Original subtitles

Laura, at this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.

I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.

I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk, and you are

willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more.

This will not be a waste of your time.

The following sounds complex, but should only take minutes to complete for

someone technical.

I would like to confirm out of email that the keys we exchanged were not

intercepted and replaced by your surveillance.

Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it

uses a strong passphrase. Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion

guesses per second.

If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been

hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications.

Understand that the above steps are not bulletproof and are intended only to

give us breathing room. In the end, if you publish the source material, I will

likely be immediately implicated.

This must not deter you from releasing the information I will provide.

Thank you and be careful.

Hey,

can you hear me?

I am here, David. How are you?

Well, I would just start by pointing to what Barack Obama himself said about

those questions when he was running.

For the office that he now occupies, in December of 2007, he said, quote, the

president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally

authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping

actual or imminent threat to the nation. So by Obama's own words, the president

does not have the power that he's now exercising under the Constitution.

And as far as why it matters, on August 1, 2007, when he laid out his reasons

why he was running for office and why he thought it was so important to change

the way we were doing things, he said, quote, no more ignoring the law when

inconvenient. That is not who we are. We will again set an example for the world

that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.

So to allow presidents to simply start words on their own.

You asked why I picked you.

I didn't. You did.

The surveillance you've experienced means you've been selected, a term which

will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern SIGINT system works.

For now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every

you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you

site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of

a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not.

Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the

that unrestricted, secret police pose for democracies.

This is a story you bet you can tell.

Thank you for inviting me here to give me the opportunity to express my story.

But let me give you some of my background.

I spent about four years in the military and then I went into NSA directly. So I

ended up with about 37 years of service combined.

Most of it was a lot of fun, I tell you. It was really a lot of fun breaking

these puzzles, solving problems and things like that. And that's really what

did. I fundamentally started working out with data, looking at data and data

systems and how you do that. I was developing this concept of analysis that

could lay it out in such a way that it could be coded and executed

electronically, meaning you could automate analysis.

And it has to do with metadata and using metadata relationships.

So that was my whole...

Being there, I didn't say that. Eventually, that's what I ended up

the only one there doing that, by the way.

So, at any rate, 9 -11 happened, and it must have been right after a few days,

no more than a week after 9 -11, that they had decided to begin actively

on everyone in this country.

And they wanted that back part of our program to run all the spying.

All right?

So that's exactly what they did.

And then he started taking the telecom data, and it expanded after that.

So, I mean, the one I knew was AT &T, and that one provided 320 million

every day.

That program was reauthorized every 45 days by what I called the YES Committee,

which was Hayden and Tennant and the DOJ.

The program was called Stellar Wind.

So first I went to the House Intelligence Committee and the staff

personally knew there.

She then went to the chairman of that committee.

Nancy Pelosi was the minority rep.

They were all briefed into the program at the time, by the way, and all the

other programs that were going on, including all these CIA programs.

I wasn't alone in this. There were four others out of NSA, and we were all

trying to work internally in the government over these years, trying to

to come around to being constitutionally acceptable and take it into the courts

and have the courts' oversight of it, too.

So we naively kept thinking that that could happen, and it never did.

But at any rate, after that and all the stuff we were doing, they decided to

raid us to keep us quiet, threaten us, you know.

So we were raided simultaneously, four of us. In my case, they came in with

drawn. I don't know why they did that, but they did.

Laura, I will answer what I remember of your questions as best I can. Forgive

the lack of structure.

I am not a writer, and I have to draft this in a great hurry.

What you know as Stellar Wind has grown.

SSO, the expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind's

of the pie, has spread all over the world to practically include

coverage of the United States.

Disturbingly, The amount of U .S. communication ingested by NSA is still

increasing.

Publicly, we complain that things are going dark, but in fact, our accesses

improving.

The truth is that the NSA has never in its history collected more than it does

now.

I know the location of most domestic interception points and that the largest

telecommunication companies in the U .S. are betraying the trust of their

customers, which I can prove.

We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man, yet

its directors exempt themselves from accountability.

NSA director Keith Alexander lied to Congress, which I can prove.

Billions of U .S. communications are being intercepted.

In gathering evidence of wrongdoing, I focus on the wronging of the American

people. But believe me when I say that the surveillance we live under is the

highest privilege compared to how we treat the rest of the world.

This I can also prove.

On cyber operations, the government's public citizen is that we still lack a

policy framework.

This too is a lie. There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of Markle law

for cyber operations created by the White House.

It's called Presidential Policy Directive 20 and was finalized at the

last year.

This I can also prove.

I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I already know how this will end

for me, and I accept the risk.

If I have luck, and you are careful, you will have everything you need.

I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the

public.

Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens emails?

No.

Does the NSA intercept Americans cell phone conversations?

No. Google searches?

No. Text messages?

No. Amazon .com orders?

No. Bank records?

No. What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications

and information involving American citizens?

Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead. If it was a foreign actor

in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead and could work that

NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized.

But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States, it would have to

through a court order.

and the court would have to authorize it. We are not authorized to do it, nor

we do it.

All right.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is now in session.

Please be seated.

Good morning and welcome to the Ninth Circuit.

The first case for argument is Jewell v. National Security Agency.

You may proceed.

May it please the Court, Kevin Bankston for Carolyn Jewell and her fellow

plaintiff appellants in Jewell v. NSA.

Your Honors, plaintiffs have specifically alleged that their own

and communications records have been acquired by the government.

But the district court found that we had failed to allege facts that

differentiated the injury that our plaintiffs suffered from the injury

by every other AT &T user whose communications and records have been

the government, basically concluding that so long as everyone is being

surveilled, no one has standing to sue.

However, to deny standing to persons who are injured simply because many others

are also injured would mean that the most injurious and widespread government

actions could be questioned by nobody.

Do you have anything concrete that, in fact, a specific communication of your

client was intercepted? We have evidence that all the communications passing

between AT &T's network and other networks in their Northern California

have been intercepted, and so that would necessarily include the Internet

communications of our Northern California plaintiffs.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Your Honor.

May it please the court, I'm Thomas Byron from the Department of Justice

behalf of the government defendants. We think this litigation need not be

resolved in federal court in light of the oversight of the political branches,

both legislative and executive, which provides a better opportunity for

oversight and resolution of the concerns raised concerning nationwide policy of

alleged surveillance in these... in these complaints. Even if it's revealed

one or more of the plaintiffs had email or telephone conversations intercepted

that had nothing to do with national security.

Your Honor, I don't know that anyone necessarily would have standing to raise

the particular claims at issue in these two cases.

We think instead that the kinds of claims at issue here against these...

defendants are those that are better suited to resolution before the

representative branches of our government. So what rule would the

if your approach is adopted?

Judge Ferguson, I think that the... I mean, we just get out of the way, is

it? Well, Judge Ferguson, I think that there is a narrow category, a subset of

cases in which it may be appropriate to step aside.

for that narrow category of cases. But the judiciary plays a role.

To be sure, Judge Ferguson.

In our system.

Yes, Your Honor.

And we don't mean to diminish that.

You're asking us to abdicate that role.

No, Your Honor, but it is a question of this court's discretion whether to reach

that issue.

We do think that there is simply no way for the litigation to proceed without

risk of divulging those very questions of privileged information that would

cause, as the Director of National Intelligence has explained,

grave damage to national security if disclosed.

Thanks for having me.

If anybody has any questions, like I said, just basically just raise your

and I'll try to call on you as soon as I possibly can.

Who here actually feels like they are under surveillance pretty regularly?

Everyone inside of Occupy. How many people here have been arrested and at

court date they had their phone taken into the back room?

How many people here had their retina scanned?

Wow.

So you guys are actually, in a sense, the canaries in the coal mine, right?

Because the incentives are all lined up against you.

Anybody see on the subway, link your MetroCard to your debit card?

and auto -refill.

This is a concept which is key to everything we'll talk about today. It's

linkability. Take one piece of data and link it to another piece of data.

For example, if you have your MetroCard and you have your debit card, you have

those things and you can draw a line between them.

That's not a scary thing.

Except your bank card is tied to everything else that you do during the

they know where you're going, when you make purchases.

When they decide to target you, they can actually recreate your exact steps.

with a MetroCard and with a credit card alone, like literally where you go and

what you buy.

And potentially, by linking that data with other people on similar travel

they can figure out who you talked to and who you met with.

When you then take cell phone data, which logs your location, and you link

purchasing data, MetroCard data, and your debit card, you start to get what

could call metadata in aggregate over a person's life.

And metadata in aggregate is content.

It tells a story about you, which is made up of facts, but it's not

true. So, for example, just because you were on the corner and all those data

points point to it, it doesn't mean you committed a crime.

So it's important to note that if someone has a perception of you having

thing, it will now follow you for the rest of your life.

So just keep in mind that what happens to you guys, for example, with

fingerprints and retinal scans and photographs...

That is what is going to happen to people in the future when they resist

changes and when they try to protest in a totally constitutionally protected

way.

This is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope

we can do this in just a yes or no answer because I know Senator Feinstein

to move on.

So does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of

millions of Americans?

No, sir.

It does not?

Not wittingly.

There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not

wittingly.

The encrypted archive should be available to you within seven days.

The key will follow when everything else is done.

The material I provide and investigative effort required will be too much for

any one person.

I recommend, at a very minimum, you involve Glenn Greenwald.

I believe you know him.

The plain text of the payload will include my true name details for the

though it will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my

My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back.

No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions,

would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions.

You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing

me to the cross, rather than trying to protect me as a source.

On timing regarding meeting up in Hong Kong.

The first rendezvous attempt will be at 10 a .m. local time on Monday.

We will meet in the hallway outside of a restaurant in the Mira Hotel.

I will be working on a Rubik's Cube so you can identify me.

Approach me and ask if I know the hours of the restaurant.

I'll respond by stating that I'm not sure and suggest you try the lounge

instead.

I'll offer to show you where it is, and at that point, we're good.

You simply need to follow naturally.

As far as positioning, I mean, if you want us to sit in any particular way.

You know, I'm going to go there.

Okay.

There's so many different

enormous stories just that are kind of stand -alone stories that

even certain things about individual documents that can just be their own

And I just want to start turning those stories out.

I basically woke up this morning and already started writing stories.

So I'm hoping to start publishing within a day or two days, as long as you're

good with that.

And so as far as the stuff we have to talk about, I'm kind of dichotomizing it

between...

You know, stuff that I'd like to talk to you about in terms of like the

documents and the content. And Laura has a bunch of questions about that as

well. Sort of working through the documents, getting your take on a lot of

stuff that, you know, will help me understand it better. But then also the

of you story, right? Like the who you are, what you've done, why you've done

what you've done. And I'd love to do that first.

Okay. In part because you're the only one who could do that. So I'd like to

get it done so that it's done.

And also because, you know, it might be that you want to do that early because

it might be necessary or we might choose to have that done early.

Tell me your thoughts on where you are with that. The primary one on that, I

think I've expressed a couple times online, is I feel the modern media has a

focus on personalities.

Totally. And I'm a little concerned the more we focus on that, the more they're

going to use that as a distraction.

And I don't necessarily want that to happen, which is why I've consistently

said, you know, I'm not the story here.

Nervous, huh? No, it's a very, very cheap plan.

Go ahead.

But, yeah, anything I can do to help you guys get this out, I will do.

I don't have any experience with media with how this works.

So I'm kind of learning as I go.

Right. So I just want to get a sense of why did you decide to do what you've

done? So for me, it all comes down to state power against the people's ability

to meaningfully oppose that power.

And I'm sitting there every day getting paid to design methods to

amplify that state power. And I'm realizing that if, you know, the policy

switches, that are the only things that restrain these states were chained, you

couldn't meaningfully oppose these. I mean, you would have to be the most

incredibly sophisticated technical actor in existence.

I mean, I'm not sure there's anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could

oppose all of the offices and all the bright people, even all the mediocre

people out there with all of their tools and all their capabilities.

And as I saw the promise of the Obama administration be betrayed and walked

from, and in fact actually advance the things that had been promised to be sort

of curtailed and reined in and dialed back, and actually at work, particularly

drone strikes, which I also learned at NSA, we could watch drone videos from

desktops.

As I saw that, that really hardened me to action. In real time?

In real time, yeah.

It'll stream a lower quality of the video to your desktop.

Typically, you'd be watching surveillance drones as opposed to

you know, murder drones where they're going out there to bomb somebody.

But you'll have a drone that's just following somebody's house for hours and

hours. And you won't know who it is because, you know, you don't have the

context for that. But it's just a page where it lists and lists.

of drone feeds in all these different countries under all these different code

names. And you can just click on which one you want to see.

Right. So if your self -interest is to live in a world in which there's maximum

privacy, doing something that could put you into prison in which your privacy is

completely destroyed is sort of the antithesis of that.

How did you reach the point where that was a worthwhile calculation for you?

I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched, and there's

never been anything in the history of man that's like it. I mean, you could,

again, have children from one part of the world having an equal discussion

where, you know, they were sort of granted the same respect for their ideas

conversation with experts in the field from another part of the world on any

topic, anywhere, anytime, all the time.

And it was free and unrestrained. And we've seen the chilling of that and the

cooling of that and the changing of that model toward something in which people

self -police their own views.

And they literally make jokes about ending up on the list if they donate to

political cause or if they say something in a discussion.

And it's become an expectation that we're being watched.

Many people I've talked to have mentioned that they're careful about

type into search engines because they know that it's being recorded. And that

limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration.

And I am more willing to

risk imprisonment or any other negative outcome personally

than I am willing to risk.

the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me whom

care for equally as I do for myself.

And again, that's not to say that I'm self -sacrificing because it gives me, I

feel good in my human experience to know that I can contribute to the good of

others.

Could you elaborate on that?

So I don't know how much of the programs and the actual technical capacity that

everybody's talked to you about, but there's an infrastructure in place in

United States and worldwide that NSA has built in cooperation

with other governments as well that intercepts

basically every digital communication.

every radio communication, every analog communication that it has sensors in

place to detect.

And with these capabilities, basically the vast majority

of human and computer -to -computer communications, device -based

communications, which sort of inform the relationships between humans, are

automatically ingested.

without targeting.

And that allows individuals to retroactively search your communications

on self -certifications. So, for example, if I wanted to see the content

email or your wife's phone calls or anything like that, all I have to do

is use what's called a selector, any kind of...

thing in the communications chain that might uniquely or almost uniquely

identify you as an individual.

And I'm talking about things like email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers,

credit cards, even passwords that are unique to you that aren't used by anyone

else.

I can input those into the system and it will not only go back through the

database and go, have I seen this anywhere in the past?

It will

basically put an additional level of scrutiny on it, moving into the future

says, if this is detected now or at any time in the future, I want this to go to

me immediately and alert me in real time that you're communicating with someone,

things like that.

So I don't know who you are or anything about you.

Okay.

I work for Booz Allen Hamilton.

a defense contractor.

I'm sort of on loan to NSA.

I don't talk to a Booz Allen boss. I don't get tasking from Booz Allen. It's

from NSA.

So I don't know your name.

Oh, sorry.

My name is Edward Snowden. I go by Ed.

Edward Joseph Snowden is the full name.

S -N -O -W -D -E -N.

And where are you from?

I'm originally, I was born in North Carolina.

a small town, Elizabeth City.

There's a Coast Guard station there. I'm from a military family.

But I spent most of my time growing up around Fort Meade in Maryland.

And your family, what's the consequences for them?

This is actually what has made this hardest.

My family doesn't know what's happening. They're unaware.

I don't think...

I'll be able to keep the family ties that I've had for my life

because of the risk of associating them with this. And I'll

leave what to publish on this and what not to publish to you guys. I trust you

to be responsible on this.

But basically, the closer I stay to my family, the more likely they are to be

leaned on. So you don't want me to report this?

Yeah, we definitely want to do whatever we can not to include them or bring them

into the mix.

That's fine.

I'm sorry, let me interrupt you. Can we just stop for a second and do the

document and then go back to that?

What do I need? Do I need an email address that we're using?

Well, so you can send them.

Once you've encrypted it, you can send it from whatever you think is

appropriate. The main thing is you've got to encapsulate all of this in a way

that it can't be decrypted and read in transit across the network or on

either of the endpoints.

Okay. I mean, just so you know, these documents are basically all going to be.

public within 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever. You want to get in the process

doing this for everything because it seems hard, but it's not hard. It's

easy. Just walk me through it.

Show me the actual folder structure where these files are first.

How many documents did you say there were?

Seven.

Okay, go ahead.

How many documents are we talking about? Because when The Guardian did

WikiLeaks, technical people set up a system so that they were available for

anybody to see.

And I just wonder if it's possible to do the same thing. That would be the ideal

endgame. But because some of these documents are

legitimately classified in ways that could cause harm to people and methods.

I'm comfortable in my technical ability to protect them. I mean, you could

literally shoot me or torture me, and I could not disclose the password if I

wanted to.

I have the sophistication to do that.

There are some journalists that I think could do that, but there are a number of

them that couldn't. But the question becomes, can an organization actually

control that information in that manner?

without risking basically an uncontrolled disclosure.

But I do agree with that. Honestly, I don't want to be the person making

decisions on what should be public and what shouldn't, which is why rather than

publishing these on my own or putting them out openly, I'm running them

journalists so that my bias... and my things, because clearly I have some

strongly held views, are removed from that equation and the public interest is

being represented in the most responsible manner.

Actually, given your sort of geographic

familiarity with the UK and whatnot, I'd like to point out that GCHQ

has probably the most invasive

Network intercept program anywhere in the world.

It's called Tempora, T -E -M -P -O -R -A.

And it's the world's first full take, they call it. And that means content in

addition to metadata on everything.

So this is what I like to do in terms of scheduling, if it's good with everybody

else. Are you...

Do you feel like you're done with what you... So, I'm anxious to go back, get

those articles done, and then there's a bunch of documents that aren't about

those first two or three stories that I'd like to spend time with you, you

kind of going over.

I'm not going anywhere. You're available?

You want to check your book first? Yeah, let me check my schedule. Is that good

for you, Oren? Okay.

Hello? Yes.

My meal was great. Thank you very much.

No, I still have some left, and I think I'm going to be eating it later, so you

can just leave me alone for now.

Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Have a good one. Bye.

Another fun thing I was telling Laura about, all of these new VoIP phones,

have little computers in them, and you can hot mic these over the network all

the time, even when the receiver's down.

As long as it's plugged in, it can be listening on and on. I hadn't even

considered that earlier, but yeah.

There are so many ways.

Everything that's in here is pretty much going to be on the public record at

some point. We should operate on that. Yeah, yeah, I think we are.

Do you have your hair cap machine? I do, I do.

Let me pop that out.

Do you have an understanding or commitment on when you guys are going to

with the first stories?

It's about 7 or 8 in the morning in London.

Okay.

Let's see here.

Okay, look, there's the other one.

Pro tip, let's not leave the same SD cards in our laptops forever in the

Did you know that this was still kicking around in your laptop?

Yeah, I mean, that would be... Okay, just making sure. Okay, yeah.

You will have a new one that looks exactly identical, but it's a different

archive, so you might want to take a Sharpie to it or something.

Could you pass me my magic mantle of power?

Is that about the possibility of overhead?

Yeah, visual collection.

I don't think at this point there's anything in this regard that will shock

We've become pretty... In fact, Ewan said before, he's like, I'm never

my room. He's like, I'm never leaving anything in my room again, not a single

machine. I was like, you've been infected with a paranoia bug. That was

us.

And the way he said it, he was like, I would never leave a single device in the

room again alone.

My bike is getting heavier and heavier. Are you sorry?

That's your evil informant. All right, I'm going to need you to enter your root

password for that. No idea.

If you want to use this one, you're more than welcome to.

It looks like your root password is about four characters long anyway. It's

usually a lot longer, but that's just like the one -time -only thing, right?

So it is.

It had been a lot longer, but ever since I knew that it was just like a one

-time -only session one, I've been making it shorter.

Is that not good?

It's actually not. I was expressing this with Laura either. The issue is because

of the fact that it's got a hardware MAC address and things like that, if people

are able to identify your machine and they're able to. The fact you're about

break them.

setting stories.

Right, that's true. So they might kind of prioritize... It's 10 letters. I type

very quickly. It actually is 10 letters. Okay, so 10 letters would be good if

they had to brute force the entire key space.

Right.

That would still probably only take a couple days for NSA.

That's a fire alarm.

Okay.

Hopefully it sounds like a two -second test.

Do you want to call the desk and ask?

I think it's fine.

Yeah, I don't think it's an issue, but it's interesting to do this. Does that

happen before?

Maybe they got mad that they couldn't listen in to us via the phone anymore.

Did the final alarm get off before?

No, that's the first time that's happened.

Yeah, I think they've got like an alert that goes to final.

That's unusual.

You probably might have to go back and ignore that.

I don't know.

If it goes... No, it's not continuous.

It's not continuous.

No, I'm just saying, if it continues... And then we go

and we meet the guys down in the lobby.

Yeah, right? Yeah.

Yeah, let's leave for now. Let me finish this up.

Not that they're going to answer because they probably got like 7 ,000 calls.

Yeah.

Hi, we hear a loud buzzing on the 10th floor. Can you tell us what that is?

Oh, okay.

Okay, great. Thank you. Bye.

Fire alarm testing maintenance.

That's good.

That's what we want to do here.

Nice of them to let us know about that in advance.

I just wanted to give you kind of a quick tour.

When Laura was looking at this, she was kind of salivating and couldn't stop,

like, actually reading the document. Right, right, right. We'll try and

ourselves without promising that we'll succeed. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of

explain a brief overview of what these are and how they're organized.

The beginning are just some documents of interest.

The primary purpose of the second archive is to bring the focus over to

opposed to PRISM. And this is in general.

SSO are special source operations.

Those are the worldwide passive collection on networks. They're both

the U .S. and international.

There's a lot of different ways they do it, but corporate partnerships are one

of the primary things they do domestically. They also do this with

multinationals that might be headquartered in the U .S. who they can

coerce or just pay into giving them access.

And they also do it bilaterally with the assistance of certain governments.

And that's basically on the premise that they go, all right, we'll help you set

the system up if you give us all the data from it.

There's a lot more in here than any one person or probably one team could do.

XKeyscore Deep Dive, XKeyscore in general, and there's a huge folder of

documentation on XKeyscore and how it works, is the front -end system that

analysts use for querying that sort of ocean of raw signals that I was telling

you about. All of that stuff where you can sort of do the retroactive searches

and live searches and get flagging and whatnot.

XKeyscore is the front -end for that.

I'm just going to show you one slide here because Laura thought it was

and was talking about kind of how these capabilities ramp up in sophistication

over time.

This is kind of nice. As of fiscal year 2011, they could monitor one billion

telephone or Internet sessions simultaneously per one of these devices.

And they could collect at a rate of about 125 gigabytes a second, which is a

terabit per second. That's for each one of these devices? That's for each one of

these, yeah.

How many tumult missions would that be then?

Per this, back then, there were 20 sites. There's 10 at DoD installation.

But these are all outdated. We've expanded pretty rapidly.

But still 20 sites, that's at least 20 billion.

This all needs to get out. You know what I mean?

Just in terms of understanding the capabilities, it's so opaque. It's not

science fiction. This stuff is happening right now. No, that's what I mean. It's

like the magnitude of it. And this is a pretty inaccessible technical document.

But even this is really chilling.

Do you know what I mean? And yeah, I mean, we could be having debates about

whether we want government.

massive and extraordinary it's amazing even though you know it you know even

though you know that to see it like the physical blueprints of it and sort of

the technical expressions of it really hits home in like a super visceral way

that is so needed this

is dnn breaking news An explosive new report is reigniting the concern that

privacy is being violated to protect America's security.

It reveals a court order giving the National Security Agency blanket access

millions of Verizon customers' records on a daily basis.

Earlier, I had the chance to conduct the first TV interview with the reporter

who broke this story wide open, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.

Congratulations on the scoop. Explain for our viewers.

Why this is important.

It's important because people have understood that the law that this was

under, which is the Patriot Act enacted in the wake of 9 -11.

was a law that allowed the government very broad powers to get records about

people with a lower level of suspicion than probable cause, the traditional

standard. So it's always been assumed that under the Patriot Act, if the

government had even any suspicion that you were involved in a crime or

terrorism, they could get a lot of information about you. What this court

does that makes it so striking is that it's not directed at any individuals who

they believe or have suspicion of committing crimes or part of a terrorist

organization. It's collecting the phone records. of every single customer of

Verizon Business and finding out every single call that they've made

internationally and locally.

So it's indiscriminate and it's sweeping. It's a government program

collect information about all Americans, not just people where they believe

there's reason to think they've done anything wrong.

Yeah, it's a tough situation, you know, hearing that the person that you love,

that you've spent a decade with, may not be coming back.

What did they ask her?

When was the last time she saw me? Where am I?

What am I doing?

What does she know about my illness?

Things like that.

So, yeah, they're pretty solidly aware because

I'm clearly not at home ill.

Hello? Hello?

Hello. I mean, disconnect from the internet.

So, there's some news?

Yes, there was indeed some news. I have config today, I think, maybe just a few

hours ago.

What kind of people visit?

An HR lady, I'm assuming from NSA, as opposed to Booz Allen, because

she was accompanied by a police officer, which means NSA police.

And they were planning to break into my house, which regular police don't do.

Does she live there?

Yeah, she lives there, so I told her to cooperate fully.

I can't find my phone, just one second. Don't worry about her, Phillip.

You know what I'm going to do? I'll just take out the stuff I want to use.

Okay.

Okay, well, look, I mean, this is not a surprise at all. Not, yeah, I know, I

plan for it, but it's just, you know, when it's impacting them and they're

talking to you, it's a little bit different. Absolutely.

But it's possible that they just noticed that you're missing. I guess it's not

really impossible.

It is, but yeah, they're, I mean...

Let me just get

rid of this.

So I... I obviously was focused on other things than appearance this morning.

How did she react? Was she relatively calm about it? She's relatively calm.

she know anything about what you're doing in life? She has no idea.

I mean, I feel badly about that, but that's the only way I could think of

she can't be in trouble. Did you just basically do a I have to go somewhere

reasons that I can't tell you about kind of thing? I just disappeared when she

was on vacation.

And I left a note saying, hey, I'm going to be gone for a while for work, which

isn't unusual for me in my business.

Okay,

so let me ask you a couple of things just quickly.

Are they going to be able to go into your stuff and figure out what you took?

In some kind of, some sort of like peripheral senses, but not necessarily.

with great specificity. Yes, because I cast.

such a wide net.

If they do that, the only thing they're going to do is they're going to have a

heart attack because they're going to go, he had access to everything.

And they're not going to know what specifically has been done.

I think they're going to start to actually feel a little better, although

they're not going to be wild about this in any case.

When they see that the stories are kind of cleaving to a trend, it's not like

here's the list of everybody who works everywhere.

Right. I also think they're going to be paranoid in the extreme and assuming all

kinds of worst -case scenarios, which is going to, I think, make them react in

ways that probably aren't going to be particularly rational on their part.

But at the same time, I do think they're limited for the moment.

I agree. And, I mean, I had kind of time to set a stage where we all enjoy at

least a minimum level of protection, you know, no matter who we are who's

involved in this. You know, you're either a journalist or you're either out

jurisdiction. So we have some time to play this before they can really get

nasty. I think it's over, you know, the weeks when they have time to get lawyers

really sort of go, this is a special situation.

How can we interpret this to our advantage?

Like, we see them do this all the time, you know, whether it's drones or

wiretapping or whatever. They'll go, well, according to this law from the

you know, we can apply X, Y, or Z authority.

But that takes time, and that takes agreement. And also, you know, I mean, I

think the more public we are out there to, like, as journalists, the more

protection that's going to give as well.

Have you started to give thought to when you're ready to come forward?

I'm ready whenever.

Honestly, I think there's sort of an agreement that it's not going to bias

reporting process. That's my primary concern at this point. I don't want to

myself into the issue before it's going to happen anyway and where it takes away

from the stories that are getting out.

of millions of Americans who weren't suspected of doing anything who were

surveilled in this way. Your thoughts for a moment. I want to continue this

conversation because these are really important, sensitive issues and the

out there has a right to know what's going on. Stand by. This is CNN Breaking

News.

Another explosive article has just appeared, this time in The Washington

It's breaking news that it reveals another broad and secret U .S.

surveillance program.

The Washington Post and The Guardian in London reporting that the NSA and the

FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading Internet

companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube,

and Apple. The Post says they're extracting audio, video.

photographs, e -mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to

track a person's movements and contacts over time.

Let's discuss this latest revelation.

They're coming out fast.

Bill Binney, the former official of the NSA who quit back in 2001, you were

angry over what was going on. You'd be known as a whistleblower right now.

what do you think about this Washington Post story? Well, I assume it's just a

continuation of what they've been doing all along.

So you're not surprised?

Do you have any idea who's leaking this information?

I don't know who leaked this. I have no doubt that the administration will

launch an investigation, not into who approved these programs, but into who

leaked the information.

I'm not shocked that the companies are denying it. I don't assume that there

be some technical basis on which they can say that we are not actively

collaborating or they don't have.

what we consider in our own definition to be direct access to our servers. But

what I do know is that I've talked to more than one person who has sat at a

at a web portal and typed out commands and reached into those servers from a

distance. So whatever they want to call that, that's what's happening. Well,

what I would call it is the single biggest infringement on American civil

liberties probably of all time, isn't it?

It's interesting. I already have the New York Times now today saying that the

administration has lost all credibility.

Yeah, the New York Times slammed President Obama for this. And frankly, I

used to that. The New York Times slammed George Bush for protecting the country

and for the steps he took. I don't want us to drop our guard. I don't want us to

be struck again. As we saw in Boston, Anderson, people are willing to

their civil liberties. People are sheltered inside.

How can you believe in freedom, do you think? I mean, try and play devil's

advocate for me. When you have secret courts, secret operations like prison.

Secret investigations which go into every bit and cough of every American's

without any member of the American public knowing about it. That's not

is it? In 2008, they eliminated the warrant requirement for all

except ones that take place by and among Americans exclusively on American soil.

So they don't need warrants now for people who are foreigners outside of the

.S., but they also don't need warrants for Americans who are in the United

States communicating with people reasonably believed to be outside of the

So, again, the fact that there are no checks, no oversight about who's looking

over the NSA's shoulder means that they can take whatever they want. And the

fact that it's all behind a wall of secrecy and they threaten people who

expose it means that whatever they're doing, even violating the law, is

something that we're unlikely to know until we start having real

and real transparency into what it is that the government is doing. Glenn

Greenwald, congratulations again on exposing what is a true scandal. I

appreciate you joining me.

I just heard from Lindsay, and she's still alive, which is good, and free.

My rent checks apparently are no longer getting through to my landlord.

So they said if we don't pay them in five days, we'll be evicted, which is

strange because I've got a system set up that automatically pays them.

So there's that, and apparently there's construction trucks all over the street

of my house.

I wonder what they're looking for.

It is an unusual feeling that's kind of hard to describe

or convey in words, but not knowing what's going to happen the next day, the

next hour, the next week.

It's scary, but at the same time it's liberating.

The planning comes a lot easier because you don't have that many variables to

take into play. You can only act and then act again.

Now, all these phone calls are being recorded digitally, not for content, but

for origin and destination.

Now, where the government is going right into the servers of these large

Internet companies. How does the government, politically speaking, make

argument that this is essential to national security and not a dramatic

overreach in terms of personal privacy?

It's difficult, Matt, because as Peter was pointing out overnight, we had an

extraordinary late night, close to midnight announcement and a

from the director of national intelligence.

They are scrambling. The administration is already supported strongly by leaders

in both parties from the intelligence committees.

GCHQ has an internal Wikipedia at the top secret, you know, super classified

level where anybody working in intelligence can work on anything they

That's what this is. I'm giving it to you. You can make the decisions on that,

what's appropriate, what's not.

It's going to be documents with different types of pictures and

Word documents, stuff like that.

Sorry, can I take that seat?

I'm sorry, I've got you to repeat. So in these documents, they will show...

Yeah, there will be a couple more documents on that. That's only one part,

though. Like it talks about Tempora and a little more thing. That's the wiki

article itself.

It was also talking about a self -developed tool called UDAQ, U -D -A -Q.

It's their search tool for all the stuff they collect, was what it looked like.

It's going to be projects. It's going to be troubleshooting pages for a

particular tool.

Thanks.

What's the next step?

When do you think you'll go public?

I think it's pretty soon. I mean, with the reaction, this escalated more

quickly. I think pretty much as soon as they start trying to make this about me,

which should be any day now, I'll come out just to go, hey, you know, this is

not a question of somebody skulking around in the shadows.

These are public issues.

These are not my issues.

These are everybody's issues. And I'm not afraid of you. You're not going to

bully me into silence like you've done to everybody else.

And if nobody else is going to do it, I will.

And hopefully when I'm gone, whatever you do to me, there will be somebody

who will do the same thing.

It will be the sort of Internet principle of the Hydra. You can stomp

person, but there's going to be seven more of us.

Are you getting more nervous?

I mean, no.

I think the way I look at stress, particularly because I sort of knew this

coming, you know, because I sort of volunteered to walk into it,

I'm already sort of familiar

with the idea. I'm not worried about it. When somebody, like, busts in the door,

suddenly I'll get nervous and it'll affect me. But until they do, you know.

I'm eating a little less. That's the only difference I take.

Let's talk about the issue with when we're going to say who you are.

You have to talk me through this because I have a big worry about this. Okay,

tell me. Which is that if we come out and I know that you believe that

you're

detection is inevitable and that it's inevitable imminently.

There's, you know, in the New York Times today, Charlie Savage, the fascinating

Sherlock Holmes of political reporting, deduced that the fact that there's been

these leaks in succession probably means that there's some one person who's

decided to leak a bunch of stuff. Somebody else quoted you as saying it

of your readers.

Yeah. Somebody else who put in all the things. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it's

fine. I want people to, I want it to be, you know, like this is a person. I want

to start introducing the concept that this is a person who has a particular.

set of political objectives about informing the world about what's taking

So I'm keeping it all anonymous, totally, but I want to start introducing

that kind of incremental way.

But here's the thing.

What I'm concerned about is that if we come out and say, here's who this is,

here's what he did, the whole thing that we talked about, that we're going to

basically be doing the government's work for them, and we're going to basically

be handing them a confession.

and helping them identify who found it. I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe

they'll find out quickly, and maybe they'll know, but is there any

that they won't? Are we kind of giving them stuff that we don't, or...

Possibility that they know, but they don't want to reveal it because they

know. Or that they don't know, and we're going to be telling them. Like, is it a

possibility that they're going to need, like, two, three months of uncertainty,

and we're going to be solving that problem for them? Or, let me just say,

part... Maybe it doesn't matter to you. Like, maybe you want it. Maybe, I mean,

you're not coming out because you think inevitably they're going to catch you

and you want to do it first.

You're coming out because you want to fucking come out. Well, there is that. I

mean, that's the thing. I don't want to hide on this and skulk around. I don't

think I should have to.

Obviously, there's circumstances that are saying that. And I think it is

powerful to come out and be like, look.

I'm not afraid, you know, and I don't think other people should either. You

know, I was sitting in the office right next to you last week. You know, we all

have a stake in this. This is our country.

And the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming

that of the ruling and the ruled as opposed to actually, you know, the

and the electorate. Okay, so that's what I need to hear, that this is not

about... But I do want to say...

I don't think there's a case that I'm not going to be discovered in the

of time. It's a question of time frame. You're right. It could take them a long

time. I don't think it will. But I didn't try to hide the footprint

again, I intended to come forward. Okay. I'm going to post this morning just a

general defense of whistleblowers. That's fine. And you in particular

saying anything about you i'm gonna go post that right when i get back and i'm

also doing like a big fuck you to all the people who keep like talking about

investigations like that i want that to be like the fearlessness and the fuck

you to like the bullying tactics has got to be completely pervading everything

we do and i think that's brilliant i i mean your principles on this i love i

can't support them enough

because it's inverting the model that the government has laid out where people

who are trying to say the truth skulk around and they hide in the dark and

quote anonymously and whatnot. I say, yes, fuck that. Okay, so here's the plan

then. I mean, and this is the thing. It's like once you, I think we all just

felt the fact that this is the right way to do it.

It's the, you feel the power of your choice. You know what I mean? It's like,

and I want that power to be felt in the world. Okay. And it is the, I mean, it's

the ultimate standing up to them, right? Like I'm not going to fucking hide even

for like one second.

I'm going to get right in your face.

You don't have to investigate.

There's nothing to investigate. Here I am.

You know, and I think that it's just incredibly powerful.

And then the question just becomes, how do we do this in the right, you know,

the perfect way? And that's my burden and that's what I'm going to... So today

is going to be the story in the morning, assuming that it doesn't change on the

Guardian. It's going to be the story in the morning just to keep the momentum

going, just to keep, like, the disclosures coming.

A big one at night.

Now it's becoming like, okay, this is... a major leak and after today i only

post the two stuff things that we're going to post it's going to be what the

fuck is this leak and who did it i guarantee you

i

just want to make sure move over slightly and you want me to move a

over okay

All right, we're rolling.

So let's just begin with some basic background information, like just state

name, what position you held in the intelligence community, and how long you

worked within that community.

Okay.

Just so I'm aware of where we're going. How in depth are we going? Just in

general, like I'm currently an infrastructure analyst, you know, Booz

Hamilton, not going through my whole backstory.

Yeah. Okay. Just like, yeah, summary kind of. Okay.

My name is Ed Snowden. I'm 29 years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an

infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.

And what are some of the positions that you held previously within the

intelligence community?

I've been a systems engineer, systems administrator, senior advisor

for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a

telecommunications information systems officer.

And what kind of clearances have you held? What kind of classification?

Top secret.

So people in my levels of access for systems administration or as an

infrastructure analyst typically have higher accesses than an NSA employee

normally have.

Normal NSA employees have a combination of clearances called TS, SI, TK, and

Gamma.

That's top secret signals intelligence, talent keyhole, and Gamma. And they all

relate to certain things that are sort of core to the NSA mission.

As a systems administrator, you get a special clearance called Prisac for

privileged access, which allows you to be exposed to information of any

classification, regardless of what your position actually needs.

So just before we go, a reminder of our top story, and that's that the former

CIA technical worker, Edward Snowden, says he's responsible for leaking

information that U .S. authorities have been monitoring phone and Internet data.

The U .S. Justice Department confirmed it in the first stages of a criminal

investigation. Leave it longer? I've got to shorten it. What do you think?

As far as the video that people saw.

Am I laughing at Apple now? Was it?

Because I can't go all the way down. It's still going to be double. I don't

the blade for closer.

Are you going to be talking to any other media about the story today?

I am.

Will you be coming to our office if you have any questions?

Of course, about where is Snowden now, what his plans are. Well, I'm obviously

not going to talk about that. Unless you have any other questions, it's going to

be a pretty brief interview. What are your plans, please?

Are you staying in Hong Kong for the time being? For a little while.

And do you have any hopes to write more about this story? Are you stopping new

writing about this story? No, I'm going to continue to write about it. Have you

had any pressure from the U .S. authorities about continuing to report

No.

And have you heard anything about what could be the attitude of Hong Kong

authorities towards this case, whether they've contacted you or asked you

anything about the whereabouts of Snowden and whether that is another... I

haven't heard from the authorities of any of them.

And where do you think the story is going for you and, of course, for

and, of course, for the U .S. media and the U .S. administration in general?

Well, for me, I'm going to continue to report on, do my reporting on what the

government has been doing and what I think my readers should know about.

As for him, I don't think anyone knows. I can have people come after me or any

of their third -party partners.

You know, they work closely with a number of other nations.

Or, you know, they make a payout to ProHeads or, you know, any of their

or assets.

Now it's time for our newspaper review and looking at what's making headlines

around the world. Let's start with The Guardian.

This is revealing the identity of the former CAA employee.

So the paper has leaked information exposing the scale of American

of the internet.

Edward Snowden. What a great story.

Peter, do you want to know what this is? Well, I think it's a fantastic story,

first off. It could be straight out of a John le Carré novel. I mean, when you

read what he did, you actually got the material. He then decided to go to the

place he identified as being very difficult for America to get at him.

Which is Hong Kong, because, of course, technically inside China, the one

country, two systems policy there, meaning that you can even get

some protection, you thought, all very well planned. It could be just out of a

spy mode. But what about the details?

That could make it worse.

It's just the lower half of my face.

How do you feel?

What happens, happens.

We've talked about this. I knew what the risks were.

If I get arrested, I get arrested.

We were able to get the information that needed to get out, out.

And you and Glenn are able to keep reporting regardless what happens to me.

Yes.

I'm sorry, who's asking?

I'm afraid you have the wrong room. Thank you.

Wall Street Journal.

Yes. I'm sorry, say again?

No, no, thank you. No calls.

I think they have the wrong number.

Yeah, no calls. Thank you.

Wait, I'm sorry.

If it's two men from the front desk, they can call, but no outside calls.

Wait, actually, just let them through.

Wait, wait, ma 'am?

Yes. Wait,

is it a lawyer?

Yeah, no, no, no. I mean the people who are asking. Ask them if they are

lawyers.

No, tell her that she has the wrong

number and there's no Mr. Snowden here.

Can you talk right now?

I'm safely going into the room.

I'm not saving the client, okay? So can we talk together about the plan?

Is the application started already or not, technically?

Yeah, so technically it hasn't started yet.

Would you mind to talk to him in speakerphone?

Sorry. Hi, Robert.

Hi,

I'm the client.

Pretty good. I'm doing well.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, that's great. Is it okay if I bring equipment? Because I'm just kind

going so I can leave in any direction at any time and not come back, if

necessary.

Okay. Take whatever you want with you. Just go with Mr. Matt.

I will pick you. He knows where I'm going to pick you guys up, and then I'll

bring you to the UNHCR. Okay, that sounds good.

All right. Thank you so much for helping me.

He's quite worried about the big thing. It's about the accommodation, or he's

going to say whether there's something pirate and they cannot be discovered by

the police.

Okay, I see. Okay, I will give you a call, hit up before I restart, okay?

Okay, bye. Okay, thank you. Bye -bye.

Sorry, not yet, but we don't have a car.

Okay. What I'm thinking, we may ask the concierge to arrange

a car or we just go down and catch a taxi.

But it's quite, the traffic here in Tsim Sha Tsui is quite difficult to catch a

taxi. Yeah, sorry.

And so is there precedent for this, where Hong Kong would extradite someone

political speech?

No, I'm not aware of. If we have a torture claim or asylum seeking claim on

death, then they ought, under the law, they ought to give you a reconnaissance

for you to stay in Hong Kong because they don't know where to come you back

The President certainly does not welcome the way that this debate has earned

greater attention than last week, that the leaked classified information about

sensitive programs that are important in our fight against terrorists who would

do harm to Americans is a problem.

But the debate itself is legitimate and should be engaged.

But tomorrow it will be on the internet, right?

Yes.

I want to show you the new document now.

You will see this much clearer than this one.

This is the map of the cables where they are collecting the data for the prison.

Here it shows how many they are collecting.

The bigger the line, the more they are collecting.

You can see here the line, the cable, is very thick.

For Brazil in the south and the north, the cable in the sea of Brazil. It shows

that they are collecting a lot of things in the Prism program, which I think is

very important because Prism is Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Yahoo,

shows a lot of transactions being stolen from Brazil.

But we don't know...

how much the Brazilian government was and how much collaboration they have

Brazilian companies as well.

We don't know, but we will know.

Right, so which ones do we want here then?

This is operational stuff, so we mustn't pay any less. So redact that.

What about the Alexander quote? Yeah, that's in tarmac.

Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer

homework project for Menwick. Peter Alexander, the head of the NSA, on a

to the UK.

This one.

Yeah.

Secret documents in there, secret documents.

We've got a stick here that should just have three single...

slides on them. If it's got more than three single slides on them, we're an

extreme example.

Yeah, that's it.

This is really dangerous stuff for us. Guardian is going to make mistakes at

very end where we kept it all under lock and key and no one knows.

I'm not saying that.

They will come in and smack the front door down if we elaborate on that.

And he said the Prime Minister is extremely concerned about this.

And they were kept saying, this is from the very top.

As you may have heard, there is a CIA agent who has

revealed a lot of information and he is now trapped in the airport in Moscow.

We managed to get him out of Hong Kong, but when he landed in the Moscow

airport... the American government had cancelled his passport.

So formally, he hasn't entered into Russian territory. He's in the transit

of the airport, and one of our people is accompanying him. We are trying to

arrange a private jet to take him from

Moscow to Ecuador or perhaps maybe Venezuela.

Or maybe I planned the country's wages would be saved.

for Americans, for everything, since the September 11th attack, is terrorism.

Everything for national security, to protect our population.

In reality, it's the opposite.

There are many, many documents that have no reasoning with anything about

terrorism.

The second thing about the X -Keys score.

When we publish the first, second, third articles, the defense of the American

government is that we are not invading the content or communication, only the

metadata, the facts about, or identity, about what you are talking about, what

you are talking about, calling you, the duration of the communication.

In reality, if I can know all the people with whom you are communicating, and

all the people with whom they are communicating, and where you are when

communicating, and the address, and the location, I can know a lot about your

personality, your activity, your life.

It's a big advantage in privacy.

But in reality, this defense is totally false.

The American government has the capacity to...

Thank you very

much.

Thank you very

much.

If you are American, living in the United States, you need to be the first

to court and ask for permission to always receive.

But if you are not American, you don't need anything, no approval from the

to do that.

I think the consequences of the elimination of privacy are sometimes

for Anandazar, but it is very important to understand that...

May I collect all the phones, please?

Put them in the refrigerator.

So, as you know, in June, Snowden was in charge with three

legal violations, felonies, principally under a World War I era criminal

law called the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act is an extremely broad criminal prohibition against the sharing

or dissemination of what's called national defense information.

It was only used to prosecute people who had been accused of acting with a

foreign power, spies, not whistleblowers. And it's a very unusual

representation, I think, not just for all of you, but for me as well.

The Espionage Act does not distinguish.

between leaks to the press and the public interest and selling secrets to

foreign enemies for personal profit.

So under the Espionage Act, it's not a defense if the information that was

disclosed should not have been withheld in the first place, that it was

improperly classified.

It's not a defense if the dissemination was in the public interest, that it led

to reform.

Even if a court determines that the programs that were revealed were illegal

unconstitutional, that's still not a defense.

under the espionage act the government doesn't have to defend the

it doesn't have to demonstrate harm from the release all of this is irrelevant

so when we say that the trial wouldn't be fair we're not talking about what

human rights lawyers think of as fair trial practices we're saying the law the

statute itself eliminates any kind of defense that snowden might be able to

and essentially would equate him with a spy and of course those three count

could be increased to 100 or 200 or 300, they could charge them separately for

each document that has been published by a journalist.

And I think that we all recognize, even though we sit here as lawyers in a

lawyers' meeting, that it's probably 95 % politics and 5 % law how

this will be resolved.

Mr. Snowden has been charged with very serious crimes, and he should be

to the United States where he will be granted full due process and every right

available to him as a United States citizen facing our justice system under

Constitution.

I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.

I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before

Mr. Snowden made these leaks.

My preference, and I think the American people's preference, would have been for

a lawful, orderly examination of these laws, a

thoughtful, fact -based debate.

that would then lead us to a better place.

Oh, my God.

David.

You okay?

Okay,

okay, okay.

You just have to walk in.

Good, good. I'm totally fine. I didn't sleep at all. I couldn't sleep.

I know.

Recent reports have revealed that the NSA have access to encryption keys and

they paid tech companies to introduce backdoors in encryption protocols.

So we are going to talk about ways in which we can defend ourselves against

governments spying on us. So Mr.

Jacob Appelbaum is an encryption and security software developer and

Ladar Levinson, the founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, used by

Edward Snowden. You have the floor.

Thank you.

LavaBit is an email service that hopefully one day will be able to stand

own without any references. My service was designed to remove me from the

possibility of being forced to violate a person's privacy.

Quite simply, LavaBit was designed to remove the service provider from the

equation. By not having logs on my server and not having access to a

emails on disk,

I wasn't eliminating the possibility of surveillance. I was simply removing

myself from that equation in that surveillance would have to be conducted

target, either the sender or the receiver of the messages.

But I was approached by the FBI quite recently and told that because I

turn over the information from that one particular user.

I would be forced to give up those SSL keys and let the FBI collect every

communication on my network without any kind of transparency.

And, of course, I wasn't comfortable with that, to say the least.

More disturbing was the fact that I couldn't even tell anybody that it was

on.

So I decided if I didn't win the fight to unseal my case, if I didn't win the

battle to be able to tell people what was going on,

then my only ethical choice left was to shut down.

Think about that.

I believe in the rule of law. I believe in the need to conduct investigations.

But those investigations are supposed to be difficult for a reason. It's

supposed to be difficult to invade somebody's privacy because of how

it is, because of how disruptive it is.

If we don't have our right to privacy, how do we have a free and open

discussion?

What good is the right to free speech if it's not protected

in the sense that you can't have a private discussion with somebody else

something you disagree with?

Think about the chilling effect that that has. Think about the chilling

it does have on countries that don't have a right to privacy.

I've noticed a really interesting discussion point, which is that what

used to call liberty and freedom, we now call privacy.

And we say in the same breath that privacy is dead.

This is something that really concerns me about my generation, especially when

we talk about how we're not surprised by anything.

I think that we should consider that when we lose privacy, we lose agency. We

lose liberty itself because we no longer feel free to express what we think.

There's this myth of the passive surveillance machine.

But actually, what is surveillance except control?

This notion that the NSA are passive, this is nonsense.

What we see is that they actively attack European citizens, American citizens,

and, in fact, anyone that they can if they perceive an advantage.

And then comes the decisive part, which speaks a lot for the fact that it was

the SDS that took the cell phone from Chancellor Merkel into the museum.

So we have the map.

Yes.

Okay.

All right.

I'll have to give that in testimony.

Everything I can truthfully.

Whatever the questions they ask me.

Okay. All right.

Thank you.

Hello, good day. How are you?

Good to see you again. Nice to meet you.

It

is

my pleasure to be here. I feel that it's important to testify about what's

really going on behind the scenes and the intelligence community around the

world, not just in a day.

All these programs that Edward Snowden exposed fundamentally are ways of

acquiring information.

Every dictatorship down through history has always done it. One of the first

things they need to do is to try to acquire knowledge of their population,

that's exactly what these programs do.

I see this as the most major threat to our democracy all around the world.

What do you think they're doing to reporters, those of us that are working

directly with Snowden documents?

How do you think they would approach dealing with people like us?

You're on the cast iron cover list, which means any electronic device you

use that they can attach to you, they'll record and capture all that data.

And what do they do with that data? They're just trying to figure out what

doing?

Well, they're trying to...

That's part of it, but the other part, primarily part, for them, I think, is to

find the sources of information you're getting.

So if I have a confidential source who's giving me information as a

whistleblower, and he works within the U .S. government, and he's concerned

about what he perceives as violations of the Constitution, and he gets in touch

with me, they... Go ahead.

From there on, they would nail him and start watching everything he did, and if

he started passing data, I'm sure they'd take him off the street.

I mean, the way you have to do it is like Deep Throat did, right, in the

years. Meet in the basement of a parking garage, physically.

Let's disassociate our metadata one last time, so we don't have a clear record

of your true name and our final communication chain.

This is obviously not to say you can't claim your involvement, but as every

trick in the book is likely to be used in looking into this, I believe it's

better that that particular disclosure come on your own terms.

Thank you again for all you've done.

So sorry again for the multiple delays, but we've been in uncharted territory

with no model to benefit from.

If all ends well, perhaps the demonstration that our methods work will

more to come forward.

So the

update that I want to give you

is about the new source that we...

Okay.

That... You picked what?

This is the, you know, this is the person who's doing the most of the work

it.

And now, and then, like, basically what's happened is,

and... That's actually, that's really dangerous

on the sources side.

Do they know how to take care of themselves? Well, he knows. I mean, it's

being done.

Through this.

Okay. And they're all talking this way.

Okay.

And... I was going to say, one of the big questions there is, can they handle

it? You know, do they have the... No, they're very careful, even though

that. Okay. Yeah.

And...

That's where that is.

Wow, that's really something.

You know that?

It's not the actual plane. Right, right.

You mean the control.

It's the process.

There's a chart.

There's a whole layout for everyone.

That is really bold. It's really risky.

But that's the thing. If they understand what they're doing. There's this chart.

It shows the decision -making chart.

It's shaped like this.

So up here it says,

That's the decision -making chart for each one.

It's so political. This part's amazing.

That's fucking ridiculous.

It's so shocking.

That's the population of an entire country. I know.

That's what we're working on.

That person is incredibly bold.

But also very well aware.

Right. You know, I just hope, I mean.

No, I mean, the boldness of it is shocking, but I mean, it was obviously

motivated by what you did. This is going to, this is going to, that could raise

the profile of this whole political situation with whistleblowing to a whole

level. Exactly.

It's going to.

Yeah, I actually think that's a great thing.

And I think people are going to see what's being hidden again, again, by a

totally different part of the government.

Thank you.