Translator: Emma Gon
Reviewer: Ciro Gomez (Video) Edward Snowden: The NSA specifically targets
the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. Barack Obama:
The US is not spying on ordinary people, who don't threaten our national security. ES: I'm just another guy, who sits there day to day in the office
watching 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. It's entirely appropriate
for a program to exist, to look at foreign data. Alan Rusbridger: What Snowden
is trying to draw attention to is the degree to which we are on a road
to total surveillance. Andrew Parker: The work we do is addressing
directly threats to this country, to our way of life, to this country and to people who live here. ES: You can't come forward against the world most powerful
intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, because they are such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you,
they'll get you in time. News anchor: [unclear] that it was
the Prime Minister who instructed Britain most senior civil servant to tell The Guardian newspaper
to destroy a computer, which held files from
the whistleblower Edward Snowden. AR: We were faced effectively with
an ultimatum from the British Government that if we didn't hand back the material or destroy it, they would move to law. (Drilling sound) I didn't think
that we had Snowden's consent to hand the material back
and I didn't want to help the UK authorities know
what he'd given us. (Female reporter)
The paper which had other copies of the Snowden files overseas, agreed to take an angle grinder
to the computer, while the intelligence agents watched. I think the plain fact is
that what has happened, has damaged national security and in many ways,
The Guardian themselves admitted that when they agreed,
when asked politely by my national security adviser
and cabinet secretary, to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files. (Reporter) In America, the White House
spokesman was asked, "Would Obama ever do such a thing?" Josh Earnest: It's very difficult
to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate. (Drilling sound) Man: I love this country,
do you love this country? How do you answer that question? AR: We live in a democracy
and most of the people working on this story are British people who have families in this country,
who love this country. I am slightly surprised
to be asked the question. But yes, we are patriots
and one of the things we are patriotic about
is the nature of the democracy, the nature of free press
and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things. ES: I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations
behind the people who made these disclosures
that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting
the power of government that's a fundamentally
dangerous thing to democracy. BO: In this directive, I have taken
the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have to the American people
to people overseas, which will limit the duration that we can hold personal information while also restricting
the use of this information. ES: I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say,
everything I do, everyone I talk to,
every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. (Applause) Luke Harding:
Hello, it's terrific to be here in Athens. I can't believe that Theo
stole my T-shirt, but, anyway. It's great to be here,
my name is Luke Harding. I'm a journalist from The Guardian and I'm one of the reporters who worked on the incredible Edward Snowden story. And I think if I were standing
here in front of you two years ago, or I'd sort of try to sell this
as book idea to my literary agent and I'd said,
"There's a 29 year-old American, he lives in Hawaii,
he works for the National Security Agency, the world's most secret
spying organization. Oh, his girlfriend is a pole dancer, he's stolen hundres of thousands
of top secret documents and fled to Hong Kong
where he's given them to journalists." I think my literary agent would have said, "Luke, that is just so ridiculous.
That would never ever happen." But actually that's precisely
what did happened. In 2012, Edward Snowden
then completely obscure, now of course world famous, decided he was going to blow the whistle. He was becoming increasingly
disillusioned with American spying, and he felt that
in the years after 9/11, the enormously powerful
American security state had stopped spying on the bad guys,
on terrorists, on Al-Qaeda, and has started spying on everybody, on you, on American citizens,
on Europeans and so on. And so he came up with
this incredible plan basically to share secret information. He decided he'd leak it to journalists. The problem was, he was in Hawaii he didn't know any journalists. But he liked Glenn Greenwald, who blogs on civil liberties
and was a columnist in The Guardian. In autumn of 2012,
he sent a very cryptic email to Glenn Greenwald saying, "I'm a senior member
of the intelligence community, I may have something of interest." And I interviewed Glenn
for my book in Rio de Janeiro and Glenn is one of these people
who is perennially busy. He lives in the tropical rain forest, he and his partner have got
about 12 stray dogs. You talk to him, he's on the phone, he's got four chat windows open, he's got a kind of mutts
jumping on his head. And he saw the email.
He didn't really do anything about it. And then Snowden tried again
a couple of weeks later. He made an encryption video, a kind of tutorial for dummies for Glenn Greenwald to try
to reach through to him. Showed him how to download
encryption software, said that you need a very good password whenever you are doing anything digital. And Snowden came up with a suggestion, which was and I kid you not, "Margaret Thatcher is 100% sexy."
(Laughter) I don't know if Greece
can remember Margaret Thatcher, but I assure you that it's not true. But, anyway,
Margaret Thatcher is 100% sexy. And incredibly Glenn didn't do it. So Snowden,
who was basically trying to leak more intelligence material
than anyone in history, must have been deeply frustrated
and he tried a different track, which was to reach out Laura Poitras, who was a documentary
filmmaker based in Berlin, whom he trusted and they had
a very ginger correspondence, because Laura was worried
she was being entrapped. Showden called himself Citizenfour and they swapped information. He basically explained that he felt American spying was unconstitutional that it was illegal and wanted to meet and to do something about it. Basically events of the beginning
of last year went into fast forward
by the spring of last year, Snowden was ready to do this leak and told Laura he would meet her. And Laura flew to the US
with Glenn and a third member, a wonderful colleague of mine,
called Ewen MacAskill. He's a Scottish reporter on The Guardian. I don't know if you watch
Star Trek in Greece, but he sounds like Scotty,
the original Scotsman from Star Trek. He says kind of "aye" rather than "yes". But he is also a brilliant reporter. And the three of them flew to Hong Kong. They met with Snowden at The Mira Hotel,
initially Glenn and Laura. What was astonishing about this meeting, it's the beginning of my book, is that they had no idea who Snowden was, they only had his name. They hadn't searched his name in Google, because that was too dangerous. They just had a rendezvous point, which was a kind of plastic crocodile in a kind of shopping strip
next to the hotel. And so, they see this figure
holding a Rubik's cube, it was a part of a kind of protocol, he comes shambling towards them and they expected
a sort of CIA guy in his 60s with a blue blazer,
gold glasses, dandruff, like off of on the Born conspiracy. Instead they get this kind of student who Glenn said he looked
barely old enough to shave. That was Edward Snowden. They went upstairs and they began talking. It quickly became clear that Snowden was indeed not just a source, but probably the greatest
journalistic source ever. And Ewen MacAskill
also interviewed Snowden. We collaborated together on this book and we, journalists
involved in this story, we did a sort of spycraft as well but very badly, sub-Hollywood spycraft. So you would have been told
that if Snowden was genuine, he should tap out on his text phone,
"the Guinness is good", and if he was fake, "the Guinness is bad." So the greatest leak in history, the switch was flicked
when Ewen on the Tuesday night on this extraordinary
Hong Kong week typed out, "The Guinness is good". And that was it. Then we started publishing
a series of stories in London, and in New York about the fact that Americans' phone records
were all being secretly collected. About the PRISM program,
which then no one had heard of. But essentially the NSA was hacking into the servers of Yahoo, Google, of all the digital platforms
we use all the time. And it was a kind of roller coaster. I was part of the team in London
that was dealing with this. And pretty quickly we came into
conflict with the British authorities. You saw on the video, David Cameron, who is not a great Prime Minister. He went to Eaton. For those of you who don't know it, it is the most privileged, expensive
private school in the UK. And he's someone
who is used to getting his own way. He was basically fed up
that we were publishing this material. Two weeks on, after we started publishing, he pointed the most senior
civil servant in the British Government, a guy called Sir Jeremy Heywood. And I think he sort of said, "Sir Jeremy, deal with these rotters
from the Guardian, deal with them." And so, Sir Jeremy came
to our offices in London in King's Cross, and basically threatened us
with legal action. He said that unless
we stop publishing stories, we had to return this material, we would be hold up before a judge and possibly even closed down. We explained, Alan Rusbriger, my editor,
that this was pointless because this material
already existed in Berlin with Laura Poitras, in Rio,
with the New York Times, and so on. Sir Jeremy said, this is the authentic
voice of aristocratic Britain, he essentially said that
the Prime Minister thinks "The Guardian is a lot more important
than some American blogger." Some American blogger
being Glenn Greenwald, the most famous journalist on the planet. Then he added,
and this is the killer line, "You should feel flattered
the PM thinks you are important." (Laughter) So that was
the British Government's response to this sensational story. We continued publishing,
I was in a kind of secret bunker. What we tried to do
was what Snowden had told us to do, which was to publish stories
about the mass surveillance of civilians, of high public importance. Not about operational matters, terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. But this brought us into a deep
conflict with the British Government. And eventually we were told unless you smash your computers up,
we will close you down. And two middle-age spies from GCHQ, that's the British equivalent of the NSA, came to The Guardian
on a quiet Saturday morning, and we symbolically agreed
to destroy our hard drives, which you saw there. It was a surreal episode, they told us to buy drills and face masks. They produced something
which looked like a small microwave oven called degausser,
which destroys magnetic data. We said, "We're not going to use
your degausser, we don't trust you." And they said, "Yes, you will. It costs 30 000 pounds." And we said,
"OK, we'll use your degausser." So we smashed the stuff up and that was the end of the Snowden files. I think, I write in my book I describe it as part Stassi, part pantomime. But I think for people
who care about press freedom, it was very chilling. The extraordinary thing
was that the two spies had spent two weeks staking out our building and they left with
presents from Hamleys, the London toy store for their children, back to the provinces,
where the spy agencies headquartered. I subsequently talked
to one of the spies, Ian, about this. And he said he wasn't so upset
about the book, but he was upset about
the implication that he was provincial. Provincialism being
the worst kind of offense. So what we know
thanks to Snowden is a terrific amount. I mean I think Snowden
has done us an enormous service. I think he's a major historical figure. I think we all owe him a debt. I don't know how many
people have one of these. I guess everyone has one of these, right? The genius of Snowden was
that he actually turned over documents, he didn't merely assert. So now we know the iPhone
is the most superlative spying device. The NSA boasts in its internal paper that people who have iPhones are zombies. So you are all zombies. The NSA can remotely
turn on your microphone. It's actually happened to me. If they do that, then your battery
goes down very quickly. It goes from full to zero in about 25 min. They collect your web searches,
your text messages your emails
and also your geolocation data. In other words, there's a complete record
of where you've been. If you go to your privacy settings,
you can find out, it's all being collected. So we've had an enormous debate
over the last year. On the one hand, politically, not a huge amount has changed, there have been some minor reforms
from the Obama Administration, I would say the British Government
is still in denial. The Germans are furious,
because Angela Merkel, whom we saw dressed
as a Nazi earlier on, her phone was bugged
by the NSA for 10 years. For very understandable
historical reasons, the Germans absolutely understand
how important privacy is. But not much concrete political change, but I think we as citizens,
at least we now can have a proper, meaningful debate
with our governments, about the boundaries between
privacy and national security. I'd be interested to know, for example, whether the NSA spied on
the Greek Prime Minister or previous Greek Prime Ministers. Almost certainly the answer is yes. I'd be interested also to know how much the Greek government
still collaborates with the NSA and is sharing your data with America. But my message with
this lovely audience is twofold: I'd say despite all of the Snowden
revelations, stay cheerful, love each other. I 'd suggest don't be too scared. It's also good to take steps
to safeguard our data. Snowden's great advice was if you have an iPhone,
to put it in the fridge. I've also discovered
a cocktail shaker is very good. I don't know if it you have
cocktail shakers here in Athens, but put it in the cocktail shaker, it works as a Faraday cage. And I'd say use encryption if you can. Encryption works and is terrific. And just one final story. One of the reasons I care so much
about the whole idea of privacy is that I spent 4 years in Russia, working for The Guardian
as the Moscow Bureau Chief. And there I was hacked by the KGB. I had unpromising young men in black leather jackets
following me around. Whenever I made a joke
about Vladimir Putin on the telephone, someone was listening and the line will go "grgrgr". (Laughter) Like this. I had people breaking into my flat. Really, it was kind of a badly written
KGB drama. I've had experience
of demonstrative Russian spying, but I've also had experience
of American spying as well. After I saw Glenn Greenwald in Rio
last year for my book, all sorts of weird stuff happens to everyone who met Glenn Greenwald. And I was writing my manuscript
back in the English countryside. And I wrote something
very disparaging about the NSA, very rude about the NSA. And I watched my computer as my paragraph was remotely deleted from right to left, kind of like that. (Laughter) And I just thought "What the f... !"
(Laughter) This went on for five or six times. Over period of two months, to the point where I'd actually leave notes
for my mystery editor saying, "Look, I'm really not very happy
that you're doing this. Please don't delete stuff." And if it had been Hollywood, I would have got a mysterious
disembodied reply, but I didn't get a reply. But very unusual, all writers expect people to criticize their books
after they published. To be criticized
when you are still writing, is something very new. So I'd say thank you very much. I think privacy
is a fundamental human right. I think Edward Snowden is a great person. He's in a difficult situation in Moscow and I think we are in his debt. I think we should thank Edward Snowden.
Thank you. (Applause)
