Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On No Place To Hide 20140601

Delighted to be here. This place is a vibrent center celebrating its 10th anniversary. I am asked often for advice on how to promote a book after it has been published. Provocative coverage ever since he gave up practicing law nine years ago, to write columns and books. He started his first blog in 2005 because, as he says in the introduction of his new book, he had become alarmed by the bush administrations post9 11 their arrives executive power and wanted to make a broader impact in his career as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer allowed. By 2007 he had become a contributing writer at salon, and in 2012 he signed if one the guardian having himself as a dogged pursuer of stories involving government overrow. It was glenns aggressive coverage of such controversies arizona warrantless wire tapping by the nsa that led snowden to seek him out and enlist million in the release of the classified files documenting the nsas vast Information Collection apparatus. Glenn tells the story in fascinating, revealing and, impassioned detail in his fifth and latest book, no place to hide. A few months ago glen n left the guardian to launch a new online publication called the intercept part of first look media, the pioneering journalistic venture being backed by pierre, but he is far from finished with the snowden archives. He has been saying theres more to come, including even bigger revelations. As he told one interviewer, quote, i like to think of it as a fireworks show. You want to save your best for last. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming, Glenn Greenwald. [applause] thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for that extremely warm and generous welcome, and thank you for coming out tonight, and thanks as well to politics and prose for inviting me to this arena. I witnessed a large number of my friends being bar mitzvahed and i never was and i learned i had some singerring jealousy, so i have that surprise happiness about being here. Book tours are singularly exhausting, but theyre also really exhilarating and thats because when you work on an issue or a story like ive been working on the nsa archives, every single day for almost a year, you end up focusing on the documents and stories in a very casebycase basis and you dont have the opportunity to step back and think about the broader implications and profound consequences of the work you have been doing, and writing a book and talking about your book with people who have read and it have been interested in your work to are long time and having that dialogue is really provocative and interesting way to think about those issues, and as much as i like book tours i particularly like events like this as opposed to what i normally do on the book tour, which is sit in studios answering the same set of very predictable questions over and over by people who work as journalists, and i look forward to the question expands session, which i know will be great as long yaws dont ask me two questions we understand that mr. Snowden, ad to be carrying a rubiks cube, and last week general alexander said your journalism will result in the death of independent innocent people. Do you worry about the blood on your hands . So im sure those two questions will not be part of the questions so it will be infinitely better than the Television Interviews i do. I want to talk about what i did in first two chapters of the book, which is tell the story of how i came to meet and then work with Edward Snowden, along with my longtime friend and journalistic collaborator in hong kong, and the reason that i really wanted to write a book and tell the story is because so much has been said about all of those events and much of what has been said has been wildly false. And one of the really interesting things is that if youre somebody who really likes to bash the American Media, and im definitely somebody who likes to do that its one of my most favorite pastimes, it doesnt really come as a price to learn that much of what the media churns out is misleading in all sorts of ways. But when youre actually at the center of a story like this, and youre reading in the newspaper claims about what it is that happened, when you actually know the truth because you were at those events and were part of them, your appreciation for their capacity to mislead expands wildly. It really is shocking to have seen some of the things that have been said, given my firsthand knowledge how false they are. I remember in particular in hong kong, when we revealed ward snowdens identity at his insis steps on june 10th last year, from under10th until june 23rd, the instant consensus of the American National security elite here in washington, and of large numbers of the American Media, was that theres no question but that this is almost certainly a chinese espionage operation, that Edward Snowden is almost certainly a spy of the government in beijing. And then on june 24th, when he left hong kong and flew to moscow on his way to ecuador and got trapped in moscow by the u. S. Government which revoked his passport and bullied the cubans to rescind their offer of safe passage, those people accusing him of being a chinese spy, transformed into he is an agent of vladimir putin. Thats been obvious, and seamlessly switch, and if he flew to south korea, he would be accused of being an agent of that government. This oped in the wall street journal last week saying we know for certain either that this is this whole operation is either a chinese spy ring or a russian spy ring or a joint operation. So it was remarkable to see that. Then there was the issue of who Edward Snowden was. This actually stunned me. I was vaguely aware of this at the time but a little occupied in june in hong kong and wasnt pay too much attention to what people were saying but in writing the book i went back to see how the media narrative formedin the wake of our disclosures and our unveiling of our source, and it is really remarkable. I am mystified to this day how it happen that almost overnight, within 24 hours, all of these journalists who never heard of the name Edward Snowden before, had no idea who he was or what he did or what motivated him, were able instantly to diagnosis him medically, psychologically, in a remarkably coordinated way. This consensus arose that he was a fameseeking mars cyst, and persists to this dame attachment the people were maligning his character as a means of distracting attention from the revelations, he was telling me, and we were executing his plan, which was, im going to unveil myself one time and come forward and say, i am the person who did this, because i feel an obligation to stand up in public and explain why it is that i did what i do. I dont want to hide. I dont want other people falsely accused. I want to take responsibility for what i did because im so convicted it was the right thing to do, and after i do that, im going to disappear. I am not going to do Immediate Use interviews. Im not going to let them personalize the issue as a means of distracting attention, and every day i had every major American Television personality, the actors who play the role of journalists on television, calling me and pleading with me to arrange for them to have the First Television interview with Edward Snowden. They were willing to devote hours of prime time to letting him pontificate, whatever conditions he demanded, and he rejected every offer because he knew that would result in allowing the folk douse be on him personally and they would ask very probing substantive questions for which our American Media is known, which is tell us about our girlfriend, do you miss her . What is your life like in moscow, and he was determined not to let that happen. So he stayed off all television for a full year. Thats the behavior of a fameseeking person, and it was remarkable to contrast the reality with who he was and what was being disseminated about him. Then theres the issue of the the disclosures. There was the script read from by the american political establishment, which is that these disclosures will result in the deaths of innocent people and compromising American National security, and every interview ive done with every major media outlet since last june has entailed these accusations, this demand it take it seriously and address it. What is most remarkable to me about it is isnt that it is presented without my expectation of specificity or evidence to corroborate the accusation. I think none of us in this room are now surprised after witnessing what the media did in the runup the iraq war theyre willing to. A my identify claims of the government without ever asking for any evidence whatsoever to corroborate it. That isnt what surprised me most. What surprised me the most was the eagerness to completely ignore the fact that in every single case of every single whistleblower of every single quoteunquote unauthorized disclosure, which means your publishing information the government wants to hide, the same accusations are made, the same kinds of fear mongering is hauled out over and over again, going back to then 1971 leak of daniel els luring when he leaked the pentagon papers and informed the americans that the government was systematic include lying to them for years about the vietnam war. And samuel was my childhood hero. I have become friends and colleagues with him. Serve on a board with him. And i have had the opportunity to talk to him because he has become the leading, most vocal defender, not just of Edward Snowden but Chelsea Manning and other courageous whistleblowers, and he rope he says he does that and is devoted to doing it, even though he is 83, he said every single thing they say batted ward snowden batted ward snowden and Chelsea Manning was said about me. And telling the American People that Daniel Elsburg was almost certainly a russian spy. The accusation was continuously made tinge by the nixon officials that this disclosure would risk the lives of men and women in uniform and in general undermine the security of the United States and its knew essentially a consensus that all of that was fictitious, that the disclosures were noble and heroic and in the public interest, but there was no conception at all when accusations are made over and over again and disproven over and over again can might mean we ought to have at least as journalists an iota of skepticism. The reality is the disclosures we have made have been quite damaging to the reputations and the credibility of american officials who have been lying to the public and building this massive Surveillance System in secret for all of these years, but it hasnt in any way harmed any legitimate interest of us as american citizens. Its only strengthened the system of which were all a part because that requires us knowing, rather than being ignorant about the most consequential acts our government is doing in the dark. The last point i want to make about why i wanted to the the story and the misperceptions is about what Edward Snowden homes to achieve, what his actual desired outcome was. There is a very pervasive criticism i call as being from the right, by which i mostly mean from democrats, although you do hear it from republicans as well occasionally but nearly with the same frequency. That these disclosures have been incredibly reckless and disclosed without regard to american interests and even with an intention to harm american interests, this was vaguely treasonous, was on cspan this morning and every time the host said now we go to the democratic line i knew i would be called a traitor, and reliably thats what happened. So the idea there is reckless is in taking place, how the documents disclosed and Edward Snowden wants to harm the systems and so do we. Then theyre this much less wellknown strain of criticism that i would say that comes from the left and actually a much more serious criticism of the journalism we have done and the way these disclosurees have carried out. And its gotten much less attention, and that criticism is, why are we holding on to so many documents . Why dont we just publish the entire archive or publish huge numbers of documents rather than the careful managed process, and the answer to both questions lies in at the truth about what actually happened when Edward Snowden came forward and what his objectives were. So like most sources to whom to journalists with information, he had very clear ideas about certain types of information that he believed needed to get out. And then there was other information that he had that he was insisting not being pushed, and it common for sources to say you can publish this but not their and there twas a gray area he believed was a close call and didnt trust his own judgment to make those choices, and he said im giving you, meaning me and laura, these materials and i want you to make the judgment about which of these documents should be published. Many of the document us don want published, and he gave us categories of documents that he didnt think should be published, such as things that would reveal the communications of innocent people that the nasa has collected. Or things that would enable people easily to accuse him of treason by, for example, disclose showing surveillance methods that the u. S. Government use on al qaeda or actual adversaries of the u. S. Government. Agree or differ agree, thats the framework he insisted upon, and we agreed to that framework. There was a good reason why he wanted that, which was he did not come forward in order to harm the United States. If he wanted to do that, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to do. He could have just taken all those documents and passed them to every american adversary, he could have sold those documents for tens of millions of dollars to virtually any Intelligence Agency on the planet. He could have taken them and uploaded them all to the internet himself if thats what he wanted. He didnt want any of that. And the reason he didnt want any of that, the main reason, is because he wanted to make sure that there was some benefit, pragmatic benefit, in the world, to the choice he made to unravel his life and bring these documents to the public, and that pragmatic benefit would be that the government wouldnt be able to distract everyones attention from the revelations by saying lets focus on howed a ward snowden is an irresponsible traitor, or wouldnt be able to did effectively, and wouldnt be able to say we found in pain 5,862 of the documents that have been released the name of this innocent person who now is jeopardized, and has the immediate you townously obsess on that one small case as a means of demonizing the disclosures. He was very acutely aware of the need to have the public debate be on his side. That was important to him. He wanted the public to be focused on the substance of the revelations and not on all of these ancillary tactics he knew would be used if we did any other sort of course, and that meant that he wanted to us go one by one by one in each and every document and each and every story and publish it journalistically, meaning report it, describe to the public what it actually meant, let it linger so that people had time and space to react, and so that it could grow, and then once we were ready to do solid reporting on the next one do that and keep doing it until the stories were ready, and you can agree or disagree but as a journalist and as a human being who promised him i would adhere to that framework, i really didnt care from that point forward about that debate because that was the framework i was going to use. And i think his strategic sense has been remarkably vindicated. Here we are year after the first story on a top yuck i have been writing about for eight years, surveillance and privacy in the nsa that can be incredibly ethereal and rather remote and actually complicated to people, turkly when pitted against the visceral fear that their children and they are going to be blown they dont acquiesce to these policies. Its very difficult to get people even to think about any of this seriously, let alone care about it, and after a year, the interest level on this story, think, is evidenced by the audience here and the interest in the book and the way in which these policies continue to be debated and Reform Movement around the world is greater than ever, and that is a direct byproduct of the very careful and aggressive simultaneously careful and aggressive choice that Edward Snowden made about how he wanted to bring these documents to the world and a big part of why i wrote the book was to correct all of the misperceptions and set fortha definitive series of events about what actually took place. So thats the part about snowden in terms of correcting the record. I just want to take a few minutes to talk about what i think is the even more important part of the story, and by the story i mean the first two chapters when i say this is what happened. Theres a really profound lesson to be learned by thinking about what happened here and why it happened. I know its been a profound lesson for me personally. When i went to hong kong, i think as most people now know, my assumption was was going to meet a source who was probably 60 or 70 years old and i thought that for a variety of reasons, beginning with the fact he had already demonstrated to me he had access to enormous amounts of top secret information, which made me think he was senior in the u. S. Government. Secondly, have spent many weeks talking to him online, and his insight was invariably sophisticated. A little bit cynical but always just very smart and thoughtful and avoided cliches and was just a very kind of original and deep thinking way of looking at the world. Thirdly, from the very first moment that i talked to him, he was adamant, adamant, about the fact that he was going to be identified as the source very early on in our reporting, and he said in the very first conversation i ever had with him that i know that almost certainly means im going to spend the rest of my life in an american prison. And the fact that he was willing to gao go to those extremes and to incur that risk led me to believe that he was probably near the end of his life, both because seems like you would have to be extremely disillusioned over time to be willing to make that sacrifice, and also that it would its almost as though its less of a difficult choice to say im willing to spend the rest of my life in prison if your Life Expectancy is another five or ten or 15 years, rather than 50 or 60. A much more daunting choice to me. Those are my assumptions. And like we have all probably experienced, whenever you make assumptions about somebody youre talking to on the enter northwest and then you meet them in real life, everything you assume is wrong and that was the case here, and the first time i met him in that hotel in hong kong, he was 29 years old, looked probably at least five years younger. I was overwhelmed with disnance and confusion and took me the entire day to recover and the reason for that, and the thought i just had so centrally in my brain was, it was completely bee if you be if you hadling to me, confounding that somebody who was that age and was clearly very intelligent and well adjusted and had a stable and lucative lucrative career and had a longtime girlfriend who loved him and whom he loved and a family that was supportive, why would somebody like that give up their entire life, literally subject themselves to almost certain consignment for the rest of your life in a cage. Not in order to enrich themselves. You can understand why someone might steal or kill in order to gain huge amount of0s money, 0 are or the not to exact ven e vengeance but simplefully to defense of a political principle that didnt really affect him because privacy and the importance of it, though very profound to him, was something he had disstilled because he was haley trained operative at encryption and could safeguard his own privacy and he was worried about everybody elses. I was maybe too cynical or just thinking clearly but i really was suspicious over the storyline that he was telling house his actions, which is, i am not even 30 yet and i want to go to jail for the rest of my life because of this abstract value i wanted to defend. My First Priority in hong kong was to understand what his true motives were. Not the motives he was claiming but to understand the motives behind the motives and the moral reasoning that led to that decision, because i wanted not to be part of helping somebody unravel their life unless i was completely be convinced there was agency and moral autonomy, and i spent a long time trying to understand what the did and why, and what got me to the point that i was extremely comfortable i did understand his motive skis could trust the authenticity of the explanation he was giving me, is when he talked about how growing up in this sort of alienated environment, the internet was his salvation. That unlike for people of my generation and the generation before me, who didnt have the internet growing up and then came to see the internet as this sort of discrete information we use for isolated tasks, people in his generation who grew up in the internet culture see the internet as an integral part of the world ask their internal exploration, and that requires the able to act freely and anonymously and with privacy, and he talk about how he didnt want to live in a world in which that was eliminated for bills of billions of other human being who are living and yet to be born, and i said i understood that but i dont understand why you are personally willing to engage in this. He talk about this belief system he had developed, and what was really odd to me was, i knew almost in the first hour that he didnt finish high school and after he didnt finish high school, he was looking around to do something, and when he was 20 years old, he enlisted in the u. S. Army in 2003 with the intention of going to volunteer to fight in the iraq war for the United States. And he said he believed the war was noble and just, it was really intended to liberate the iraqi people. He got basic training and quickly realized the people to train him spent more time talking about killing arabs than they did liberating anybody, but that was impetus to get him to enlist, and i thought this is a person who has had a fundamental transfor make of what the think to go from im going to fight for my country and this war i believe is just to being one of the most riskseeking aggressive whistleblowers of a main american history, must have meant there was some profound change that took place. What i ultimately realized there was great continuity between those actions, not actually a reversal. That the reason he enlisted in the u. S. Arm request because because he genuinelily believed it was his obligation as a human being to risk his own interests, even his life, it if it meant liberating people and that led him to doing the whistle blowing and put him in the position of going to jail for the rest of his life. He said im not going to be a person who simply has beliefs and articulates and expresses those beliefs. Those beliefs in my opinion, are worthless unless im willing to take action in defense of them. And what he said was that what he had discovered not just the surveilens system itself this idea this extraordinarily cops sequential apparatus that been constructed without an iota or understanding or knowledge, and he said knowing that happened and then knowing that he would be spending the rest of his life on his conscience, having to realize he did nothing about it, even though he could, was an infinitely worse punishment than anything the United States could do to him, including put can him in a king. A selfinterested choice he would rather have the pain of being in prison than the pain of knowing that he did nothing in the face of what he considered to be this grave injustice, and not only did that persuade me deeply of his authenticity but really kind of eliminated the lesson which i had been writing about these Formidable Political and military and economic forces in the United States and west who do all sorts of horrible things, and you write about those thinks theres a tendency to almost like spread a kind of like gloominess, oh, god, just listened to all these horrible thing and i actually feel weakened and impotent and dissparing and defeatess about the prospects for doing something about this. What can i do to stand up to these formidable forces and to me the real lesson of Edward Snowden and what the did, the thing that is so profound i hope everybody in the world walks with no matter theyre perspective, learning and thinking about, is that he was this incredibly ordinary, common, powerless person, he you up in a lower middle class home. His father spent 30 years in the coast guard. He had no position or prestige or power, and yet simply threw an act of conscience and courage of his convictions, he literally changed the world. He revolutionized how people all over the world think about a very wide array of profound issues, even if theres never a law that is passed to reform the nsa or anything else, that consequence will genuinely endure, and that should be a permanent ant antidote to defeatism to the idea were powerless against injustices. We always have within ourselves the ability, when we summon or will, even when acting alone or in concert with other people to unleash all sorts of profound changes, and being able to see him do that is something that will profoundly influence me and probably will for the rest of my life. So i just want to talk for a couple more minutes and then well start the q a. About what the book reveals about that Surveillance System. Because that ultimately is what motivated him to come forward and motivated our journalism. I want to talk about one small part. The book contains a lot of documents and revelations, puts together older story in a broader context to convey this, but this is the nub of everything that happened which is over the past ten amongst there have been all kinds of debates, vociferous, spirited, scornful, but the essential claim has been of one side, the nsa insisting that we need not worry about what it is that theyre doing because its an extremely discriminating, targeted, careful form of surveillance only interested in monitoring the communications of people who are engaged in terrorist plotting or other forms of threats to American National security. And on the other side you have people like in the and edward snowedden and the aclu and other people who have been saying that actually the exact opposite is true. This is a system of indiscriminate, limitless, upick quit to us surveillance, unliking in been created in the world and you look at the debate, death alexander says one thing and i say the opposite, theres no way for a person in good faith to resolve those differences except for the good luck we happen to have tens of thousands of nsa documents which resolves the differences decisively. One document i published is illustrative of countless documents that appear in this archive, in which the phrase collect it all appears. Thats the motto of the nsa. It was a moto first pioneered by Keith Alexander when he was general in baghdad because he wanted to direct the framework of surveillance at an enemy population in the middle of a vicious protracted would war, and that got imported like other war on terror abuses like detention without trial, and drones, on to american soil, and became the surveillance philosophy of the american government, with regard to american and all other populations, and theres one document all sorts of documents that confirm collect it all as the National Security agency. To week others, the form are director of the cia and nsa under bush and when i presented him with that fact, after assuring the audience it was districted, he was basically left to say its a really difficult point but collect it all doesnt actually mean, he told the audiencecollect it all. Collect it all means collect it all. And its evidenced by in the fact that there are billions with a b every single day of emails and telephone calls collected by the nsa and stored by the nsa from the American Communications system and then all throughout the world, and theres one document in particular that says, at the top, by the nsa, its very generous of them to have created a document this clear and helpful. It says at the top, because this how they talk when the think nobody will know it says our collection posture. Actually says our knew collection posture, and a sort of circle and each peg of the circle has a difference phrase which defines what the nsa sees as its news collect posture, and of course is says collect it all and then as you go around the wheel it says things like snip it all, process it all, exploit it all, know it all. That really is the institutional amibition of the nsa and its closest partners and its not just an aspiration of some Science Fiction future. Its something theyre extremely close to fulfilling, and document after document dem demonstrates that, and no matter what you think of Edward Snowden or surveillance or how ben never plant you think the u. S. Government and is can be trysted with these powers, at the very least its extremely difficult to dispute the principle that if the United States government is going to create something that profoundly consequential for privacy for generations, for how people in the world organize themselves or how personalities are formed, if they convert it from the greatest instrument for liberation and emancipation and to what it has become is the greatest and most menacing means of social surveillance ever known to human history, at the very least, even if every detail is not known us to the broader contures have to be. The fact our governments are doing that has to be known to the population if it has any meaning at all to say that we live in any form of a democracy, and that is the principle that animated Edward Snowdens choice to come fur. And is the reason i wrote this book. So thank you for listening. Well now have a 30minute q a. [applause] i guess the system is anyone who wants to ask a question lines up at a microphone and then to alleve alleviate me the burden of choosing, well go from one microphone to the next. Many of the nsa programs have been based on questionable legal theories. Do you think there will be repercussions for those who greenlighted the programs, or is it too soon for that . Do you have anymore smoke guns you think would lead to indictments. If we had a country which lived under the rule of law, then the answer to your question would be easy, yes, people who ordered surveillance as a federal court ruled it did, or who abused the system for improper purposes, would be held accountable, just like other people who arent from power in washington when the break the law for much less significant transgressionses are put into prison. But we know that american political officials created a worldwide torture regime and innovated and destroyed 0 kin triof 26 Million People based on aggressive war and financial lead to global collapse and not a single individual has ever been held accountable under the law, even though [applause] even though we have we are the country that imprisons more of our citizens than any in the world in raw numbers and proportinally, for far less serious transgressions than any country in the west. So you have this split in how the judicial system functions. My colleague matt taibi has a book out called the divide, how this judicial system has created created two tiers of justice. Let me give you a really example. There are all these really brave american journalists who love to stand up and say, Edward Snowden should man up thats their phrase they loved his bravado and come back to the United States and face trial into be prosecuted and put into prison. But this whole debate began when the senior National Security official in the obama administration, James Clapper, win before the United States senate and when asked, if the nsa collecting data about hundreds of millions of americans, and he said, what . Not collection of data about americans. No, sir. He lied to the American People through the senate, which is at least as much of a felony as anything Edward Snowden is accused of, and yet you cannot find literally a single american politician media figure who has interviewed James Clapper who asked him whether he should go to prison or advocated or suggested he should. It demonstrates the split in how we look at what the law is for. Its for powerless and ordinary people and not for people who wield power. As for smoking guns i dont think there are any no matter what i demonstrated that would lead to things like indictments in our current culture butunder definitely stories that will shape hour the story is formed, and just to be clear those stories are not yet reported not because were purposely sitting on them or saving them, which is in nobodys interest. These are the stories that are very difficult to report. They involve incredible sensitivities about the privacy of innocent people and how do you report while protecting their interests and they involve legal questions that will implication the source and the journalists on the story but the minute the stories are ravedy, and were working on them night and day, they will be pushed and will significant he reshape how people view the revelations. [applause] im excited to get to ask you this because you hinted at it on your kolbert interview. A question from a 92yearold former congressman who forked against the hoover fbi when he was the chair of the special subcommittee on the invasion of privacy which resulted in the freedom of information act. He wanted to know he has been following your report on the nsa with great interest because as a member of congress he saw how the fbi used methods like the nsa today to develop dose as dossiers of members of congress. He questiones what can you tell us about the potential of the executive branch to use the nsa as a policing unit and creating personal scandals just at the hoover fbi did in his day . So i get in big trouble with both my editors and all the people, fellow journalists with whom i work on these stories when i give little previews when i have a momentary loss of control there is always the headlines after my kolbert report saying, Glenn Greenwald vows the greatest story is coming and they email me and say thank you for that lovely pressure. So im going to be careful before the that. But what i will say is is that we have had stories that speak directly to that question there was a story that we published in the Huffington Post three or four months ago that didnt get the attention it deserved that had the nsa saying that they had taken six people they consider radicals, but they said specifically that they are not members of a terrorist organization or plotting terrorist attacks. They simply have what the u. S. Government regards as a message that is radical. Just like in the 60s and 70s,j. Ed guard hoover regarded the Martin Luther king and john lennon as having a message that was radical, and it talked about lou they monitored their intimate online activities, including sexually explicit chats, and visits to pornographic web sites and talked about howl they could release that information about those individuals so as to discredit them as messengers and prevent them from being listened to in their communities, which is pure j. Ed guard edgar hoover. There have been stories about the dch monitoring the people who visit the wikileaks web site or ruining the reputation of activists, nasty forms of reputation destruction the plotted and used against them. Thats exactly the kind of political abuse of surveillance capableities are that are so famous from the 6s so and 7s so. The problem in society the people viewed as radical are viewed as threatening. Martin luther king creatures that were peaceful and nonthreatening because they were vein vindicated by history but they in the 60s and 7sunrise were viewed as threats, just like muslim who who stand up and say the palestinians have the right to protect themselves and now seen as radical and the Surveillance System is very much about tarring though kind of people. Theres already stories like that, and i know go ahead and kill me, john cook and my fellow intercept journalist, there are stories like that coming. [applause] i want to thank you very much for what you have done, and when you see Edward Snowden, thank him for many of us herfordt here for doing what he did. [applause] i also want to say i wasnt bar mitzvahed either, and its okay. You can couple up here afterwards with me. I was one of those people, like many people here, that grew up in in the late 6s so and early 7s so, done a lot of demonstrations, organized a lot, we work for people that we believe in. We have tried to make our country and our government a better place. But always seems to me like were caught in a time warp, that were constantly repeating things that seemed to have happened in previous generations, not even generations i mean, if you look at what happened to this country in the 60s, and 70s, and the war in Southeast Asia and all those things that had an impact on the direction of country, it has not that long ago. Not as though everyone should have forgotten that stuff but may have. I want to ask you as someone who has been out there and talks with people and has reflected on your own work in this area, why is it that we keep doing the same things over and over again and is there any way that we can prevent this from happening again . Even though were going to get very upset and pissed off about this, many of us already are although i dont see him in demonstrations out there, which is something we had quite a lot of. But people dont seem to be very angry about it. They dont seem to be upset. Dont seem to understand what the government is doing and has done to them. Doesnt seem to bother them very much. A little bit maybe. I was sort of interested in your thoughts on that. So, let me just disagree a little bit with the premise of the last part of your question. Chills the idea that people dont seem very bothered by this. I think sometimes theres an expectation, particularly among those of us who are very politically engaged relative to the rest of the population, and also politically passionate, that political passions are an important part of how we look at the world, to not just hope but to expect that everybody is going to sort of see the world similarly to the way we see it and to react to how we react the way we react, and that, therefore, when were angry about something, if theres not instant stainous instainous demand are for change in a collective way that means that other people are general live apathetic. Im not suggesting thats how youre framing it but theres a tendency to see it that way. Its important to think about how perceptual change take place if you look at polling dat in the United States, theres the remarkable poll of pew poll taken every year, every year since the 9 11 attacks, that asks americans this question, and its been constant every year so you have consistency in the polling metrics which is it that you fear more, the threat of foreign terrorist attacks or the threat to your Civil Liberties from the u. S. Government . And every single year, since the 9 11 attacks, americans overwhelmingly, by Something Like 70 to 30 , have said, i fear the threat of foreign terrorist oui attacks more than i fear the threat to my Civil Liberties by the government, except 2013 when the poll was taken three months after the snowden disclosures, and it was the other way. That is a remarkable change and a stunning change that will have profound implications. People are not protesting about surveillance because people have worries that are more tangible and immediate, like how to pay your bills bills and feed your children with this rampant unemployment, and theirs a sense of confusion how to translate outrage, which i do think is there, into meaningful change. People say, i went to the polls in this election or that election i mean 2008 but just trying to be generic and i thought that the vote i was casting was going to bring about meaningful change. I really fought this time that would happen. And then i see that actually it hasnt. And now i realize that all of this wonderful democratic participation i was also told guaranteed i had an inflation how things happen is illusory and all those massive forces are arrayed against me. This occupy wall Street Movement that was subverted by the police and theres a sense of helplessness that is ingrained and the lack of activism is not reflective of the lack of outrage. Its important to see the story internal nationally and knock domestically, the internet is a global means of communication. And i know from where i am in brazil that this story has resonated greatly and been sustained for over the course of a year, and i know in germany, where laura lives and i just visited, the debate over the issues continues to swirl because of our engaged and active the population is, and all over the world people think differently about the issues and that cant but help lead to all sorts of changes, some of which we probably cant even anticipate. You know, youre right that none of this is really new. That there have been debates about surveillance and scandal officers surveillance for years. We forget about that probable my because at human beings we focus on what is in front of us rather than the distant past because it affects us more itch also think that we like to look at things that are distant, foreign leaders over there or past leaders here, like j. Ed guard hoover, being the kinds of tie rans tyrants were lucky to be free from and we dont think those kind old abuses are possible here, but thats part of why you speak to your neighbors and why people start blogs or write books or come furled with documents is to change how people think about those things, and i really believe this story, more than probably anything that ive seen at least in the decade ive been writing about politics and playing close attention, that is had that kind of affect, and id love it to be more. And i think it can continue to be more, but i think its been very substantial. [applause] hello. I was wondering, if you see any scenario playing out where we would see the United States becoming a safe place for Edward Snowden to return to or you really think hes going to be a real challenge to return without being locked up in a cage for the rest of his life . I dont see any scenario where he can return and ill tell you why. I remember i wrote an article in 2011 where id a i investigated and discovered i investigated and discovered the detention situation in which Bradley Manning was being detained, borders on torture, and i remember being confusioned initially about why they would do that. Why would they put her in those kind of conditions. Seems to counterproductive to the interests of the United States government for one thing. It distracted attention from what it is that she did. It turned her into a martyr, made them look awful. And it even jeopardized their ability to prosecute her because any statements she made that were increme nateing incriminating could be excluded because it was a byproduct of and the reason they subjected her to that treatment is the same reason that they have been so vindictive about prosecuting a whole array of whistleblowers, even though they used proper channels and done very little harm, which is the same reason why your government put people in orange jump suits and in cages on an island thousands of miles a. From their home with no trial and show the world the pictures and torture people, its important for the United States government to send the message that if youre somebody who thinks about meaningfully undermining what we are doing or challenging our power, and specifically if youre somebody who thinks about being a whistleblower and revealing to the world what we have been doing in the dark, take a look at what we did to Chelsea Manning and how we destroyed thomas dreg0s life who are in dead or in prison and you should think devices, and so to let Edward Snowden come home to this sort of heros welcome, welcome back, ed, parties, you know, would severely undermine that deterrence and that intimidating power. It would incentivize other people to do it. The whats theyre so furious he is being protected because he created a template for other people who want to come forward but dont want to spend the rest of their life in prison, and that is very, very alarming to the u. S. Government and very, very encouraging to me and i think a lot of other people. [applause] question about journalists and sources. Leakers and whistleblowers. Leakers can be looked upon as people with ulterior motives, whistleblowers usually people acting through conscious to expose wrongdoing. And these very act of whistle blowing is a very isolating event, for the individual as evidence evidence by Edward Snowden, from your family and your country. And you messengered in your new endeavor you will be looking to enemploy secure drop, anonymous technology. Have you given thought of what impact that has on the relationship of the journalist to the source, from the perspective of, does it somehow, some way facilitate the leaker, the person in power who has an ulterior motive and isolates the whistleblower in terms of the only avenue of support often is the journalists they are dealing with, and that will somehow, some way, be undermined through the use of technology. The question you ask raises a really important problem that gets far too little attention in my opinion when these debates take place, which is if you tell people that the government is collecting the list of everyone who is calling them and everyone who theyre calling and how long theyre speaking and where they are when they talk and the device they use and collecting their emails, theyre obviously threats and implications for various rights, such as the right to privacy, that has been debated to a reasonable extent. But theres a lot of other rights that are seriously threatened bay system of that kind of surveillance, including the freedom of the press. How do you do journalism, which relies on people coming to you in confidence that they can give you information and remain anonymous in a world where the government knows who everybody is talking to. It becomes almost impossible to do journalism in a world where even just metadata is collected in a comprehensive way, and so i think it is the responsibility of journalistic outlets to think about how to create Ways Technology include to enable sources to come forward once again the way deep throat did to bob woodward and Carl Bernstein and sources throughout time have come to journalists and leaked with confidence they can do it without being immediately detected bay government who knows everyone who is talking to everyone, and things like secure drop, which is away of letting people deliver documents to journalists with a good amount of anonymity but also technology that we hope to develop further and hope to influence and encourage other Media Outlets will reestablish the able for human beings to commune anonymously. Its credit critical for privacy critical for attorneys who need to meet with clines in private, and doctors who need to communicate with patients and its crucial. As far as facilitating whistleblowers who might have ulterior motives im not surely how you can stop that or why that it enmatters. It seems unlikely the government will take on anything for the abusive policies the cubs rebuilt. Congress is taken here to move forward on legislation that addresses only one of the state surveillance policies defined by the Data Collection program. Legislation like we like where passing is uncertain which has been so buttered up already but if past may proven effective as a restraint. Bobrow protects your privacy and Civil Liberties ultimately be left up to individuals to save themselves . For example using for browsercommiserating ipg email and if so how can individuals go about these concerns without their behaviors razzing underskirt and the part . Thats a good question. I agree completely that of all the different ways that reform is likely to have to change is to occur what happened in the bit by building a few blocks from here is probably the least relevant in the least prophecy because the history of the United States, especially the recent history spent that revolution takes place whispers it is an outrage, what the government attempted to do is answer has been here they have to engage in a ritual of showing symbolic reform, things that are called reform ballot look like reform, but usually are designed to ensure the system continues stronger than ever. Thats a list of Congress Terrible certain to be. What decent one passed in house two weeks ago that by the time it gets in to the nsa protect his hands of Dianne Feinstein its almost going to turn into exactly the opposite. Some okay things might have been there. Theres lots of other things that can. Countries banding together to find ways to undermine the ability of the u. S. With hegemony over the internet. The panic and fear American Tech Companies literally have about the impact of revolution and future Business Prospects based on the idea that germantown is inversely companies in koreatown needs can they dont put your emails and chats on facebook or google. Put it with us because the alternate to the nsa. I think it is a really important pressure point. Ultimately exactly what you said. Not just individuals not relent in their privacy been compromised. You know, it is also the choices we all have come especially people who are your age and younger, which is people have career choices and the nsa needs young, highly adept people at programming and cryptography to work in their system or their Corporate Partners and other Silicon Valley Companies Need the same people to go and operate systems in a way of lots of money in front of the want. And theres this other side with their attack on base to try to produce privacy tools of the kind you sent for social act within groups to try and protect privacy. You may not make as much money, but that is the choice we all can make to have an ultimate in fact. The last point you made i want to underscore, which is its really remarkable there are these tools like your browsers and the like they can protect the internet and actually work. This document through the nsa is going to tear out over its inability to invade two indications. The nsa scours the internet, looking for people who are using pgp to protect your email because they regard anybody who uses pgp email is inherently suspicious. On the grounds that if anybody wants to keep their communications away from our eyes, they are probably bad people doing bad things. The reason that works, the reason you can become a surveillance target is because so few people use it. As millions of people use it instead of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or tens of millions, but as millions of people start to use it instead of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or tens of millions and it becomes the default is the way we communicate, which i think is going to happen, it becomes impossible because of the sheer quantity for the nsa to target people and that will severely undermine their ability to a communications. Encryption really does work and if all that happens to these stories as people begin using encryption, that will be a major blow against this ubiquitous surveillance video. [applause] unfortunately, we are running short on time. We can take for brief questions, four from each microphone. You have said before that Elizabeth Moran, for example, or other politicians who would be able to enter but have to conform to a system that forced them to sell out, two influences the a sickly their original message of a populist message, people who promised to come and shared politicians, president ial candidates promising reform. I am curious from individuals such as noam chomsky questioned the ability of the institutions that do exist right now to address these problems but so other given the level of purvey city between then and the interconnection and the inability of any single wall or politician or even branch of government to affect change on its own. Id also like to say thank you too many fbi agents here are contributing to a great cause. So let me quickly address that. I dont think i am quite grim about the prospect of particular elected officials to effect some kind of positive change in to get elected. I do think the system is corrupting. Someone like Elizabeth Moran who has long been an outsider she wants to sit on the committee, if she wants to have other democrats vote to get them she has to get done, has to make conversation compromises and tradeoffs. Having someone like Russ Feingold in the senate to have hearing on issues and abstract and pohlad information come even though every bill he proposes fails by 981 is a real benefit to those of us working outside of the system. Or having Elizabeth Moran grilled banking regulators over their failure to exercise Regulatory Oversight over wall street tycoons is extremely beneficial even though every member is going to be with those people and receive checks from them. I dont want to overstate the sort of grimness editor at the uselessness of it. Im glad there is a Elizabeth Warren talking that were Russ Feingold talking about that. I just dont think any meaningful change is going to come exclusively or primarily from within this corrected system. It takes all sorts of other things turn most of us who arent in that rely on the factory punch a hole one every two years next to a name in order for it to happen. [applause] you started by talking about the various attacks on snowden. Im curious if you can think of effective attacks that they havent been doing it could be doing and what your thinking will will be reasonable defense is to be coming out taxonomists noted that misinformation. You mean are there things that could be attacking me with effectively that they havent yet taught us that you want me to share with them . [laughter] b. Macbook, i said earlier actually the other have done that a report in the story among people with whom i have long been allied in a lot of stories that says that the disclosures we made had been too slow, too fragmented, too piecemeal, too incomplete and there should be much, much more disclosure. It is a really interesting debate to have. I have a lot of respect for those opinions. Ive shared some of the reasons why. Ill give you an example of what i mean. I was doing this pbs newshour debate today and the interviewer who was quite good, the reporters that i want to ask you about a critique from the right and also a critique from the left. I thought to myself, shes actually going to ask about a critique from the left . That never happens. I was happy to engage. Keith alexander says youre responsible for these dead bodies that no one knows where they are. And then the critique from the last was a column or review in the Washington Post by david cole who asserted a good critic on Civil Liberties, but also a democrat that basically was the same critique is Keith Alexander, which was that i have engaged in irresponsible disclosures that will harm National Security. The actual critique from the left that is really one great to have that in the open is completely excluded as usual. So there are real critique surrounding the disclosures, how to do the reporting. The critiques they get hurt or almost entirely valid and thats the reason why generally keep them was her. [applause] thank you for everything youve done. Of course Edward Snowden. I do have an adversarial question for you. At the moment favorite kind. Id be a mac and how does that blur the lines between not in traditional journalism or more importantly what does that mean to your protection as a journalist . Well, theres this interesting dilemma because what ends up happening is if you are in possession of topsecret document, the Justice Department believes that any kind of publication is a crime, is a felony, even if you are a journalist. That is their position. And the protection you have is that there is a superseded love called the constitution for example, when i worked with ulcerative media outlet around the world in order to do the reporting in the places where the people were or were most affected by the disclosure i wanted to nsa spying on spain with spanish journalists in nsa spying on sweden and sweden with spanish journalists. I had to enter into context about the organizations before i could give them documents saying they were hiring me as a freelance journalist to do the reporting because if i didnt come if i given document, the Justice Department would say that i know blogger journalist and im now a distributor in a source then handing our documents are free and clearly not acting as a journalist because journalists get paid and i did it for free. Same thing happened with this book. In this book i wanted to make certain revelations because they fit into the context in antarctica stories published. You can only get so many stories published in each other because they have to go through the long editorial and legal vetting process. Doing it through book was on way to get more stories out. Eventually i could publish documents in the boat and then sell the book and then have somebody say you are charging money for access to classified documents, which is selling topsecret material, which is espionage, for which a lot of people are in prison for life or you could do what we did, which is on the very day of the release we uploaded to the internet every single document in the book so everybody in the world can go to get them for free and then you are faced with the criticism that now youre exploiting documents to generate publicity for the book i miss you essentially have a loselose proposition. I got make any apologies at all for having writ a book. Ive been working on surveillance issues for eight years. I want to maximize every platform i have to go around the world and talk about why he surveillance policies are so dangerous that my government secrecy is so dangerous, urging people to protect their own privacy and talk about the reasons why that is so urgent. It was Just Announced today that Sony Pictures purchased about to make a film about it. Im thrilled about that as well. When i was growing up, our success with the film all the president s men. It reached me about the duties of journalism and away i probably wouldve never been reached and i think the book in film will reach people in all sorts of ways that would neither rising age people. It would be great to be independently wealthy and spend five minutes pouring my heart and soul into a book without getting paid in making a living at every journalist in person from noam chomsky to everyone else whos read the book. You need to get paid for your work like everybody else does. I dont make any apologies for that as well. My duty to my sources to bring the message he wanted to bring to the world as effectively as they can in writing stories and going on the media and writing books and doing films are all important ways for me to do that and that is what i intend to keep doing. [applause] is to be the final question. I was going to ask a few rapidfire yes or no questions. Rule violation. But go ahead and put some of us together and ill address them as best as i can. Ill just ask this one. I dont really expect you to answer it because you talk about some of the upcoming revelation and not wanting to scoop yourself. Can we expect to see maybe surveillance of occupy wall street in upcoming tories . The reason i dont want to talk about futures is because i dont want to screw myself. Its because these are hard documents to get a hold of and understand the meaning of in the context and to understand how you can best communicate them to the world. That is certainly smart editors and their spin a couple of occasions when i make claims about documents i thought i understood fully that turned out not to be exactly the way of describing. So thats really the reason i dont talk about future reporting. The other thing to keep in mind is that god is one thing that happens when people realize the vastness of the information we are given, there was almost this expectation we have the holy grail to solve all injustices. Like all the files of u. S. Government in our possession so every person who cared about any injustice of email may come to see me on the street in a i demand you documents about injustice at under the assumption that we have done. You know, let me say this about the question you asked specifically. Every document in the archive reveals abusive or improper surveillance or surveillance that is done for political ends are surveillance that is done in a way that is different from how the u. S. Government has been claiming it has been done will be published, but there is me or somebody else. That is the promise they make. [inaudible] [applause] excuse me . [inaudible] i think it has been a good come healthy competition in fields each of us. So now, i am not talking to marc gellman. I hope and expect to do the reporting hes been doing because its been really good. Thank you, everybody so much. [applause] thank you for joining us and for your thoughtful questions everyone out the books i need. If the number in your ticket is between one and 75, please join us in line. Additional books are for sale. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] journalist Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet account aribert heim accused of violent acts while in prison while at the concentration camp