clearly a chinese spy that this was definitely an espionage operation that was run out of beijing and this was said over and over for those two weeks even though there wasn't a shred of evidence that it was true and then when edward snowden left hong kong because the hong kong and chinese governments essentially forced him to do so and he tried to get to ecuador or latin america and seek asylum but was trapped in moscow by the u.s government those very same people who had spent two weeks announcing that he was clearly a russian agent or a chinese agent immediately switched like without any acknowledgement that they had ever said anything in the past and they said clearly this is a russian spy this is clearly a patsy of vladimir putin this is definitely an operation that was controlled by moscow even though there was no evidence for that either and if tomorrow he managed to fly to lima they would all say he's clearly a peruvian spy it's just whatever they need to say at any given moment to demonize him and to discredit the revelations they will say notwithstanding the lack of evidence and major media outlets continuously air all kinds of these claims there was just this big op-ed in the wall street journal last week by someone named edward j epstein it was printed all over the world and what he said was and it's amazing if you go and read it he said there are things we know for certain about edward snowden and the disclosures that he made and the agents who worked with him that means me and other journalists and what they said that they know for certain is that he's either a chinese spy that this was clearly either a chinese espionage operation or a russian espionage operation or a sino-russian joint cooperative espionage we know for sure it's one of those things and not only has there been zero evidence that he has ever cooperated with any foreign government or given any information of any kind to any foreign government or that any foreign government has ever obtained a shred of information from him not only is there zero evidence of that there's all kinds of evidence that make that claim on its face completely absurd beginning with the fact that had he wanted to cooperate with foreign governments he could have sold that information for tens of millions of dollars to virtually any intelligence agency in the entire world and been extremely rich for the rest of his life he could have easily done that had that been his intention or he could have passed the archive secretly to a foreign government that was an adversary of the united states had he wanted to harm the united states and act in in some sort of espionage capacity and yet he did none of that what he did was exactly what you would want a whistleblower of conscience to do which is to come to journalists to work with some of the world's largest and most well-respected media organizations and give the information to those journalists and say to the journalists i myself don't feel comfortable deciding which of this information should be public and which should be disclosed i want instead for you and your organizations and the editors with whom you work to make those choices it is the exact opposite in every single respect of what somebody who is a spy would do to say nothing of the fact that the chinese government forced him to leave hong kong after two weeks and the russian government let him linger in the international airport for five weeks as the putin government negotiated with the u.s over things that they could get in exchange for handing him over not exactly the way that the chinese and russian governments treat its spies and yet over and over and over this claim got made and it still gets made and there's almost no indication of how frivolous it is and so writing this book was one way to sort of lay out the definitive case for what actually happened and to make the facts known to make it much more difficult to sustain those myths there was another really remarkable attempt to demonize the reporting that i found almost humorous i actually it took place in the in the week or so after we unveiled snowden as our source and i was in hong kong at the time and i wasn't really paying much attention to what american pundits were saying because i was a little bit busy trying to go through the archive and and do the reporting and it wasn't until i wrote the book and went back to look at what the discourse was in the immediate aftermath of disclosing edward snowden did i see what had happened which was that almost overnight this script arose among american and british journalists as well almost so identical in terms of what one another was saying that it was almost hard to believe that they didn't coordinate it they had all suddenly decided that they had the capability to look at a person whom they had never met and knew nothing about and within 48 hours to psychologically diagnose him they all decided that what had motivated him was not a genuine concern about the dangers of a surveillance state but instead the fact that he suffered from a psychological affliction that they all with remarkable consistency called fame-seeking narcissism that was how they diagnosed him he was just a fame-seeking narcissist and there's a really consistent pattern in western political discourse whenever somebody radically dissents from the prevailing order it is impossible for people in power and their apologists and defenders in the media to recognize or acknowledge that there may be some legitimacy to the grievance that led to the radical dissent because if there's legitimacy to that grievance it means that there may be something fundamentally wrong with the status quo and that is something that people who wield power and who defend those who wield power more than anything want to avoid the recognition that there may be something not wrong on the margins but fundamentally wrong and so you can never acknowledge that there's any validity to somebody who radically dissents instead there must be something psychologically impaired about them they actually have to be crazy and you can pretty much go and look at every single whistleblower over the last 50 years in the united states who stood up and disclosed secret information they've all been accused of being mentally imbalanced in one way or another and we knew that that was going to happen we had lots of conversations when we were in hong kong about how that edward snowden was going to be demonized and the strategy that he actually not only conceived of but then spent the next several months implementing was the exact opposite of that accusation what he said to me from the very first conversation i ever had with him before i even got to hong kong when i spoke with him for the first time on the internet he said i am determined to not hide not to lurk in the shadows and wait for the us government to find me i insist upon identifying myself as the source of this information because i believe that i have an obligation to publicly explain why i did what i did also i'm not ashamed of my choice i'm proud of my choice and therefore i want to appear in public and explain to the public why this system of surveillance that i'm exposing is truly so menacing and truly so dangerous and why people have been systematically lied to but then he said i know the capacity and strategy of the us government and its media will be to try and keep the focus on me personally as a way of distracting attention from the substance of the disclosures they'll want to talk about my girlfriend and my family and my work history and my personality because then they don't have to talk about comprehensive metadata collection or recording the telephone conversations of every single person in entire countries or the invasion of facebook google and skype and so what he said was once i identify myself as the source of this disclosure i want to disappear from sight i want nothing to do with the media for weeks and even months every single day after we identified him i had telephone calls from every major media figure in the west every single one urging and pleading that i arrange a television interview in prime time that they would conduct with edward snowden he could have easily been the most famous person on the planet he could have spent hour after hour after hour in prime time soaking in the fame and yet he has never done any of that here we are a year after the story first emerged and he is purposely kept out of the spotlight because he wanted no fame or aggrandizement for himself he wanted the focus to remain on the substance of the disclosures that he unraveled his life in order to bring the world and so you compare what i actually know to be true and what he's done to the attack on him that he's a fame-seeking narcissist and you see that not only is it not true it is literally the opposite of reality and yet to this day every single day i hear that same smear repeated over and over and so writing this book was sort of a way to undermine that as well and then the last point that i just want to talk about in terms of what i really wanted to kind of clarify and correct forever um is the choices that we made about how this material was going to be reported and the influence that our source edward snowden played and how the material was disclosed we have been criticized we being the journalists who have reported on the story have been criticized around the world in every single country where these disclosures have appeared including in this one for being reckless with our disclosures for exposing secrets that should have been kept concealed and as a result helping the terrorists evade detection and endangering national security all of the cliches that are hauled out by western governments after 9 11 for over and over and over again designed to justify anything they want to do from torture to invading iraq to staying in afghanistan to rendering people to spying on the world terrorism terrorism terrorism they all got hauled out and we were constantly accused of endangering people and their safety as a result of these reckless disclosures that was the argument for want of a better word from the right and then there's been a criticism that has gotten much less attention even though it's much more serious and much more reasonable and valid which has come from want of a better term from the left which is that actually we haven't been reckless with our disclosures we've been excessively cautious that we haven't actually published enough that we should just take the entire archive and put it online and not conceal any of it let the public see everything that edward snowden gave us and what both of these critiques fail to acknowledge is that when you're a journalist and you have a source who risks his life which is exactly what edward snowden did literally he certainly risked his liberty but his life he we expected that he would remain in prison for the next 60 years when a source like that comes to you and expresses a preference for how this material should be reported and insists upon a framework that you agree to before giving you the information you are duty-bound just by your basic obligations as a human being let alone as a journalist not to violate that agreement because other people want you to and when edward snowden came to us he had everything thought through in terms of how he wanted this information to get first into our hands and then into the hands of the world and what he was very clear about was that he did not want the entire archive of documents to simply be published all at once or even at any point had he wanted all of the documents to be published he was extremely capable of doing that himself he could have just uploaded them to the internet one by one or all at once he did not need me or the guardian or any other journalist to do that what he said instead was i edward snowden don't feel qualified to make the decisions about which documents should be published i want you to make those choices working with your editors and other journalists and i want you to be extremely careful about which documents get revealed i want you only to reveal the documents that enable the public to understand what these programs are and to debate whether or not these programs should continue to inform the public but i don't want you to publish anything that might risk legitimate operations or that could put innocent people at risk he really believed that it was not his duty to destroy these programs unilaterally but instead to inform the world about what the programs were so that all of you democratically could make the choice about whether or not you wanted them to continue he was angry that the u.s government and your government had denied you that opportunity by keeping these programs from you and therefore not letting you debate that which you did not know but he also didn't think that he should replace the us government as the unilateral decider by destroying the programs unilaterally instead he wanted a debate to be triggered and that was the framework that he insisted upon and that was the framework that we have followed and will continue to follow i think it's well known that he gave us something like many tens of thousands of documents and even though we've had it for a year the archive we have published only a small percentage and that is because of this framework upon which he insisted so the last point i want to make about um uh snowden is that i think there's a really valuable lesson to be drawn from all of this that is a really important motivating factor for why i wrote this book to kind of convey this lesson because having watched it all firsthand it's something that profoundly influenced me and probably will for the rest of my life and i wanted to be able to share what i think is an important lesson with everybody else what was most amazing to me about when i met edward snowden was that i had been expecting that he was going to be somebody in his 60s or 70s i think we've all had that experience where you talk to somebody on the internet and you form a mental picture about what they're like and then you meet them in real life and they're never anything like what we're imagining them to be that really happened in this case i had been assuming that he was quite older for a variety of reasons and when i met him and saw that he was only 29 and he looked five years younger it immediately became staggering to me that somebody this age had made the conscious knowing choice to take action that we all assumed was going to send him to an american prison which is extremely oppressive to be in a cage in the american penal state for the rest of his life and i really needed to understand the reason why he was willing to do that before i helped him to do it and what i ultimately came to understand is that as hideous as prison would be for anybody to spend even a month there let alone the rest of their lives at that age he believed that what he had discovered that the united states government was doing to the internet and to all of our privacies was so menacing and so wrong and it was wrong not just what they were doing but the fact that they had kept it from everybody that they were doing it so it threatened not only privacy but also democracy that the knowledge that he would have to live for the rest of his life knowing that he did nothing about this upon discovering it he told me and i believed him was so much worse that that pain of having that sit on your conscience was so much worse than anything that the u.s government could do to him including sending him into a prison for the next 30 or 40 or 60 years that it was almost a compulsion that he had to act and the lesson to me of that is you know i've been going around the country my country and the world for almost a decade now talking about all of the abuses of the war on terror and political and economic elites and this question that always arises is well what is it that we can do about any of this i think there's this kind of tendency to adopt this defeatism like these are really formidable forces and it seems like i acting alone or even with other people can't really fundamentally alter the course even if i'm really disturbed by it and i think the critical thing to realize about edward snowden is that and a lot of this has been forgotten is that at the time he made the choice to do what he did not only was he 29 but he was somebody with absolutely no power or position or prestige he grew up in a lower middle class family his father served in the coast guard for 30 years he was just obscure and anonymous and banal just an ordinary citizen and yet through this extraordinary act of conscience that really was incredibly self-sacrificing whatever else you might think of him he sacrificed his life and for defense of this cause through that act he really has changed the world i mean that sounds very dramatic but it really is true i mean all over the world for the first time people are having a serious debate hundreds of millions of people on every continent about the value of digital privacy and the danger of vesting government spying power and letting governments generally exercise power in secret and the role of the united states in the world and the trustworthiness of president obama and the role of journalism vis-a-vis the state all of these issues are being thought about in fundamentally different ways by people all across the planet as a result of the choice that he made and the lesson that i think we can all draw from it is that defeatism is always unwarranted that no matter who you are no matter how weak or ordinary or powerless you think you might be there's always the capacity that we all have to find within ourselves the ability literally to change the world if we summon the will to do so and the passion is strong enough and i think edward snowden like so many other people before him who have changed the course of history or or all sorts of injustices through the acts of an individual have proven i think he really does demonstrate that truth so the last point i want to make and then we'll have the the q a session is i just want to speak briefly about um what this surveillance state is because there's been so much said over the last year by the nsa and by the british government and by your government and governments in europe about what this system is and isn't and the claim that gets made over and over is that we need not really worry about this extraordinary amount of communications data that these countries are collecting because it's very targeted and very discriminating and it's really only interested in monitoring the communications of people who are engaged in plotting terrorist attacks or other threats to national security and on the other side you have people like mr snowden and myself and lots of other critics who have made the opposite claim that no this is a system that is indiscriminate that it is the most sweeping system of suspicionless surveillance ever known to human history and it's very hard to resolve that conflict except for the fact that we're all really fortunate that we just so happen to have all of the nsa's documents on this very question and so we don't need to trust the nsa or dutch government officials or anybody else and we don't need to trust me or edward snowden or critics of these agencies we can look at what the nsa itself was saying in secret when they thought that nobody was listening and there's this great irony because one of the arguments i make in the book about why privacy is so important is that the private realm is the place that we need in order to explore who we are as individuals to really express our true selves and that when eyes are cast upon us and people are watching we change our behavior significantly that you can only really find who you are as a person and who you want to be when you have a realm where you can engage in behavior privately and the irony of it is the best example of that is what the nsa says and does in public versus the true self that emerges when they speak in private when they speak in private there's no talk about this being a careful targeted discriminating system where they're only interested in the communications of terrorists and people engaged national security threats the opposite is true they boast of how limitless their power has become there's one slide in particular that is remarkable it's labeled and it's really helpful and how clear it is the nsa really did us all a favor unknowingly and making these documents really easy to read but it's called our collection posture and underneath that phrase is the motto of the nsa that they repeat over and over again in these documents which is collect it all not collect the terrorist communications or collect some particular threatening people's communications but collect it all and then right under collected all around the circle that they created as the graphic there are other phrases that appear such as sniff it all and exploit it all and then the last one which is know it all that really is the institutional mandate of the nsa and its partners to convert the internet from what it could have been and still can be which is a tool for incredible amounts of democratization and liberalization into one of the most menacing tools of social oppression and control and surveillance ever known and whatever you think about edward snowden or about surveillance or about anything else whatever you think about all of those things we should all be able to agree on the fact that in a democracy if our government is going to do something that profoundly consequential that at the very least we ought to know about it so that we can then debate it and everything that edward snowden did in coming forward with these documents and everything that i've done in reporting them and everything that this book is about is intended to enable that debate so that if this system is going to continue at the very least it's because we've agreed that it should and we have the power to demand that it doesn't so with that i thank you very much and we will have the q a portion of the event thanks very much well thank you glenn for this fascinating and thought-provoking uh talk before we dive into uh into the discussion about all these issues let me first explain also to the audience how we go about the next 45 minutes or so um we'd like to start to divide the evening up in into a number of segments each starting with a brief video and then i'll ask a few questions of glenn greenwald that we'll uh do some back and forth and then hopefully there will be a few questions from the audience maybe two or three there are two microphones there uh i know it's not easy because there's no no aisle in the middle so the people on the outer ends of the rows are unfairly advantaged but maybe they can they can find the microphones then we go to another clip we see the clip we discuss a little bit here at the table and there will be another uh possibility for people uh from the audience to uh to put in their questions uh so let us start right away with with the first uh clip that is uh from the video the in which uh edward snowden made himself known to the world just a few days after the first revelations came out in the world and and shocked everybody let's look at the video uh my name is ed snowden i'm 29 years old i work for booze allen hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for nsa in hawaii the nsa specifically targets the communications of everyone it ingests them by default it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends so while they may uh be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone that they suspect of terrorism they're collecting your communications to do so usually whistleblowers do what they do anonymously and take steps to remain anonymous for as long as they can which they hope often is forever you on the other hand have decided to do the opposite which is to declare yourself openly as the person behind these disclosures why did you choose to do that i i think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model when you are subverting the power of government that that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy and if you do that in secret consistently you know as the government does uh when it wants to benefit from a secret action that it took uh it'll kind of give its officials a mandate to go hey you know tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side but they rarely if ever do that when an abuse occurs that falls to uh individual citizens but they're typically maligned you know it becomes a thing of these people are against the country they're against the government but i'm not i'm i'm no different from anybody else i don't have special skills uh i'm just another guy who sits there day-to-day in the office watches what happens what's happening and goes this is something that's not our place to decide the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong and i'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say i didn't change these i didn't modify the story this is the truth this is what's happening you should decide whether we need to be doing this well i thought it was um an an interesting illustration to what you you said already about your your meeting with with edward snowden he says i'm just another guy um but obviously he's not just another guy he's he's somebody who's taking his life put his life on the line does he really think of himself as just another guy or is he uh does he think that he's really there with a very special task i mean i think there's a great humility to what he did and and i say that because there were lots of options that he had for being the person to decide um whether or not these programs could continue but also being the person to decide which material should be disclosed and he really did believe that he was not qualified to do any of those things and that it wasn't his place to do so and he had an enormous amount of power in his hands when he had that archive in his possession as i said he could have enriched himself he could have picked which country got it he could have picked which documents were known he could have destroyed the programs he wanted single-handedly and he did none of that he gave up that information and said this is not my place to decide and and he also has removed himself from uh the media spectacle that that ensued so it's i don't think it is false humility i think he was aware that he was doing something unusual he was inspired by people who did the same thing but but i think it was very genuine do you admire him i do i do admire him greatly and i know somewhere some one time i don't know 100 years ago apparently somebody wrote a rule on like a tablet that said if you're a journalist you're supposed to pretend that you don't have feelings towards your source um i'm not sure where that rule got got written or who did it but i don't accept its legitimacy so i have no trouble admitting in fact i just wrote a book arguing that i do think what he did was noble and heroic yeah and can you understand that some people are mad at him for deciding by himself to to go to a journalist with all this information no um i can't understand that and you know that's because it isn't really an aberration of the democratic system to have somebody and as an act of conscience inside the government find things that the government is doing that shouldn't be concealed and take it upon themselves to bring it to journalists i mean there was a case in the united states in 1971 where daniel ellsberg discovered this eight volume pentagon papers that demonstrated for a fact that the u.s government had been systematically lying to the american people about the vietnam war telling them that they thought they were on the verge of winning when in fact internally in the government they were admitting over and over that the war was unwinnable and he quote unquote took it upon himself to give that to the new york times and it dramatically changed the arc of how we understand what the war is and how we think about whether we should trust the government that is a crucial part a corrective to people abusing power yeah in your book you say that his worldview and his his ethics were very much shaped by by playing lots of video games when he was young uh could you explain a little bit how that uh how that is yeah i mean you know i like i said i spent a long time trying to understand his motive because it was for one thing it was fascinating to try and understand why somebody would do that but also it was really important to make sure that i wasn't helping somebody unravel their life unless they had a very solid path of moral reasoning and a lot of agency and autonomy you know the video game comment was more offhand he was talking about how as a child the moral narrative with which he was inculcated was the idea that if you face grave injustice even as a single individual you can confront it and even triumph over it and that it's your obligation actually to do so um and you know as he got older he sort of gave up the video games picked up things like greek mythology and the philosophy of joseph campbell and more sophisticated texts that still conveyed to him the same message yeah yeah yeah and and when you met him first you were surprised by his by his age by his youth um and was there a moment when you when you hesitated whether he realized what he was putting himself into yeah i mean when i saw his age i was concerned about a variety of of issues one of which was whether or not this was real because given the access to the volume of information that i knew he had by that point and how sensitive it was i had assumed that only somebody very senior in this agency would be able to obtain that amount of documents additionally he was incredibly sophisticated in his insight you can see some of that on that video and so when i was talking to him before i just assumed that this was someone who was older and when i saw him my first question was is this like the son of the source maybe it's his lover um you know i thought like the source was hiding behind a curtain like the wizard of oz and i was going to be taken to him um but the the bigger concern was you know sometimes people who are younger are more impressionable and can act rashly and i needed to know that this was not the byproduct of instability or an impetuous choice or that he had been overly influenced by by me i knew he he told me he had been reading me you know every day for a long time i wanted to make sure i hadn't like unwittingly hypnotized him into something like this i needed to know there was a very solid foundation of agency um behind this choice and i i very quickly ascertained that there was yeah yeah and um you have been in contact with him since since june last year very regular yeah do you have the feeling that he has changed since then no that's the remarkable thing um there's this amazing dynamic in american political discourse which is certain words drive americans instantly into hysteria and irrationality one of them is terrorism the minute you say that everybody screams and jumps under the bed um not quite as much as as they did before but still but the much scarier word for people is russia this is a word that i mean if you just you want to really like scare an american or make them go away just whisper the word russia in their ear and they'll they'll start running down the street so all the time in in interviews i've been doing in the last six months including in the last week when i was touring for in my book on television every interviewer would say to me well what about edward snowden he must be completely miserable i mean he's in russia you know like i guess they assume that all 160 million people who live in russia are instantly and automatically miserable from the time of their birth until they die like it's just one big gulag and what is really you know amazing to me about that is that um of all the people that i know in my life i really do believe that edward snowden is the most self-actualized and fulfilled and the most at peace and tranquil because he gets to put his head on his pillow every single night in the knowledge that he took very brave and meaningful action in defense of the beliefs that he claimed to have and not very many people get to make that claim and a much bigger part of whether or not somebody is happy is not the job they have or the material goods they have or any of those things i think it's the state that we have internally and what our conscience tells us about the choices that we've made and and i don't think it's hard to understand why he has such a steady level of happiness that i saw back in hong kong and i've seen every day since and yet he is in a very difficult position he's in an incredibly difficult position i mean he's in a country that he didn't choose to be in um he is separated from his longtime girlfriend and his family who he's virtually never able to speak with because he's concerned that if he speaks to them they'll become targets of an investigation he is the most wanted man on earth by the world's most powerful government and faces immediate prosecution if he steps outside of russia and yet the tranquility that i've never seen him display an iota of remorse or regret or anxiety about what he did not once very interesting very interesting now i wonder if there is a question maybe in the audience is there somebody already near the microphone if there is could you please go to the microphone there there's someone over there already somebody over there yeah please you start okay hi um could you state your name my name is andrew gebhardt okay um it's amazing to me what's happened over the past year in terms of uh yeah this uh um fame-seeking narcissist and disgruntled blogger um in one year all these uh how much how much the media has transformed just in in this year so i wonder if you could comment a little bit about sort of the media landscape um okay i think it's a lot of people often forget that um it was during the iranian hostage crisis that nightline was born and that during the first gulf war um was really what uh accelerated the viewing of cnn and i wonder if there if you see a similar kind of thing happening now i mean just last week we had thank you all this brouhaha with the times et cetera et cetera okay thank you no it's that is a great question um and it's interesting uh as i wrote about in the book when i went to hong kong um i was with my good friend and and really brilliant colleague who's a documentarian laura poitras who has made several films about the war on terror and amazingly she filmed virtually everything that took place in hong kong our interaction with snowden all of the conversations we had which is going to be in a documentary that she releases in the fall and i was in berlin a few weeks ago and had the opportunity to see some of the footage about what happened in hong kong and what amazed me was that we actually spent at least as much time if not more time talking about media issues than we even did spend about surveillance issues and that was because we knew that what we were about to do would trigger a debate as importantly about the role of journalism as it would about the role of privacy and surveillance and one of the things that we set out to do was there were as i said before there's all these unwritten rules that govern how journalists are supposed to behave not just the one about how you don't admit that you have feelings for your source but also you're not supposed to express opinions you're not supposed to be too aggressive and condemning the government you're not supposed to you're supposed to pretend to have respect for their fear-mongering claims about why you shouldn't be publishing you're supposed to give great deference to the things that they tell you about what shouldn't shouldn't be published if you get a lot of top secret documents you're supposed to publish just a few so that the public can kind of get a little glimpse of what it is that you have and then kind of walk away before anything really changes and collect all your prizes and write a book there were all these kind of rules that govern how journalism has functioned and one of the reasons that edward snowden didn't go to the new york times on purpose and kept them out of the story was because he believed as did i and have written many times that they are far too accommodating of and subservient to the us government there's all kinds of examples that prove that to be true and one of the things we set out to do is to reanimate the model of journalism that says that journalists can only be a an important force in society if they are adversarial to the government if they are devoted to shining a light on exactly that which people in political power want to hide and i knew that there would be substantial parts of the american media and the british media that would lead the way in hostility not toward edward snowden only but to ourselves and so we purposely sought out this debate about what journalism should be and i do think that the washington post and the new york times and other media outlets have been more aggressive because they would have been shamed into if they hadn't been and i think we have introduced into certainly american discourse but even more broadly in the west this broader question about what the role of journalists are supposed to be and isn't it a good thing when the media or the government rather is angry at you rather than it being evidence that you're somehow unpatriotic or doing the wrong thing and that was very much a deliberate part of the strategy and i think one of the most enduring aspects of the last year so you think journalism should throw the striving for objectivity out of the window i mean striving for objectivity is like striving to be able to jump out of a 30 you know story building and and fly i mean human beings don't have wings and we don't evaluate the world like computers we are subjective beings we see the world through all sorts of subjective prisms and i think it's much more powerful as a journalist to be honest about the way you see the world and the assumptions that you're making than it is to try and deceive your readers into pretending that you float above opinion um and i think that passion and vibrancy and soul are necessary for good journalism the attempt to drain all of that out of it has made journalism not just weak but boring um and sort of neutered and and you know i think ultimately the only real test for whether or not you're a journalist and doing good journalism is not whether you obey all these unwritten rules that somebody wrote down in secret on a tablet um but whether or not the facts that you tell the public are accurate and reliable and um you know there have been a couple of stories we've done over the last year that have been the subject of some dispute but by and large every single story that we publish has turned out to be entirely true and very virtually never questioned we've informed the debate and for me that ends the question of whether or not this is good journalism well it's clear you're not the only one things like that there's another question here please sir yes hi my name is george mashke and i'm an american living here in holland i'm a former u.s army interrogator arabic linguist former reserve intelligence officer and i founded a website critical of an aspect of u.s intelligence policy their reliance on the polygraph to screen individuals such as i believe it's been reported that edward snowden was polygraph twice so one of the things that said in the u.s media frequently is that well all this metadata collection is not really causing any harm because it's just used to focus on terrorists so it's not being used for other purposes but in august of last year i received an email from a u.s navy petty officer who was assigned to a type of unit where they would assign require people to take polygraphs and he emailed me saying that he reported to his polygraph test recently and there he was presented with a printout of the websites that he had visited the night before on his personal computer in his personal home with his personal internet service provider and they said that among among the sites that he had visited was mine it was called ant.polygraph.org and then they proceeded to try to discredit the site and he promised me he'd follow up with details and he never did and he never replied to any follow-up messages that i sent i think perhaps he received a talking to i don't know but what my question for you is does this sound like something that's plausible to you and uh i don't want to preempt i know you you're going to talk more in your future reporting about individuals have who have been targeted but i'm i'm left here wondering you know is my website the target of surveillance are are my visitors at risk just for visiting my website thank you yeah i mean no i'm glad you i'm glad you asked that because it does get to this critical question um which is the nsa and its defenders spend a great deal of time trying to reassure the public which is look yeah we're collecting virtually everything that you're doing and we know everybody with whom you're communicating but you know what it sounds really bad they say but you need not worry because you can trust us we're not really interested in doing anything abusive we're only interested in using it to keep you safe and there's a lot of amazing aspects to that claim the first of which is that if it were really true that they were permitted to compile this massive system of surveillance and then exercise it in the dark it would be the first time in human history ever that surveillance would be able to be used without much control and it wouldn't be abused i mean you would have to believe that the american government is so exceptional that it just has such goodness embedded in it that they have managed to reverse many millennia of human nature about how human power is exercised which doesn't really seem all that credible to me um but i guess you know people can debate how much they are willing to believe that but there's a lot of evidence already reported about exactly the kind of abuse you're asking about so one of the documents that we published that i think you know didn't get nearly the attention it deserved sometimes it's just luck what other news is happening that day but i talk about it more in the book is there's a document from 2012 in which the nsa identifies six people all of whom are muslim one of whom is an american whom they call radicalizers meaning people who express opinions that the u.s government believes is radical and the document specifically says that these are not people plotting terrorist attacks nor are they members of terrorist groups they are simply people who successfully proselytize what the us government considers to be a radical message and it talks about how through this surveillance system they have gathered the intimate sexual chats of these individuals as well as the log of visits that they make to pornographic sites and the document then goes on to contemplate the ways in which that information could be released to humiliate those people in public and render them ineffective spokespeople in the communities in which they speak basically to destroy their reputations using their sexual and intimate activity online there are and it says that these six are just exemplars for how this could be done there are other documents that we reported where the gchq monitors the people who visit the wikileaks website of the kind of of tracking that you're talking about so if you're somebody who's interested in the documents of wikileaks or the things they have to say the gchq can monitor the visits and gather identifying information about you there are documents about how the gchq destroys the reputation of people who they consider hacktivist which are just people who use online gathering to engage in political activism by writing fake victim blog posts they'll write a post and post it and say that person over there who i don't like stole money from me or ruined my business or did something else really untoward to destroy their reputation so the kinds of abuse that in the us and the 60s and 70s created such scandal is already being demonstrated by the reporting we've done and as i've said several times in the past 10 days the biggest story of the archive is yet to come and it involves exactly that question which is how which kinds of people are really being targeted by the nsa who are they specifically and are they activists and civil rights leaders and foreign policy critics um or are they really people who you would be inclined to think are are actual terrorist threats and i think that that reporting will complete the picture um in terms of what the system is really about thank you we're looking forward to that um let's go to the second uh the second clip um which is uh one of the many new shows uh that interviewed glenn greenwald over the last couple of months they want to know i suppose that how can you guarantee that the material you have you can keep safe i mean the thing is you know could it possibly be on a memory stick in your pocket i mean people want to know how you think you can keep things safe well i'll be happy to answer that that was what i was about to tell you when you interrupted there's only one group of people who has lost control of huge amounts of what they claim are important documents and those people are called the gchq and the nsa the gchq took documents that they claim are so very sensitive and put them onto a system at the nsa that tens of thousands of people have access to we at the guardian have protected all of our data with extremely advanced methods of encryption and our documents have remained completely secure we have not lost control of any of our material that remains entirely secure i think for for many of us out there in the world we were so we weren't wondering how is it possible that you have all this information and you can keep it secure and we read about you walking with your backpack and there was somewhere in the backpack was the usb [Music] still you kept you kept it all secure but also i wonder was there information that you decided not to write about for reasons of maybe not wanting to bring problems upon people that might be involved in that you know so one of the you know i started by talking about all these media themes that were just wildly distorted and one of the principal ones was the claim early on that edward snowden was just this very kind of a low-level i.t guy sort of like the guy who works at the help desk when your computer freezes and you call them up and you say oh hi ed my computer's frozen and he says oh try starting it rebooting it and start it over that's what they tried depicting him as the reality was exactly the opposite and it ultimately emerged which is that he was a highly trained operative cyber operative by both the cia and the nsa trained in the most advanced methods of both cyber offensive attacks but also cyber defensive methods he was trained specifically to safeguard high amount high numbers of sensitive documents from the most sophisticated enemy intelligence agencies in the world and he trained me and and laura and the other journalists with whom he worked on how to keep that material safe and that is always just so ironic that you know the the people who have lost all the control of the documents really are the nsa and the gchq and we never have and that remains true to today um as far as documents that that we decided not to publish i mean of course you know as i said we we've had tens of thousands of documents in our possession for a year now um i don't know how many we publish but but it's it's a small percentage um and you know par a lot of those documents will at some point be published um some of the reporting is really hard it takes time to figure it all out but yeah there's definitely material that neither edward snowden nor me nor probably most people think should ever be published because it would harm innocent people it would destroy their reputation it would put them in danger um or there are certain things that are too difficult to predict in terms of their outcome and how do you decide whether you might not want to publish certain certain documents uh i suppose it's not by going to the government and asking do you think it's a good idea to publish this right i don't work at the new york times that's not my method um but um you know what what i do is i mean i think that you know we engage in in the same kind of journalistic analysis as journalists around the world are taught to engage in for every single document which is does the the value to the public debate outweigh potential harm to people from publishing these documents and there's never been a document where i on my own have decided to publish them i work with all kinds of experienced national security journalists and editors they're vetted by lawyers it's always a very collaborative process yeah yeah now in your in your talk at the start of this evening you talked very clearly about about risks uh you see in in a surveillance state a government that is a sort of omnipresent surveillance but do you think there is also a legitimate form of government surveillance or is it in your opinion always constituting repression i've been writing about surveillance for nine years now and i have never met a person who believes that all forms of government surveillance are illegitimate i certainly don't believe that um i think that there's a very good model to use which is if the government wants to surveil an individual because they believe there's evidence that that individual is doing something that warrants surveillance plotting a terrorist attack engaging in violence something of a very serious nature they should have a court not a fake court but a real court um that they go to and present that evidence and somebody else should be there to oppose what they're saying so there's an adversarial process and the court should decide what i think is the key distinction is the distinction between targeted surveillance and indiscriminate bulk surveillance that puts entire populations under a microscope i think there's never an instance where a state can legitimately monitor or collect information about human beings who are guilty of nothing yeah thank you [Applause] is there somebody at the microphone over there yeah um you you've started writing about surveillance nine years ago or roughly roughly nine years ago has there never been a moment that you thought that the intentions of snowden were not genuine um you mentioned that he wanted to publicly or basically probably explain what he did and probably explain his reasons but immediately after he disappeared only to come back at the south by southwest conference and the questionnaire of putin and never in an audience where he was actually critically engaged so my question is is snowden actually genuinely interested in revealing uh nsa documents for for the public debate and if so was it really necessary to review this many documents instead of just a small amount to actually start the debate okay so um first of all the the premise of that first part of your question isn't quite accurate he actually has engaged in um all sorts of discourse where he was presented with criticism that he addressed very early on for example i think in july of 2013 he appeared at the guardian for a question and answer session with not me but the public and all sorts of journalists and guardian readers were able to pose questions to him that he then answered and many of them were hard questions that were critical in nature um and were exactly the kinds of criticisms that people were voicing and he addressed every single one of them even in the appearances that he's done and he's actually done more than the two that you you identified um he's often been um criticized and and faced with critics say this and this and what is your response and i think one of the things that he's doing is now that the debate has really gotten started i think he feels more comfortable about appearing in more media venues and will have a lot of different kinds of public appearances where different kinds of questions are presented to him by different kinds of people but he's been very engaged with the public and with all kinds of questions as far as whether or not this number of documents needed to be disclosed um you know and that sounds kind of arbitrary like what number should we have done um you know i think we probably have published close to a thousand i mean was 500 the right number was you know 150 um i don't really think that that's the proper metric for judging the disclosures as i said before i find the critique that we published too little to be much more compelling than the one that we publish too much my view as a journalist is that every single newsworthy story in this archive that tells people in every country around the world what the government is doing to their privacy ought to be and will be disclosed and reported it doesn't mean every detail will be it doesn't mean that every single program will be but we intend not to conceal any documents that help the public understand what has been done to their privacy and i've never heard a compelling reason why we should help suppress that information thank you is there another question over there hello my name is jaya ballou i'm the chief information security officer of the dutch telecommunications operator kpn um and we really believe vehemently in the privacy and security of our customer traffic although while saying that it becomes very difficult to actually guarantee that while facing our legal obligations and still providing tools to users to let them be private online and with their telephone so what do you do do you use pgp do you use silent circle what do you do yeah i mean you know you put your finger on what i think is one of the best parts of the story which is you know ordinarily um when there's some kind of disclosure that has moved public opinion and if you look at polling data in every country this has clearly moved public opinion it's not so easy and obvious to see how change is going to come usually it has to rely on the you have to rely on the very government abusing its power to suddenly enact laws limiting their own power and that's very unlikely to happen here there are a couple of different promising avenues for re-establishing that right to privacy such as countries around the world banding together to undermine u.s control over the internet which i think is happening i think there is a panic that has set in in the american tech industry for exactly the reason that you just said which is that they perceive that the perception that they're not able to protect the privacy of their users will damage their future economic prospects and cause users to go to other countries and and use their services where they feel that the privacy is more safeguarded but the best course for actual change is that individuals around the world now realize the extent to which their privacy has been compromised and the reason that's so important is because there really are effective tools that they can use to protect their own communications and the sanctity of it i do use pgp email um and in part i use it because i happen to have read a lot of nsa documents talking about how frustrated they are at their inability to invade it which gives you a lot of confidence that that it actually works um bgp is is pretty good pretty good privacy that was the original name of it and it's become a fairly sophisticated means of protecting email communication there are chat programs such as pidgin and otr that provide relatively good protection there's the tor browser that lets you use the internet anonymously and the tails operating system that lets you so the problem is is that all of these names are kind of daunting to people who haven't heard them before and in fact they were pretty daunting to me a year ago when edward snowden insisted that i use them and and it all sounded way too complicated um and i think the tech community needs to develop these tools to make them much more user-friendly so that you don't feel like you have to be a hacker or a programming expert to use them but once that happens and that will happen encryption will become the default means of how people communicate on the internet and that's so important because right now and this is really extraordinary if you use pgp email the nsa actually looks for the people who are using encryption because in their twisted minds your desire to shield your own communications from their prying eyes is evidence that you're suspicious why would you possibly want to keep them out of your communications unless you're up to no good and so they use that to actually target people for added surveillance and the reason that works is because right now tens of thousands of people use pgp instead of tens of million and once tens of millions of people start using it because it becomes the default means by which we communicate the nsa will not only not be able to target people anymore for that but there will be substantial parts of the internet that will be off limits to the nsa and to the chinese and everybody else trying to invade communications um and you know they'll continue to try and develop their own technological skills to surpass that it'll be a little bit like an arms race um to always stay one step ahead um but i do think that's where the greatest promise lies and and the more companies like yours and other people who care about privacy can sort of evangelize about the need to use encryption and encourage a greater ease with which it can be used the better so thank you i think this is this is the right moment to go to our next clip which is a man who many in in united states all over the world and i'm pretty sure also in this hall have invested many hopes in um and we're going to say see what he has to say on this subject the same technological advances that allow us intelligence agencies to pinpoint an al qaeda cell in yemen or an email between two terrorists in the sahel also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach and at a time when more and more of our lives are digital that prospect is disquieting for all of us one thing i'm certain of this debate will make us stronger and i also know that in this time of change the united states of america will have to lead it may seem sometimes that america is being held to a different standard and i'll admit the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating no one expects china to have an open debate about their surveillance programs or russia to take privacy concerns of citizens and other places into account but let's remember we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity as the nation that developed the internet the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment not government control glenn greenwald did you also have high hopes when obama was elected in 2008 well first of all i mean i think he's due a lot of credit um because it really is impressive that he's able to say those things with a straight face and not bursting out in laughter i mean i find that skill really really extraordinary um and he's very good at it and i think we ought to acknowledge that in fairness um you know yeah i actually i thought that you know i wrote in 2008 that that i thought it was important that he win um i didn't really have enormous expectations that things would change greatly there's a fascinating document that i would urge all of you to read if you haven't which i think just sheds so much light on everything that he just said um which is in 2008 there was a cia document that was written and it was declared top secret and that eventually leaked to wikileaks which posted it um and the impetus for the document was that the cia was extremely worried about the spread of anti-war sentiment in western europe and they were particularly concerned because of european government i believe it might have even been the dutch government but i'm not i'm not positive i i i don't remember but i think it was that a government in europe had actually fallen because it was too supportive of the war in afghanistan and they were really worried that countries throughout western europe were going to have to withdraw from both the war in afghanistan and more broadly the war on terror and leave the united states acting alone and they were petrified about this trend and what this paper said and it was really quite prescient was that the greatest hope for saving america's war fighting ability and to stem the tide of anti-war sentiment in western europe was for president obama for then senator barack obama to become president because what that would do is to transform these wars from george bush's face which the world had grown increasingly tired of and had been viewed as this kind of swaggering unilateral cowboy that was particularly hated in europe into this kind sophisticated progressive face of barack obama and by making obama the face of these wars it would transform all of this anti-war sentiment into people who were willing to acquiesce to the war if not outright support it that they knew that he would continue all of these policies but his branding was so pleasant and especially in western europe so beloved that it would be an immense asset for the national security state and you know it's really amazing to watch him um say that he's just so happy that we're having this debate and it's going to make us so much stronger because for one thing he has been very devoted to taking the person who started the debate edward snowden and trying really hard to throw him in prison for the rest of his life which is a really strange way of showing gratitude and appreciation for the debate that you claim you're so happy about having in the country but the other part of it is he it wasn't like he just became president seven days before that speech and he was really just about ready to start a debate when edward snowden did what he did he has been president for five years and you know he says of course china wouldn't have an open debate about surveillance and of course russia wouldn't and the fact that we are shows how exceptional and how we're the leader but he was in office for five years and not only never had a debate but did everything possible to hide the surveillance state a debate was forced on him he didn't actually choose one um and so you know i think that there's so much rhetoric about the us government and he's an effective salesman around the world for this myth of american greatness um and i think one of the principal things that this debate over the last year has done is opened people's eyes about the reality of president obama versus the image i mean i live in brazil where he had been beloved and across every brazilian newspaper is very menacing pictures of him in connection with spying i think that's happened in western europe and in asia and in large parts of the world it has really kind of shed light on the reality of america's role in the world and is that because when i read the book i thought it's a very somber book but you don't seem to be a somber man so is that because you you find hope in in the reaction to the revelations and the debate it has provoked i do i mean if you you know i mean sometimes people say you know um well what really has changed right the nsa is continuing to spy and you know i think sometimes that's an unrealistic expectation for how change happens i mean the national security state of the united states is the most powerful faction on earth the building of the nsa is not going to collapse on itself because you publish some of their documents um but what does lead to real change is changing what people think about and how they discuss it and what they know and if you know i know that thinking about what we hope to achieve in hong kong if i think back on that even in our best case scenario all of this has exceeded our wildest expectations for even the best case scenario that even a year later the the interest level in this debate is more sustained and more global than it's ever been and you believe that it might become more than a debate it might real change things in in governments yeah i mean i think it already has um i think germany and brazil have taken serious steps i think um even the u.s congress is starting to think about some serious reform but i think that change and consciousness manifest and change that's a little bit longer term um but i have zero doubt that if you get people so many people around the world thinking so differently about so many different issues that will lead to a changed outcome in ways that we probably can't anticipate well thank you very much for being thank you very much thank you to all of you as well i really appreciate it thank you

Channel: The John Adams Institute

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Length: 73min 59sec (4439 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020