SNOWDEN REVELATIONS 10-Year Anniversary: Glenn Greenwald Speaks with Snowden & Laura Poitras on the Past, Present, & Future of Their Historic Reporting | SYSTEM UPDATE #93
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Welcome to a special episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
We are very excited to present a special episode of System Update.
Exactly 10 years ago today, on June 6, 2013, we began publishing what became known as the Snowden Reporting, based on the largest leak of top-secret documents in the history of the U.S.
security state.
The reporting that ensued over the next several months, and even over the next several years, revealed the mass indiscriminate system of surveillance secretly imposed by the NSA and its so-called Five Eyes spying alliance in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
And it became one of the most consequential stories in the history of modern journalism in Lisbon.
And the reporting we did won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
The documentary, directed by my journalistic colleague, Laura Poitras, showed our work with Snowden in real time in Hong Kong and won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, which was Snowden trapped by the U.S.
government in Russia.
We accepted at the side of Snowden's then fiancee, and now his wife and mother of their two toddlers, Lindsay Mills.
The reporting led to legislative reforms in multiple countries, including at least to some extent here in the United States.
Legislation to impose real curbs on the NSA was co-sponsored by Republican Congressman Justin Amash and Democratic Congressman John Conyers, both in Michigan, and was poised to pass in 2013 in the wake of our reporting.
It would be the first time ever since 9-11 that state powers would be rolled back instead of expanded.
Until the Obama White House and Nancy Pelosi intervened and whipped just enough no votes to defeat it, leading to the headline in the journal Foreign Policy in 2013 that read, quote, how Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA surveillance program.
The consequences of this reporting endured for years and found expression in multiple sectors.
It generated appellate court rulings that the NSA domestic surveillance programs which Snowden enabled us to reveal were both unconstitutional and illegal, direct frontal assaults on the constitutional right to privacy of all Americans, It caused diplomatic breaches between countries, threats to prosecute us for doing this journalism, and calls for our arrest from various corporate media figures, and it left Snowden facing multiple felony charges under the Espionage Act of 1917.
And he's being stranded for nine years and counting now in a country he never chose to be in.
In other words, as so often happens in the US, the only person to pay any price for the crimes that were committed here was the person whose heroism enabled those crimes to be uncovered.
Tonight, 10 years later, after I first published that article in The Guardian, we will speak to the two people who, along with me, were most responsible for enabling this journalism to happen.
Our source for this story, the remarkably heroic Edward Snowden, who knowingly risked his liberty and his life to inform his fellow citizens how the U.S.
security state had degraded the internet from what it was always heralded to be the greatest tool of liberation and empowerment ever created into what it has become the greatest tool of coercion, monitoring, censorship, and population control ever known.
And we'll also speak to Laura Poitras, whose reporting on this story was a key part of the Pulitzer, the story won, and whose film, Citizen Four, forever memorialized the courage and integrity that drove Snowden's whistleblowing, as well as the resulting threats, conflicts, and attempts at reform.
I'm very proud to present my discussion with both Snowden and Poitras tonight.
We explore what motivated our original decisions about how to bring this material to the public's attention.
The risk and challenges that we face, the benefits produced by the reporting, and the ongoing fight against the U.S.
surveillance state and for the right of individuals to use the internet with privacy.
Normally, this being Tuesday night, we would have our aftershow here on Locals, which is interactive in nature, but because of the length of this interview, we will be back on Thursday with that to gain access to our interactive aftershows and the transcripts to the show we provide.
Simply join our Locals community, which helps promote the journalism and support the journalism we do here.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast version, where you can simply follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, a special episode of System Update, starting right now.
Just to provide a little history before we show you this interview, 10 years ago today, I published at The Guardian the very first article from the Snowden Archive.
That story revealed, as the first three paragraphs of the article put it, quote, the NSA is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S.
customers at Verizon, one of America's largest telecom providers, under a top-secret order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by The Guardian, requires Verizon on a quote, ongoing daily basis to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its system, both within the U.S.
and between the U.S.
and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration, the communication records of millions of U.S.
citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
That would be the first story of what would be hundreds of reports that came from the archive Snowden provided to us.
A vast, gigantic collection of hundreds of thousands, if not more, of top-secret documents from an agency so secretive, the NSA, that for years the joke in Washington was that it stood for, no such agency.
That first article was quickly followed, the next day in fact, by a revelation of the so-called PRISM program, under which the leading big tech companies were turning over massive amounts of user data to the NSA without so much as a warrant.
No leak of any kind had previously emerged from the NSA, let alone a leak composed of its most sensitive secrets, taken from right under their noses by someone who had worked inside both the CIA and in the NSA as a contractor, Edward Snowden, who, after first enlisting to serve in the US Army during the Iraq War, believing as a young man in the mythologies he had heard about that war and the US security state in general, he then joined both the CIA and the NSA.
At the time of the publication of this first week of articles, I was in Hong Kong along with Laura Poitras and Guardian reporter Ewan McCaskill.
Hong Kong was the city Snowden had chosen to go once he had finished the job of collecting the NSA documents he wanted to leak and once he had made that final point of no return decision to provide those documents to us in order to report.
As he explains in the interview we're about to show you, Snowden had chosen Hong Kong in part because it offered protections from the CIA and other U.S.
security state agencies that would let us get these documents and report them before we could be stopped.
Unlike most places in the world, the CIA has a great deal of difficulty operating in Hong Kong.
But he also chose the city because Hong Kong represented to Snowden the values that drove his whistleblowing.
A city fighting for its freedom, for its right to dissent and protest, and against centralized repression and tyranny.
Knowing that we were going to meet a source who had already proven to us that he was in possession of many of the most sensitive documents from the world's most secretive agency inside the world's most powerful government, Laura and I arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday night, June 3rd, 2013.
We went the next morning to the hotel that Stone has indicated in a spot where he told us to wait for him to appear and said that we would know him because he would be carrying a Rubik's Cube.
We had no idea what he looked like, how old he was, or anything else about him other than the fact that he worked at the NSA, And clearly had access to some of the most sensitive secrets inside the U.S.
government.
He provided us two separate times to meet.
And on the second time, a young man, he was only 29 at the time, appeared carrying a Rubik's Cube.
We greeted him and quickly followed him up to his hotel room on the 10th floor.
And as soon as we entered the hotel room, Laura, a filmmaker whose 2004 film about the insurgency in the Iraq War had landed her on a U.S.
government watch list, And she was also nominated for that film for Best Documentary Oscar, took out her camera gear and began filming everything we had done together.
That footage would serve as the remarkable anchor of her documentary Citizenfour.
Almost immediately after we began our reporting, and especially when, at his insistence, we revealed the identity of Edward Snowden, and published a video interview with him, where he explained his rationale for coming forward, a video interview that resonated around the world, the Obama administration, both publicly and privately, began to become very threatening, not only to Snowden, but also to us as the journalists involved in the story.
Obama's senior national security official, James Clapper, began referring to us in public, the journalist, as, quote, Snowden's accomplices.
A deliberately and carefully chosen word to indicate that we could be subject to criminal prosecution.
What was particularly ironic about Clapper taking the lead in making these threats was that it was his blatant lying to the US Senate only three months earlier.
In which he falsely denied that the NSA was doing exactly that which the NSA was doing.
Namely, spying indiscriminately on millions of Americans that led Snowden to finally make the decision with finality to show his fellow Americans the truth about the surveillance system their government had imposed on them in the dark.
Here's James Clapper before the Senate three months earlier.
So, what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, 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.
As the reporting would show, it is hard to overstate what a blatant lie that was.
Clapper was never punished.
He served until the end of his term as Obama's senior national security official until getting hired by CNN to help report the news.
Now, as usual, The U.S.
security state's chief servant in all of this, including their attempt to criminalize our journalism, was the corporate media.
Shortly after we began the reporting, I appeared on Meet the Press, then hosted by David Gregory, and despite never having broken a story in his life, to this day, he immediately began insisting that I was not really a journalist and therefore should perhaps share a prison cell with Edward Snowden.
You are a polemicist here, you have a point of view, you are a columnist, you're also a lawyer.
You do not dispute that Edward Snowden has broken the law, do you?
No, I think he's very clear about the fact that he did it because his conscience compelled him to do so, just like Daniel Ellsberg did 50 years ago when he released the Pentagon Papers and also admits that he broke the law.
I think the question though is, how can he be charged with espionage?
He didn't work work for a foreign government.
He could have sold this information for millions of dollars and enriched himself.
He didn't do any of that either.
He stepped forward.
And as we want people to do in a democracy, as a government official, learned of wrongdoing and exposed it so we could have a democratic debate about the spying system.
Do we really want to put people like that in prison for life when all they're doing is telling us as citizens what our political officials are doing in the dark?
Final question before you, but I'd like you to hang around.
I just want to get Pete Williams in here as well.
To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?
I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.
The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I've aided and abetted him in any way.
The scandal that arose in Washington before our stories began was about the fact that the Obama administration is trying to criminalize investigative journalism.
By going through the emails and phone records of AP reporters, accusing a Fox News journalist of the theory that you just embraced, being a co-conspirator in felonies for working with sources.
If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal.
And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States.
It's why the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said investigative reporting has come to a Well, the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you're doing.
And of course, anybody who's watching this understands I was asking a question.
That question has been raised by lawmakers as well.
I'm not embracing anything, but obviously I take your point.
Mr. Rewald, just stay put, if you would, for just a moment.
I want to bring in Pete Williams.
I appreciate you dealing with it.
Now, that was far from an isolated case.
In fact, the very next day, the New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin went on his CNBC show and suggested the same thing.
Watch.
Let's talk about some of the headlines.
The big one this morning, there is heavy security this morning at Moscow's airport today.
National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, yep, he's there.
There is speculation he is planning to fly to Havana en route to Ecuador.
The government of Ecuador has confirmed it is considering an asylum application for Snowden.
He faces American espionage charges now after he admitted to revealing classified documents and I gotta say, I feel like A, we've screwed this up to even let him get to Russia.
B, clearly the Chinese hate us to even let him out of the country.
I mean, that says something.
Russia hated us and we knew that beforehand, but that's sort of, right?
And now, I don't know.
And then my second piece of this, I told you this in the Green Room, I would arrest him and now I almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to be out there.
He wants to help him get to Ecuador or whatever.
I mean, it's almost like a whole Yeah, and it feels like it could be quite the diplomatic issue as well.
Now, Sorkin ended up apologizing for that.
That mentality was very much the prevailing ethos in establishment Washington at the time.
That this leak was the most harmful one ever.
And it was, but not to the security of the American people, but to those who had implemented this illegal and unconstitutional spying system to impose surveillance on all Americans.
And their view was, all those responsible for the revelations of those crimes, but not the crimes themselves, must pay.
In 2021, three Yahoo News journalists, including Michael Isikoff, reported that agents of the CIA had plotted to assassinate Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
As part of that reporting, they also revealed that officials during the Obama administration had aggressively explored how to criminalize Assange, Poitras, and myself.
Indeed, as the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange demonstrates, there is a free press in the United States.
Only for those journalists who serve the United States, the U.S.
security state, and establishment power.
Not for those who subvert it, undermine, and expose it.
The Snowden story and its reporting is typically remembered for what it revealed about privacy surveillance, and for sure that was a big part of the story, but it was also about the role of transparency and journalism and democracy.
The reporting revealed, above all else, That the U.S.
government, completely in the dark and with no democratic debate, indeed unbeknownst to many members of Congress, converted the internet into a pervasive system of indiscriminate mass surveillance aimed en masse at the American people.
Exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent.
To commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the start of our reporting, I am thrilled to show you the interview we conducted just yesterday with both Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras, without whose courage this reporting would never have been possible.
In the discussion, we revisit the work we did together and the choices we made, the climate of threats and intimidations that instantly arose.
The role of the corporate press in defending the NSA in the US government and the impact of that reporting.
Ten years later, the US surveillance state continues to expand, but because of the revelations enabled by Edward Snowden, they do so with far more weapons now in the hands of individuals to combat that surveillance.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion as much as I enjoyed having it.
Ed and Laura, thank you so much for taking the time to join us tonight.
I really cannot think of any better way to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting as well as to explore its implications than by speaking with the two of you ever since we had confirmation that this was going to be able to happen, that we were going to be able to make this work.
I've been incredibly excited, really looking forward to our discussion tonight.
It's really a thrill to be able to do this, the three of us, which is how the Snowden story began.
So Laura, let me begin by asking you, I think these kind of milestones, like a 10-year anniversary, are really helpful because sometimes temporal distance provides a lot of clarity that help you understand better what it is that happened in the past, but also sometimes subsequent events are actually important for Reshaping and changing the way we understand things that happened in the past as well.
So with now 10 years, 10 full years, with the start of the Snowden reporting having elapsed, what is your view on the overall impact of the reporting that we did on the heroism of Ed that enabled it and the changes, if any, to the surveillance state and the ability of individuals
Yeah, I mean, those are a lot of things to answer.
I mean, first of all, I want to sort of dedicate and honor this conversation to David Miranda, you know, who took so many risks to help our reporting and tragically passed.
So I just feel like we need to Acknowledge that before we dive in.
You know, I've been thinking a lot about just what happened 10 years ago and the kind of the experience of the uncertainty, I think, for all of us going into this.
I mean, I think we, it was really scary to go and meet Ed and there was a lot of fear.
I mean, there were, you know, a lot of news organizations that were That pulled out, that didn't go, people who didn't feel safe doing this.
But I'm very proud of the work that we did, and it's great to see Ed and you today, and very just proud that we were able to do this reporting.
Same question, Ed.
Kind of 10 years later, how do you look back with this anniversary, and what are kind of your just primary reactions or perceptions about what we did?
I think what's interesting is the response systemically to public outrage, particularly when that public outrage begins to build momentum and become sustained.
You see efforts to say, oh, you don't understand this or it's not happening.
And a lot of those times, those are directly false and they're knowingly false.
These are willful lies by governments or corporations, institutional powers that interact with us in many ways, influence us and in some ways order us.
Um, to try to disperse that, and it happens over time, and that's, like, seen as a bad thing, you know.
In terms of politically, it does halt momentum, but I also think it's frankly part of the learning process.
It shows that distance that we've traveled from.
Maybe it's possible, but it's not happening to, you know, these people are ridiculous for believing it to.
Of course, it's happening.
It's happening everywhere.
Every to all people all the time.
What else would anyone expect?
They normalize it.
When we look back at what happened after 10 years, it's remarkable that we're all still alive.
Yeah, well, I want to pick up on that because, Laura, you mentioned the very substantial risks that all of us face beginning with Ed.
And I was thinking about this because if you look back kind of retrospectively at what we now call the Snowden story, the thing that we remember is that the reporting won Pulitzer's for Public Service for the two newspapers with which we primarily worked, The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Your film won an Oscar.
Ed did not end up in prison the way we, I think, all thought was highly likely for him to do.
But instead, even though he's exiled in a country he never chose to be in, can participate in these debates like the one that we're having today, the conversation we're having today.
But it was very possible from the start that the outcome was going to be very, very different.
Talk about The kind of tensions and risks specifically that you alluded to in that first answer that we were having to kind of navigate and get ourselves to more or less ignore in order to do the reporting.
Right, so let's set the stage a little bit.
So we know that right in the immediate aftermath, immediately preceding our meeting in Hong Kong, we know that the AP had been spied on by the government.
We know that the journalist James Rosen from Fox News had been named as a co-conspirator in another espionage case that involved Stephen Kim, a really outrageous case.
And we know that at that point the Obama administration had really weaponized the Espionage Act in the context of journalism.
Right?
So, you know, before, I think, before Obama, the Espionage Act had been used a handful of times.
Only once in the case of journalism, which was Daniel Ellsberg, right?
So he was indicted under the Espionage Act and ultimately dropped the charges because once it was exposed to the level of government abuse into spying onto Ellsberg and his psychiatrists.
There was a lot of, you know, nervousness.
And then I think just putting it in the context of the media's timidness post 9-11, right?
I mean, we have to remember also that in the aftermath of 9-11 that the major news organizations wouldn't use the word torture to describe the CIA's torture program, right?
So, all these things were very real.
When I was in communication with Ed, before I even knew his name, what he did.
I, of course, met with lawyers and a lot of them were like, don't go.
This is not a good idea.
You know, the Espionage Act has never been used against a journalist, but it will be.
It could be.
And you would be a great target.
And they thought I'd be a great target to use it because I was an independent documentary filmmaker who had already been placed on a watch list.
You know, fast forward to today, they've used the Espionage Act on Julian Assange, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, you know, the most outrageous sort of threat to press freedom.
So, like, all of those things were kind of, you know, I think, in play, and I think that, you know, at risk to his life, I mean, you know, the CIA, I think, and the government would have, you know, done anything to stop this story from being revealed to the public.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, I actually want to kick it back to you.
I mean, I know that this is your show and you're hosting, but, you know, talk about how you're feeling today, 10 years after.
Yeah, you know, it's, I mean, Citizenfour helps me so much as kind of the touchstone for how I remember it because, you know, the camera just got put on in front of us and it's amazing that, you know, one of the most important moments or episodes in all of our lives was just recorded, more or less, from the very beginning and what
get so conveyed viscerally by the film that I think is one of the genius aspects of the film that also helps me, you know, kind of understand how I felt while I was going through it is just the extreme amount of tension and anxiety that we absolutely felt from the very first second that we started kind of understand how I felt while I was going through it is just the extreme amount of tension and anxiety that we absolutely felt from the very first second that we started working in
We never had any idea what the U.S. government knew about what Ed had done, about with whom he was meeting.
We had no idea what Chinese authorities might have known or Hong Kong authorities or anyone else in in the world that we really thought at any moment that the door could be kicked down and likely would be kicked down at some point.
We were just waiting for that to happen.
There's that scene that a colleague of mine mentioned to me today where the fire alarm went off in incident in 4:00.
And I remember that so vividly because every noise, every disturbance, made us think, wow, it's really now about to happen.
I think that is one of the things that has gotten lost to time is, you know, just the fact that although we more or less came out of it relatively unscathed, with the not small exception that Ed is exiled in a country that he never chose to live in, that he's raising his family there, that he can't leave, that The government really did get very bullying.
I mean, Laura, you didn't leave Germany where you were working on the film and the reporting until almost a year after you got back from Hong Kong.
I didn't leave Brazil for almost a year for the same reason, namely that the US government was purposely conveying that there was a very real danger we could be subpoenaed or even arrested if we tried to go back to the United States.
And, you know, this leak Was maybe the only exception would be Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers leak and the WikiLeaks leak from Chelsea Manning in 2010.
But I think this really was on a different level because it was the most significant leak of the most sensitive materials from the most secretive agency within the world's most powerful government.
And to say that they were you know, in a panic over it, that they were desperate.
I mean, the thing that I always go back and think about is that they thought that when Ivo Morales, the then president of Bolivia, had traveled to Russia, just like on a hunch, they thought he may have somehow picked up Snowden and was trying to take him back to Bolivia.
And they forced his plane, the president of a sovereign country down over European airspace in a very dangerous way, just on the mere hunch that Ed might have been on that plane, just reflecting how kind of unhinged and deranged they were.
And we never really knew what the They were attempting to do what they were capable of doing.
We all know what the US government is willing to do.
And I think the fact that, as you said, Laura, you and I both kind of only had one small part of our foot in the world of corporate journalism, but everything else was always very outsider made us very, you know, unique.
And juicy targets for them wanting to set a precedent of prosecuting actual journalists under the Espionage Act, the kind of red line that they had never crossed until they brought that case against Julian.
So, Ed, let me ask you about the kind of decision to work with me and Laura, because it is so interesting.
You had a lot of options in terms of how you might have been able to bring this material to public attention.
You could have just published it all yourself on the internet.
You could have just dumped the whole archive on the internet.
You could have curated it yourself and put it on the internet.
You could have sent it to a group like WikiLeaks and asked them to just publish it en masse on the internet.
But instead, you decided you wanted to work with journalists, but not journalists who were embedded in the New York Times and the Washington Post, but were journalists who were purposely kind of outside of that corporate framework. - Why?
With all those options, why did you choose the option that you did choose, which was to work with journalists but kind of very outsider journalists?
And what did you hope to achieve or what were you trying to avoid with that choice?
I mean, one of the reasons that I picked you specifically was the criticism of the New York Times handling of previous leaks.
We had major institutional newspapers that had been far too accommodating to the Bush administration.
And its abuses of secrecy.
And when we saw in the context of the WikiLeaks, Cablegate and the Iraq War Logs, and how the government responded to that initially, and how the media at first was very, you know, championing and open, welcoming to these disclosures, and the courage of Chelsea Manning in that circumstance.
And how that changed over time.
And I was very concerned, particularly given the fact that these were documents from an agency revealing serious crimes against both the American and the global public.
I knew the government was going to lean extremely heavily on the newspapers in a way that was unprecedented.
We actually saw this bear out, where in Britain, the Guardian, which was one of the possessors of the Archive, actually had the British intelligence services come to their newsroom and destroy their computers and the hard drives that they used to process this information, literally grinding them down in the newsrooms.
It's documented.
It's just a remarkable kind of thing.
I had a strong suspicion that things like that were likely to occur if these documents were held by a single newspaper.
I was not confident that their editor and their lawyers would be able to reduce or sort of resist the pressure that was being placed on them by working with someone like you, who basically previously committed themselves to a critical position, working with Laura, who was going to basically partner with another newspaper, an institutional newspaper.
Um, but, uh, would, would basically have that, that melding there.
And then actually people forget, but Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, his involvement as the classical institutionalist, uh, really covered the bases in a way that I didn't think the government would be able to shut the story down.
And that was the main thing.
Like, I, if I had just been trying to get away with it, And have my identity not be known, I probably would not have been able to risk working with any journalists at all, simply because making the contact in the beginning was extraordinarily difficult in technical terms.
And even if I did everything perfectly.
The minute a journalist knew something about me, if they mishandled that information through, you know, no ill intentions, but simply a lack of technical sophistication against basically the most advanced intelligence agency that had ever existed in history, I was going to be cooked.
It doesn't really matter what happens to me.
We have to focus on the story.
Then how do we prioritize getting the story out?
Once you commit yourself to that principle, the outlines of how it comes to be become pretty clear, I think.
There's one more thing that I actually want to change my answer earlier.
You know, we opened this by saying... That is not allowed.
I'm sorry.
The rules of the show state that once you have made an answer, you are... Too bad.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
To say that, you know, 10 years on, what do I think about this?
And I don't really think about it, but hearing you guys talk about it does cause a lot of reflection.
One of the things that's most remarkable about this story is we got evidence of a major intelligence agency, actually the entire community, and their allies, a transnational governmental conspiracy to violate Rights internationally, human rights broadly.
We published that.
And we got away with it, frankly.
And none of the criticisms against the sort of claims of harm and everything like that ever bore out.
One of the big fears or threats that the government, you know, anxiously put out to try to stop the spread of the story was they said that, you know, you guys weren't the NSA, you weren't the CIA, you wouldn't be able to protect these secrets.
And newspapers weren't the ones to make decisions about what should and should be published.
And if you tried, you know, the world was going to fall apart.
The oceans were going to boil off, the atmosphere was going to catch fire, and everybody was going to die because the, you know, system of national security was going to fail.
But now, ten years on, we never have any evidence of compromise, not from any of the journalists or any of the newsrooms who handled this material, which means journalists actually handled this material more securely than the government itself did.
And when you consider that, and the fact that this really should be a lodestone for, I think, sort of young journalists to look at as what they can do, the role they can play in society, you look at how the sort of major institutional journalistic outlets today are handling new stories of, you know, materials that are getting out of government hands and are in the public interest.
In a way, they're actually trying to suppress the story.
They're pulling the edges of it.
They're criticizing it.
They're critiquing it.
They're going, well, who benefits from the publication of this story?
As opposed to, is this information true and correct?
And should the public know it?
And that raises a question on reflection.
If this someone like me came forward today, Would we still be able to get it reported?
Would we still be able to hear that story in the way that we did 10 years ago?
Yeah, I think I mean the reaction of the media at the time, I think people have forgotten as well, was really quite hostile.
The first time I went to meet the press I was asked by David Gregory why I shouldn't be in a prison cell right alongside of you because of the role that I had played.
There was You know, multiple people who were saying the same things.
Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and CNBC basically said that he also thought that that should be my destination is sharing a prison cell with you.
But one of the criticisms that you got, and it was kind of from both sides of the political spectrum, was why didn't you just simply take the archive that you had in your possession Let the public see all of it.
Why didn't you just put it on the internet?
Why did you come to journalists and ask us or really not even ask us but insist as a condition to sharing it with us that you wanted us to curate it and decide what the public should and shouldn't see?
I just want to point out for those following along at home, this is actually Glenn revealing that he was very deeply wounded by 10 years of mean tweets.
Replies to his tweets that are saying, why weren't you more aggressive?
Why didn't you?
I wish it were that way.
We're only confined to mean tweets.
But no, I mean, I think it's important that people understand what your motive was.
And your motive ultimately is determined by your actions.
And the action that you took was to look at a series of options that you had about how to get this into the public hands.
And the action that you took or the choice that you made, I think, is highly illustrative of what your motives were.
So why didn't you just dump the archive onto the internet or ask that we do that for you?
Right, I wasn't trying to elect myself the President of Secrets.
When we were dealing with something that had never been done before, this kind of information, these kind of documents about this kind of work, that frankly was criminal, and courts have upheld that it was criminal, right?
This isn't sort of political rhetoric, this is factual.
The government was breaking the law.
They were, and are today, violating human rights around the world.
But what if I had been wrong?
What if I believed these documents to say that, but that's not actually correctly how they can be interpreted?
What if they were misleading?
What if my political biases blinded me to the potential risks of disclosure?
If I went out and did it myself, I think, frankly, it still would have been correct.
It still would have been a moral and ethical thing to do.
But in the wake of how we had seen the media begin to accept the government's arguments against Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks, Going, oh, they were reckless.
It was a document dump.
It should have been sort of more curated.
I wanted to establish a counterexample publicly that couldn't be sort of questioned or denied by the government, say we didn't do it in the most careful way.
Not to discredit Manning or Wikileaks, who I think did nothing wrong at all, but to establish that the government's response would not differ, in fact, between sort of where you just have a bare disclosure.
And where you have sort of curated journalists going through this and making decisions in the public interest, right?
So this is why I work with journalists.
And I said, you shouldn't publish any story just because it's interesting, just because it's newsworthy.
These should only be stories that you believe the public needs to know before.
Publishing any of these stories, you should still go to the government, tell them what you're about to publish, and basically give them a right to argue against publication.
Maybe you don't understand it.
Maybe I don't understand it.
Maybe the document is wrong.
Maybe there's some detail in it that we can't infer that's going to get somebody killed somewhere.
In every case I'm aware of, that process was actually followed.
Stories didn't get spiked.
There were a few details that got removed.
Um, but I think that's not actually harmful if the public's understanding still comes through clearly.
But the interesting thing about this is, uh, you know, I was not receptive to these criticisms very early on when the government's coming against us where they say, you shouldn't be so careful.
You should actually open the best more.
You should be more revealing.
But that's something that I think 10 years on, we should reflect.
Could we have been more aggressive?
Should more have been published without harm?
You know, one of the remarkable things two years on is no government in any country, and there were a lot of them that were implicated in this kind of behavior, have ever shown any evidence of harm as a result of these publications.
That is remarkable because you know all of these agencies have incredible resourcing and they were looking very hard.
They were signing hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people to do sort of triage responses to this, read through all the documents, look at every operation that might have been implicated in that, and go, can we show, you know, somebody somewhere got a stubbed toe because this was out here, then we'll leak it to the New York Times, and you know, we'll have our counter narrative that these people were reckless.
That never actually happened.
No one was hurt, but the public interest was served.
Should we have gone further?
Should we have been less careful and in fact more open?
I think that's an interesting question.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, just from experience, you know, and like the Brazil reporting ended up doing in other instances, when you're doing reporting that infuriates establishment centers of power, as opposed to serving their agenda and kind of carrying out the role they assigned to you, the biggest gift you can hand them is to make some kind of a mistake
Either factually or as you said where they can kind of demonstrate that in some way you've endangered somebody and so speaking for myself when weighing these kind of risk and benefits of disclosures I did especially at the time in the beginning say for the first year err on the side of being more careful precisely to ensure we weren't handing them a weapon that then would have become the hallmark of the story which is oh remember when they recklessly disclosed those documents and endangered these people.
Laura, you generously provided several excerpts from Citizen Four, and I wanna show the first one, which is, I think, the first day that the three of us met in that hotel room.
But before I do, I do think it's very notable.
Not only who was there, which was the three of us, and then ultimately Ewan McCaskill, the reporter who was kind of sent by the Guardian to babysit us, but we ended up developing a great deal of fondness for and respect for.
He's, you know, just a great journalist and a great person.
But the Washington Post, for example, wasn't there, and you alluded to other media outlets that just weren't willing to send anyone to go meet with and in Hong Kong because they judged it too dangerous, which was, to their credit, I think, a decision that The Guardian ended up making that they would send us on their behalf, but was also reflective of those kind of risks.
But talk a little bit about that, but also the kind of remarkable ability that you had to convince your source to allow you to film him in the process of doing things, namely providing us these materials that we knew the U.S. government would namely providing us these materials that we knew the U.S. government would regard as But on that, I mean, so I was first contacted anonymously by Ed in January 2013, and we went back and forth.
And for the first three months of that, I thought my job was to keep him anonymous, to protect him as a source.
And at some point, he revealed to me that that wasn't his intention, that he was going to go public after the story broke, first let the story break, but that he wasn't going to conceal his identity.
So that was a decision he had made, and it informed me of the decision.
So that's, first of all, I mean, it wasn't what I expected.
It's not what sources usually do.
I mean, the risk was extraordinary.
I mean, I already felt that, you know, his life was on the line and then it sort of, the risks rose from there.
But then once he told me that, that's when I said we need to meet.
I said we need to meet and he said, no, we shouldn't meet.
It's not a good idea to meet.
The story's not about me.
The story's about what the public needs to know.
And I said, well, you know, the media is going to make it about you.
So only you can share your perspective of why you've made the choice that you're making.
And that was my argument.
And we did a lot of back and forth on how to assure that the increased risks of us all being at the same place was minimized.
So in other words, if something happened to all of us, the story would not disappear.
So that is not something I'm gonna go into detail here, but it was definitely things were put in place.
That if something happened to all of us, that the story would not go away.
And I know I just felt like as, you know, I approach this, I mean, as a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, there's nothing, you know, there's, to be able to understand why somebody makes the choice that they do helps, I think, the public understand the importance to be able to understand why somebody makes the choice that they do Otherwise, the narrative, we give the narrative to the government, right?
And they're happy to try to create their own narrative.
And we've seen that's exactly what they did with Chelsea Manning.
So that's the argument I made.
And ultimately, I was able to convince Ed that that was the right choice.
Yeah, I remember the first time when I was talking to him online and, you know, he made very clear to me that not only did he not want anonymity, that he felt it was his obligation to identify himself to the public and explain to the public, account to the public why he did what he did.
And I began kind of giving a sort of lecture about the dangers that was going to ensure he confronted.
And then he started citing chapter and verse to me of the Espionage Act of 1917.
So Keen and I immediately realized, OK, this is obviously something he has thought about on his own.
So let's show this first clip, which is basically the first day that we got to Hong Kong on a Sunday night.
And we woke up that next morning, and we met Ed in the Mira Hotel in a story that we've repeatedly told that we would know him because he would be carrying a Rubik's Cube.
We had no idea.
What he looked like, how old he was, really almost anything about him.
And that was the way we were able to identify him.
We met him.
We went up to his hotel room.
You immediately unpacked your camera gear and started filming.
and this is essentially the first moments that we spent together in Hong Kong.
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. - To make it better light.
This one, where the first place is. - So there's, you know, so many different enormous stories just that are kind of standalone stories um that even like you know certain things about individual document that can just be their own story i don't know about you laura but i've lost audio i basically woke up this morning and already started writing stories um
so i'm hoping to you know start publishing within like a day or two days okay as long as you're good with that yeah it's bad um and so as far as like what the stuff we have to talk about i mean i'm kind of like dichotomizing it um between you know stuff that i'd like to talk to you about in terms of like the documents and the content Yeah, it's bad.
And so as far as the stuff we have to talk about, I mean, I'm kind of dichotomizing it between stuff that I'd like to talk to you about in terms of the documents and the content, and Laura has a bunch of questions about that as well, sort of working through the documents, getting her take on a lot of this stuff sort of working through the documents, getting her take on a lot of this stuff that will help me understand it better, but then also the Like 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 just 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, and I think I've expressed it a couple times online, is I feel the modern media has a big 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.
Anything I can do to help you guys get this out, I will do.
- I'm a very cheap fan, that's a site of forest bro.
Go ahead. - But yeah, anything I can do to help you guys get this out, I will do. - Yes, I will. - 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.
I'm sitting there every day getting paid to design methods to amplify that state power.
And I'm realizing that if policy switches that are the only thing that restrain these states were changed, 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, all the bright men, 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 away 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 get worse, particularly drone strikes, which I also learned at NSA, we could watch drone videos from our 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 actually like, you know, murder drones where they're going out there and 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's 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 and the same respect for their ideas and 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 towards something in which people self-police their own views.
And they literally make jokes about ending up on the list if they donate to a political cause or if they say something in a discussion.
And it's become an expectation that we're being launched.
Many people I've talked to have mentioned that they're careful about what they type into search engines because they know that it's being recorded.
And that limits the boundaries of their intellectual explorations.
I am more willing to risk imprisonment or any other negative outcome personally, then I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me whom I care for equally then I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of
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. - Sure, I've seen that.
I've seen Citizenfour many times.
I've seen that scene in particular.
Many times you've seen it much more than I have, having been the person who directed and edited the film.
And yet, nonetheless, as many times as I've seen it, watching that again really kind of brings me back to that moment in a very visceral way.
I'm wondering what your impression of that day was like as captured in those six minutes.
Right.
I mean, you know, the first thing that, you know, I remember, you know, that We, I had no idea.
I mean, Ed had shared his name, but I knew that I couldn't search for it before I got on the plane to Hong Kong because I knew enough that that would be, you know, something that would tip off the, potentially tip off the government, right?
So we had no idea how old he was.
We had no idea where he worked.
We had some sort of basic, you know, outlines that he'd written to us in a text document.
And so I think we were both taken aback how young Ed was when we met him.
I was, Definitely worried that that could be used against us.
I think in reflection, I think it was actually very positive that somebody who was risking everything, you know, somebody young was risking everything.
Um, made it, you know, more compelling.
And, you know, and I knew that the question about the camera, like, right?
I mean, it was risky, right?
It was risky to document what we were doing, but I also felt that there was a potential reward, right?
That if we, if, if, if we could share with the public why we were doing it, and that Ed could say in his own words why he was making decisions, that we could, like, like the, the public opinion conversation, that we could win that conversation.
and that if we decided to do it secretly, that that just, again, gives the government the opportunity to write their own narrative.
And so, and I know you both have commented, you know, many times about how quickly I took the camera out and it's true and I apologize.
But it was a combination of both like, listen, we were like, we had already, like we were, the train had left the station.
Like we had, we were going down this road and it was gonna end wherever it was gonna end.
And so I felt like very strongly I needed to document it.
And then also, honestly, it was a little bit of a protective device, you know, like I could go, at least I had something to do as we await the CIA to like bust down the door and arrest us all.
So it was both kind of just, OK, I was nervous and I could take out the camera, but I also thought it was important.
And I knew you well enough, Glenn, that you're not somebody who's going to wait around for two hours before you ask a good question.
You know, like you were going to dive right in.
And I was like, I didn't want to miss that moment.
Yeah, my perception always was that, you know, you've been in lots of dangerous situations prior to this one, including, you know, very up close in the Iraq War where you were filming some of the most dangerous areas of the Iraqi insurgency, a film that was nominated for an Oscar as well.
And I always felt like the camera provided you a kind of sort of protection or kind of like a defense shield.
And sometimes I found myself kind of coveting the fact that you had that.
And I felt a little bit More exposed what strikes me.
I mean there's so many things here that that you know strike me about this And I'm wondering if you share this you know it is true I mean I tried making light of it or even denying it about you know like I was probably playing with my pen there was anxiety with that of course it was like a very awkward moment because the room was so small we were really like right on top of each other out of nowhere and
Never having been in each other's presence before, the tensions were palpable for all the obvious reasons, but just the interpersonal dynamic was strange as well, because we had no idea who we were coming to meet, and I think there was maybe, I would say, 20 or 30 minutes of awkwardness, and then it all kind of dissipated pretty quickly as we began talking about your motive.
For me, I felt like, you know, I was convinced of the authenticity of your story within probably a couple of hours.
And I think that really set the stage for our ability to work together so well.
What was your impression of that first day, both kind of standing alone in memory, but also having watched that scene?
First off, I want to say, you know, Laura, I apologize for taking the camera out early.
You shouldn't apologize, Laura.
It was very good.
It worked out.
The thing was, Yeah, what doesn't come across in the clip, I think, but I remember very clearly from watching the clip, is the sense of fear.
Like, you can see I laugh a lot, and it's because I'm nervous.
It's because I'm scared.
And I think we all are.
Like you say, you snap a pen that's in your hand.
And in that kind of circumstance, I don't think for any documentary filmmakers that are watching this, like, it's okay to just, like, wait, and then, like, all right, he pulls out the pen, like, then everybody goes, stop, you know, I'll set this up, because everybody's already sweating, like, it's too amped up.
Laura kind of working around us and saying, don't worry about it, you know, the equipment's off, it's off, it's off, and it was off, right, as she sets it up, and then she does this, it's whatever, we know.
Not worried about it that that kind of activity like it It sets a tempo and a scene and I'd never been on camera before like that was my first interview You know when you work in the intelligence community like rule number one is don't talk to journalists, right?
And of course, I've been writing to them emailing them But it's it's it's very different when you're in the room and you know that the camera turns on and I think You know, one of the remarkable things is how well everybody did.
Um, managing their fear and the difficulty, like you said, the awkwardness of the situation.
Uh, we were all in extreme legal jeopardy.
Uh, and I, I think when you hear me start talking, I speak very slowly, um, because I'm thinking about, we were all very thoughtful about why we were doing this.
What was it for?
And I think once you do that, and particularly when there's a camera there keeping you all honest, um, It actually helps build comfort that there is a cause behind this.
And I think when you do something that's that risky, a certainty in your cause is crucial.
And from the clip, you know, from my memory, from everything that we see today, you know, you can Be certain of your cause in yourself, right?
But it's only the rest of the world that can really judge that.
And the remarkable thing about Citizenfour is everybody can see that happen within ourselves where we judge each other.
And also then the viewer in the world, like the process of that consensus forming occurs.
And I don't think that would have been possible without the tremendous sense of vulnerability.
That we all accepted from, you know, meeting in person, from having the camera in the room.
And that was not an easy decision.
It wouldn't have happened if Laura hadn't, as she said, really convinced me why we were doing it.
The fact that the media, crucially, was going to make a story out of me, whether I liked it or not.
I mean, we've seen a lot of other personalities who are involved in big classified disclosures get absolutely murdered by the press.
You know, some were ideological, some were non-ideological.
Because, you know, the press just does their own thing.
And when the government starts whispering to them, you know, the narrative gets out.
And that's all anybody talks about.
It's not what was published.
It's who published it.
It's not what does it mean for us.
But, you know, What does it mean about them?
And that kind of psychologizing is really dangerous because humans love stories about people.
And Laura, frankly, had the wisdom and the foresight to say that was going to be the main story that the media that didn't have documents were going to latch on to.
And they did.
Yeah, you know, Laura mentioned Danny Ellsberg earlier on, and I actually want to talk about him in a little bit.
But I remember when I was first becoming aware of the Pentagon Papers story when I was young and then reading about government misconduct, which I alluded to, which is the only reason Dan Ellsberg didn't spend his life in prison was because the Nixon administration got caught engaged in a variety of illegalities which is the only reason Dan Ellsberg didn't spend his life in And the principal one was they broke into a psychiatrist's office in order to discover what his psychosexual secrets were.
And it never made sense to me in the sort of naivete of youth.
Like the Pentagon Papers proved the U.S. government was systematically lying to the public about the Vietnam War.
Why did the Nixon administration believe that exposing Dan Ellsberg's sexual fantasies or sexual pathologies or aberrations or deviations or however they wanted to characterize it would be some kind of effective response?
And of course, They were right.
It would have been because focusing on the personality of the whistleblower is probably the most effective way, not just of distracting from the revelations, but also kind of making the person so radioactive that no one wants anything to do with them.
And I think the fact that, you know, you were kind of somebody who people could identify with and that the public could see that was a major benefit and advantage that we had in trying to convince the public to be open to this story.
Let me just ask you a couple questions, Ed, that obviously are things that people who are either your critics or have doubts about you are obviously always going to ask.
One is the place you're currently living, which we've alluded to and I want to get to in a little bit, but the other issue is the choice that you made to go to Hong Kong and to kind of summon us to meet you in Hong Kong.
I remember the first time you told me you were in Hong Kong and wanted us to come meet you there.
Of course, I was very baffled.
Why would somebody with access who has worked in the U.S. security state for so long that he had all these secrets?
You expect them to be in like Arlington, Virginia or some place in suburban Maryland and not in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was the place that you chose to go once you had finalized the gathering of all these documents.
Why did you What was it about Hong Kong that made it an attractive place for you given your motives at the time?
I mean there are a lot of A lot of aspects of this because there were a lot of countries that I considered, but one of the core ones here is earlier.
You were like, you know, we didn't know what you know, if the door was going to be kicked in with the Chinese were doing, you know what they knew.
It's not actually true.
I knew quite a bit about what they were doing, their capabilities, and I had searched, you know, through all of the different countries' capabilities.
We have counterintelligence reports that basically are our assessments of their capabilities and how they work.
And at the CIA, you know, I had been something of a specialist in how these kind of things occurred.
I was a communications security officer, basically.
They're called TISOs, telecommunication information systems officers.
And so I actually had a pretty strong confidence that in this country, the U.S.
would be absolutely not free to operate.
They had, at the time, a relatively free Internet and relatively free media, especially internationally.
They were a major broadcast center.
They were the financial center, basically.
Entirety of Eastern Asia at the point at that point in time, and things have changed enormously since then, of course, but it was basically 1 of the only places in the world.
And, you know, there's no place in Europe that this is true and where the US wouldn't feel free to operate and sort of do like a bag job or something like that because they're, they're.
sort of officers would be very strictly monitored there.
But at the same time, we could sneak in.
And, you know, I wrote to both of you, I think, at least some of you, about things not to keep in your luggage and how to discuss things if you were caught at customs, how to develop a cover story where you could get through and like ways we could signal each other if anything went wrong.
And basically, it was, frankly, one of the only places in the world, perhaps the only place in the world where you could do something like this and get the story out.
Because remember, that was the key to get the story out.
I did still think it was quite likely that That I could be arrested immediately afterwards and, you know, they might stop reporting.
We wouldn't be able to continue to operate.
But by then, the cat's out of the bag.
The reporters already have copies of their archives.
They've gone back to their institutions.
And even if we were all arrested, frankly, everything could continue onwards.
And this calls back to that initial decision about, you know, why to use you and other journalists structured in this certain way.
We had to avoid a single point of failure.
And the most prominent single point of failure that we could possibly have in the early stages of this reporting was for everybody being in the room at the same time with the material.
And if the U.S.
could stop that, they would stop that by absolutely any means necessary.
Absolutely.
Laura, when you offered to share some clips of Citizenfour, I mean, we just immediately said, you know, you pick the ones that you think are the most important or the ones that would best inform the conversation.
The second one we're about to show is one where Ed is talking about, with Ewan McCaskill, the Guardian reporter, the capabilities of the GCHQ and the role of the British in this spying system.
Why did you, I mean, you obviously had an enormous amount of raw footage that ended up not making it into the film.
You chose this clip to put into the film and then also to share with us.
What do you, just set this clip up, like why is this something that you thought was important?
Yeah, I mean, so the clip begins with you and then it shifts to a conversation about how and when we would proactively reveal Ed's identity and not wait for the government at At that point, we knew that the government knew.
who he was.
They knew the source at that point, I believe.
So I thought that was important.
But in terms of beginning with UN and GCHQ, I mean, I think it changed the reporting.
I mean, I think it was, I mean, The Guardian, I agree with you, they did the right thing by sending you and sending you in, our dear friend and colleague.
But they made some decisions after that that weren't just decisions that I think they should be proud of, for instance, allowing, destroying data, which they did both, you know, in the presence of the UK government, but they also destroyed data in Hong Kong, you know, as soon as they had a look at the GCHQ material, you know, as soon as they had a look at the GCHQ material, they started freaking out about the UK state secret laws and the
So I do feel that, and there was, you know, before the Before they saw the GCHQ material, The Guardian were talking about safe houses for Ed.
I mean, they were talking about how to protect him as a source.
And as soon as they saw that, they were like, we're getting out of here.
And I think we have to also acknowledge the role of Sarah Harrison and Wikileaks in the fact that Ed is, you know, not in prison right now, right?
And her stepping in.
I just feel like it was important to show what was happening in a very compressed amount of time.
From a first meeting where we don't know each other to a few days later where we're about to part ways.
Alright, let's go like this.
GCHQ has an internal Wikipedia at the top secret, you know, super classified level.
Yeah.
Where anybody working in intelligence can work on anything they want.
Yeah.
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 of, you know, different types, pictures and PowerPoints and Word documents, stuff like that.
Sorry, can I take that seat?
Yeah.
So, I'm sorry, I'm getting you to repeat.
So, in these documents, they all show Yeah, there'll 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, 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 gonna do it, I will.
And hopefully when I'm gone, whatever you do to me, there'll be somebody else who'll do the same thing.
It'll be the sort of internet principle of the Hydra.
You know, you can stomp one person, but there's gonna be seven more of us.
Yeah.
Are you getting more nervous?
Um... I mean...
No, I think the way I look at stress, particularly because I sort of knew this was coming, 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 busts in the door, suddenly I'll get nervous and it'll affect me.
But until they do, I'm eating a little less.
- Yes, that's the only difference I think. - Let's talk about the issue with when we're gonna say who you are.
- Yeah.
- This is, you know, You have to talk me through this because I have a big worry about this which is that if we come out and I know that you believe that your 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 was one of your readers, and there was something.
I mean, it's fine.
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 place.
So, I'm keeping it all anonymous, totally, but I want to start introducing you in 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, you know, 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 possibility that they won't?
Are we kind of giving them stuff that we don't, or, or, or. - Possibly that they know, but they don't want to reveal it because they don't know. - Or that they don't know and we're gonna be telling them.
Is it a possibility that they're going to need two or three months of uncertainty and we're going to be solving that problem for them?
Or, let me just say, the over part, maybe it doesn't matter to you.
Maybe you want it.
You're not coming out because you think in that little bit they're going to catch you and you want to do it first.
You're coming out because you want to fucking come out and you want to be heard.
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.
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 elected 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 fullness 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 because, again, I intended to come forward.
OK.
I'm going to post this morning just a general defense of whistleblowers.
That's fine.
And you in particular, without 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 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, you know, say the truth, skulk around and they hide in the dark and they 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, I think we all just felt the fact that this is the right way to do it.
You feel the power of your choice, you know what I mean?
It's like, I want that power to be felt in the world.
Okay.
And it is the ultimate standing up to them, right?
Like, I'm not gonna fucking hide even for like one second.
I'm gonna get right in your face.
You don't have to investigate.
There's nothing to investigate.
Here I am.
You know, Laura, I think if I had to list the two or three scenes that most affect me, this would definitely be on that list, because I remember when we were in Hong Kong, we always used to kind of joke, and I was a little bit petulant about it, the fact that I wasn't able to sleep for any more than 90 minutes even using, you know, large doses of narcotics that are designed to enable you to sleep.
Just the adrenaline and the tension and the kind of excitement and the nervousness just made it impossible for me to sleep.
I don't think you were sleeping very much either and yet, you know, it was always like 10 o'clock at night.
Ed would say every single night.
All right guys.
Well, I think I'm ready to hit the hay, you know as though he was it was like any other day and I think that for me was the biggest life lesson beyond the lessons about the revelations of surveillance and transparency and whistleblowing and journalism and all these things on which we were focused substantively was that if you are convinced that you have made a choice that comes from the best of motives.
You are kind of doing it with a clean conscience and with a sense that what you're doing is just.
Even in the midst of this kind of extreme turbulence, it provides you a sort of inner tranquility and peace that is both, you know, kind of gives you a sense of resolve, but also a sense of calmness.
And I think you can see just in that scene how it kind of becomes contagious.
It reinforced our own conduct in the wake of these fears, seeing Ed just so determined In the righteousness of what he was doing, what do you remember about that part of the transcendent lessons that we learn from this?
I mean, it was remarkable.
It was remarkable from the first day we met him.
I mean, that first sort of interview slash interrogation that you did to find out who he was and get all of his backstory.
When we went to look at the footage after the fact, he speaks in perfect every, you know, perfect paragraphs with utter calmness.
I mean, it was clear that Ed had made sort of like a decision.
He'd crossed over a threshold that there was no going back and he was at peace with whatever was going to happen.
And I think we felt that.
You know every you know every moment and the fact that we weren't You know, or that he wasn't more nervous.
I mean, you can feel my nervousness, like the camera movement and the sort of trying to find focus.
I mean, I think, you know, luckily I sort of had been making films for long enough.
I sort of, my body knows what to do, even if my head is like, you know, freaking out.
And, you know, but Ed was completely centered.
I mean, he was just completely centered in terms of the choice he had made.
And, you know, and also looking at these clips, when Ed says things move fast, I mean, I think you're, Ability to turn this information around and report on it so quickly was also one of the things that kept us, protected us.
I think, you know, we were always one step ahead and I think the government was probably, you know, waiting for the time that they would, you know, shut us down or have their own press release and we just never gave them the opportunity and that was because of, you know, the work that you and Ewan were able to do, like, after these sort of filming sessions to to go and report a story every day.
You know, we met on, we first met on a Monday.
The first story came out on a Wednesday and another story came out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
And then we released a video on Sunday.
So that happened in a week.
You know, the pace was pretty, pretty intense.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned at the start the role that my husband, Dave Miranda, played.
And that, the reason that that happened in reality was because he was very suspicious of the Guardian from the start.
Not necessarily because they were a particularly corrupted institution, but because of this dynamic I'd mentioned earlier that the government succeeded in 2007 In 2004, in bullying the New York Times from publishing what ultimately came a Pulitzer Prize winning story about how the NSA was spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.
And the only reason they ended up even publishing it at all was because Jim Risen had had enough and was about to go break the story in his book.
and they didn't want to be scooped by their own reporter.
And David was so sensitive to any, like, even slight indication on the part that the Guardian might be willing to be bullied or intimidated that even once they, on Tuesday, said, we just need one more day to talk to the government lawyers and meet with the government we just need one more day to talk to the government lawyers and meet with the government lawyers, I remember David typing on Skype what he wanted me to say to the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Janine Gibson, The Guardian in the US, which is basically, if this story isn't published by tomorrow, we're taking our documents which is basically,
And that's what I mean, like, this kind of...
you know, spirit of how the ethos of how the reporting was done, the kind of determination to do it in the most aggressive way, to keep our fears under control, really came from all of us and it kind of just reinforced each other's resolve.
And I just, I want to ask you about Russia before we watch the third clip that were selected, because obviously that is something that's on people's minds when they hear about what you did and where you are and you can't, you almost can't have any kind of discussion about politics these days without mentioning Russia.
Russia is the place where you have now lived for nine years since 2013.
It is a place that has provided you essentially effective asylum and you often say that that was not a place that you chose to be in.
You were essentially forced to be there.
Why is it that, how is it that you ended up in Russia and why are you still there now?
Yeah, so if you go back and you look at the contemporaneous reporting, this is all very well documented.
But basically, I wasn't supposed to stay in Russia.
It was a transit route, a transit stop en route to Latin America, where because of the openness that South America had shown for whistleblowers in the past, particularly in the case of Julian Assange, where they had said, even though he's being hunted and desperately persecuted, By the United States and the UK and Sweden.
He would be be welcome to go there and I had talked to a lot of lawyers at this point just in a few days, right?
So we had to make decisions very quickly because like you see in the clip, there was a burning fuse where we knew my identity was going to be revealed.
It was very likely.
I would no longer be able to travel onwards.
So immediately we went.
All right.
I have to get out.
To a safe place of asylum, that's going to be Latin America.
We had contacts, we had insurances.
This would probably be our best bet.
I had originally hoped for Europe, but every diplomat that we talked to in Europe basically said, this is not going to work.
They're going to cave.
The government's not going to back you.
Or we'll try, but no promises.
And it was just very clear from the reporting that Everybody in the world knew the United States had raised a gigantic hammer.
And.
For like, you know, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, that all looked like they were positive Bolivia, that all looked like they were positive possibilities.
They had the Caracas Convention, or I can't remember which 1 it is that was on non refoundment.
Basically, they didn't extradite.
Uh, people, and they mutually respected that, so there would be free movement.
And so I had a flight that was laid out.
The tickets have been seen by journalists.
Journalists were on the plane.
We're supposed to go Hong Kong to Russia, Russia, Cuba, Cuba to the final destination in Latin America.
And it was actually, there were forks.
There were a couple of different ones that I could go to based on route.
Did we see any response from the US that was going to stop going to one or the other?
But as soon as I left China, it was leaked.
And the U.S.
government, while I'm in the air with no communications headed to Russia, the U.S.
threw a whole bunch of sort of emergency conferences and was like, stop him.
His pants were just canceled.
You know, exactly the kind of thing that we suspected would happen.
And so I land in Russia and the border guards say, your passport doesn't work.
And I'm like, no, I don't believe this.
And I recall recount the story in my book in great detail.
But we basically got Wi Fi in the business lounge and the terminal.
And I was like, Oh, God, they really have done it.
So then becomes a long period when I'm actually trying quite hard not to stay in Russia.
And if you look back at this period, this is what, you know, none of these critics say I spent 40 days trapped in an airport transit lounge.
Where I applied for asylum in, I think, 21 different countries, and these are documented.
There are public responses from the different countries representatives where they all in places that you would expect to be to stand up for human rights here and whistleblower protection.
Places like France places like Germany, you know, we even went to Italy.
Iceland was a big possibility where you had 1 of 2 responses for the big countries.
They went basically, we won't do this.
We won't agree to this because we're afraid of the.
U.S.
response politically, and we just don't want to get engaged in that.
If you manage to get here, you can apply, no promises, but you don't have a passport.
So, oh, I guess there's nothing that can be done.
Good luck with your life.
And then the small countries that were actually willing to say, we would do this, but we don't believe we can actually protect you because of the U.S.
practice of extraordinary rendition, which is kidnapping.
They just sent a black bag team and they don't go to the courts or anything.
They just snatch somebody up.
They put them in the U.S.
court system or prison ship or whatever.
And U.S.
courts have held that this is not a problem, that they can do this.
I mean, that's a whole other story.
And so now, while all of this is happening, we had the Evo Morales incident that you referred to earlier, where Bolivia, which had been one of these countries that had telegraphed that they would be sort of open to granting the asylum, had their president attend an energy conference in Russia.
And they had basically, you know, heard a rumor or something like that, that I was going to be flying back on the presidential plane.
And even though the President of the United States on camera, then Barack Obama, said, I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get some 29 year old hacker, like literally a week or two earlier.
They closed the entire airspace of Europe, like a wall, to prevent this plane from transiting.
And it was a smaller plane because it's a smaller country, so it hadn't stopped to refuel.
It lands in Austria in the airport.
And the U.S.
ambassador is there to greet it, and they won't let the plane take off again, even though this is a president of a sovereign country, until the U.S.
ambassador gets walked through and says, oh, no, there's no guy on here.
You know, thanks for helping.
You can go now.
And that was the moment when it became clear to everyone, including myself, that even if I got, you know, a promise of asylum from Germany and France, it wouldn't be safe For me to travel there, because you've got to travel over a lot of vassal states on the air path to get there.
They would just close the airspace.
And so that point, I was out of options.
I applied for asylum in Russia.
I was granted it.
And actually, I've been left alone quite remarkably since then, which is really all that I could ask for, given the circumstances.
I remember the week after that happened with you, Morales, I went to the Russian consulate in Rio de Janeiro to get my visa to visit you with Laura.
We ended up filming the last scene from Citizenfour there, but it was also the first time I was able to see you since Hong Kong.
And the Russian consul recognized my name from the application and came out and said to me, look, we understand why the US government wants to arrest Snowden.
We don't support what he did.
We understand why governments need to punish people who leak their secrets.
But please explain to me why they are so insane like this thing they did to Eva Morales' plane is so far outside of they had no idea that you were even on the plane it was like a hunch or like a suspicion and they brought down his plane for that reason alone it was very dangerous what they did and Even the Russians were shocked at just like the extremity of that conduct.
Let me ask both of you, just because this is something that I think about a lot, you know, one of my big concerns before we started the reporting was whether we were going to make the right strategic choices in a way that would generate the attention we thought this story deserved.
I remember feeling a huge amount of responsibility and it just unraveled his life and I was always so worried.
That I was going to do this reporting, the word was going to do the reporting, we would end up with like a segment on Democracy Now and maybe like a five minute hit on Chris Hayes and then that would be the end of the attention and the interest in what we were reporting.
As it turned out, obviously the interest and the impact exceeded at least my best case scenario by many multiples of what I was hoping in terms of attention But 10 years later, in terms of the reform, I think the kind of expectations or the desires we had about the ability to re-establish the capacity for individuals to use the Internet with some degree of privacy, I'm wondering what you think about the impact of the story from that perspective.
ton of attention.
It made people aware.
People debated internet privacy for the first time.
How do you, though, see now the strength of the U.S. and the Western surveillance state and the ability of people to use the internet with privacy as compared to before we started the reporting, Laura?
I mean, you know, I mean, I think that this, what Ed did, I mean, his life kind of captures this historical moment where he experienced the internet as the internet sort of arrived into our cultures.
And I think, as he says, you know, very clearly was motivated by the power of that tool for good, right?
For citizens to communicate.
what an amazing tool the internet is, and how corrupted it's been, how abused it's been by governments and obviously by corporations as well.
So it feels that that's a lost moment, right?
I feel that that's, nobody's, people who grow up today don't have that moment of the internet as a space for free expression.
I mean, it's a space that's corporatized, commercialized, and it's a surveillance tool.
I mean, unfortunately, that's... I do think we, though, have a bit more understanding that there are some... there still are some tools and technologies that do protect people.
I mean, encryption, you know, as of today, still does work, you know, so that is a positive.
And people know the importance of encryption in a way that they didn't before.
So just to follow up a little bit on that, I think a lot of things, one of the things people have forgotten is there was so much momentum in the wake of our reporting, especially about domestic surveillance, that some genuine reform was introduced in the U.S.
Congress, and it was sponsored by Justin Amash, who at the time was perceived as this kind of hard right Tea Party Republican representative from Michigan, this very young, I think he was in his early to mid-30s, who was talking about the internet in ways very similar to the way Ed was.
It's something we have to kind of protect.
It's this crucial innovation.
And he co-sponsored it with John Conyers, the longtime, probably on the furthest fringes of the left wing of the Democratic Party as it gets in terms of mainstream politics, as African-American representative in his 80s at the time, who was a longtime civil as African-American representative in his 80s at the time, who was a longtime civil libertarian, and they built a majority in both of the parties' caucuses, and the Journal of Foreign Policy has an article that you can read right up today
that says, it's the headline, and the Journal of Foreign Policy has an article that you can read right up today that says, it's the headline, How Nancy Pelosi Saved NSA Spying Powers, and it was all about how the Obama White House was vehemently opposed That was a great opportunity to reform, and they had just enough no votes in the Republican and Democratic Party to defeat it.
There's now a controversy, not getting a lot of attention, but some, and I think it deserves more, where the FBI wants to renew one of its most central tools for spying, Section 702, that the NSA also uses.
And there seems to be some resistance, again in both parties, out of concern that the FBI is basically completely out of control in how it spies on American citizens on the internet, basically disregards any of the legal constraints that have been put into place, as minimal as they are.
Do you have any hope or about the ability to at least usher in some real reforms as part of this renewal?
Or do you think it's just gonna, as it always has so far, at least kind of slide through with just enough votes to continue?
Do I have hope in our elected officials on either party?
Not a lot.
I have to say, not a lot.
But I do think we should use this moment to draw attention to it.
I do think we should use this moment to draw attention that it should not be renewed.
Yeah, we're going to do a show on that because I think, you know, once you start using words like Section 702, you can kind of hear the clicks of people turning off a program.
And so, you know, finding ways to make people understand the personal impact that these things have on them is always the challenge, but we have a lot of practice.
It's one of the, you know, kind of central projects, I think, of all of ours over at least the last decade.
Ed, what about you in terms of this question of obviously there was a huge amount of public attention that I think did exceed our expectations.
I remember all the gratification I felt when I would come home, not come home, but come back to your hotel room in Hong Kong after doing more TV interviews than I could count all over the world.
And then I got to see you watching the effects of this reporting on your television.
I always remember being so relieved and happy that you were able to see the impact in terms of the debate.
That your decision had sparked, and it wasn't just on Democracy Now and Chris Hayes, but pretty much every global media outlet on the planet was talking about this for months.
But in terms of the impact that you were hoping to achieve of reestablishing privacy, of diluting state surveillance, how do you see that 10 years later?
Yeah, I mean, look, this was never going to be something like you revealed the documents and like in Hollywood, sort of the sunshine and roses and rainbows the next day.
That's not how the world works.
That's certainly not how government intelligence agencies work.
My desire.
Had been to return public documents, to return public documents to public hands, so that the public could then express their will.
And that will would translate into, for good or bad, into legislation.
But exactly as you summarized before, we saw the opposite happen.
We were doing a lot of polling.
I became very close with the American Civil Liberties Union over the months that would follow.
They were actually paying for private polling to make sure we had the most accurate information about what the American people, and people globally as well in other countries, felt about were these justifiable when you take the government's strongest arguments into account, would they be supported?
And we know the facts.
Actually, the result was no.
People wanted to see a change.
They wanted to see these programs shut down.
They wanted to see this activity and behavior stopped.
Basically, they just wanted the government and its agencies to comply with the law.
And we saw, as you saw, or as you said, legislative efforts in Congress, fairly heroic efforts, to make that possible.
But then what we saw was we saw the executive hijack the process, task someone like, you know, a Nancy Pelosi type, Who was personally implicated, by the way, in the criminal activities that were being revealed and discussed for a long time, because she had previously been top dog on the intelligence committees.
And they basically thwarted the public desires, and they knew what they were doing.
They used proceduralism, they used deception, they used the kind of misinformation and disinformation that's becoming, you know, so talked about as the threat today.
Anything they could To try to bury this, but that's kind of how it works.
And that's the meta angle of this story that you see in that where I'm talking about, you know, the remarkable thing about the early Internet is that you could have a child engage with an expert on equal terms.
And it was the argument that was assessed and valued and measured rather than the identity, because the identity wasn't known.
They had both chosen their own names.
They had both chosen to engage in the conversation.
And, you know, the kid surely nine out of ten times would be wrong, but maybe one time they were right.
They had a good point.
The Internet and governance conversation debate policy has become very identitarians.
The Internet has become very identitarian.
Both corporations and governments heavily pressure these sort of real name, real identity policies, where they want you to put your picture up there.
They want you to put your face up there.
They want you to put your name up there.
And people end up pigeonholed.
They end up filter bubbled into little communities.
And even where they are sort of radical or out there, they're shouting into a small void only occupied by people of like minds.
And this is how the democratic process went sideways.
And this is kind of what's happening or likely to happen with the 702 reform at the end of the year.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's ironic that.
Go ahead.
Let me just interject just a quick question, which is when I started seeing some of the footage from Citizen Ford that Laura took.
And then when I watched the film and then kind of just, you know, had some opportunity to breathe and reflect on what we did in Hong Kong, I ended up realizing that probably half of what we talked about was about the...
The privacy aspect and the surveillance aspect, but probably half of it was about the role of journalism and the importance of transparency.
The fact that if we're going to turn the Internet into this from what it was promised to be, which was this unprecedented tool of liberation into the opposite, which is the Most unprecedented tool of coercion and control through surveillance that it ought to be at least something in a democratic society that we know about that it's not done in secret.
Even unbeknownst to many of our elected officials, we had members of Parliament in the UK and members of Congress in the US saying they had no idea any of this was being done until they learned about it from the reporting that we did that your whistleblowing enabled.
I think people look back at the story and think about it as being about privacy and surveillance, which of course it was, but what about the journalism and the transparency component of it?
That was clearly a pretty big motivating factor for you as well.
Yeah, I mean, I've been saying for 10 years now, like, the reason that I didn't go to the New York Times, it was the fact that they spiked a story one month before an election that would have changed the course of that election, that President Bush had broken the law and spied on every American, violated the Constitution in the most flagrant way.
And they were like, yeah, the White House doesn't want us to do that.
So we're not going to do that.
And this is the New York Times, right?
You would not think to be the most pro-Bush organization, but the reality is the distance between left and right institutionally is not very far.
When you talk social issues, there are differences, right?
When you talk about the kind of thing they put on a bumper sticker, there are differences.
But when you talk about institution, you start talking about money, when you start talking about violence, when you start talking about power.
They're really largely marching in lockstep there.
And what we saw in 2013 and the years after it is that this is not a story about surveillance.
It's a story that involves surveillance.
This is a story about democracy and power, how institutions function, and what we are taught to believe is a free and open society.
But it will not and never can remain a free and open society unless we make it so.
And we must make it so over the objections of government.
And that's something that I think a lot of people don't understand, right?
I've been criticized as a hacker, right, to imply some sort of criminal cast on that.
But what is a hacker, right?
People think like stock photos of some guy in a hoodie hunched over a keyboard, but a hacker is simply somebody who understands the rules of a system better than the people who created it.
Hacks are the product of exploiting the gap in awareness between how the system is believed to function, And how the system functions in fact, and that's what's happened to our political system, not just for the last 10 years, but for the last many, many decades, where the public wants one thing, the public believes one thing.
It's very clear.
There's support for one thing.
But then special interests or corporations or lobbyists or party or both parties want something very different.
Look at this, you know, even just considering the way stock trading is handled for members of Congress.
Everybody in the country is getting poor while they're becoming more rich.
When you look at this, when you look at the, you know, story of 2013, when you look at the reforms that happened and the ones that don't, a lot of people fall into despondency.
They become depressed.
They think there's nothing we could do.
But actually we can and we did.
The important lesson to take away from 2013 is not that, oh, you know, the sort of bad guy was vanquished and everything is good again, because that's not how it works.
This is the work of a lifetime.
This is the work of every lifetime.
If you want a free society, you have to make it that way.
But just like these institutions hacked our government to seize control away from us in important ways.
Small groups of committed people, activists, volunteers, engineers, people who have no political power whatsoever, coordinated and collaborated together to hack the Internet in a positive way, to defeat the very forms of mass surveillance that the government was doing without the public will on a technical level.
And this is the kind of thing Laura is talking about with encryption.
2013, nobody used secure messengers unless they were, you know, cypherpunks, unless they were hackers, unless they were information security.
Or somebody on, like, the US government enemies list like Aura.
I think, let me just interject because it's really true.
You know, obviously, I, like, famously did not know how encryption worked when we first spoke.
It wasn't something I was particularly talented at mastering.
But I remember very well within the first month of the story, or two months after the story broke, Several New York Times journalists, including some of the most well-known investigative journalists who work on the most sensitive national security matters, kind of called me in with an attitude of sort of like, okay, we'll take it over from here.
Why don't you go ahead and give us the archive and we'll go ahead and do the reporting.
And then, you know, when I made very clear that wasn't going to happen, that we were not going to just send them a copy of the archive because they were entitled to it because of the New York Times, it sort of became a kind of like pleading, sort of, can you at least share one or two stories with us?
And as we considered it, you know, I made very clear to them that using the most sophisticated forms of encryption that I had taken like a three-month course in was a prerequisite to even considering that.
And almost none of them knew what encryption was.
Same with reporters at The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
And just the fact now that we can talk about encryption and it's something that people are aware of, people use Signal and purposely seek out.
You know, privacy enhanced means of communicating all came from this reporting.
None of that was true prior to 2013.
I think you two were like among 14 people on the planet that use encryption back then, and now it's something that, you know, is maybe not as common as we want, but infinitely more common than it was back then.
That's absolutely right.
Like, everybody who works in the news nowadays uses encryption.
One of the, actually the only sort of public example of damage that all of us collectively produce as a result of these disclosures that was publicly argued by then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, most famous for lying to Congress, Was that the revelations of 2013 about mass surveillance pulled forward the adoption of strong encryption on the internet by seven years.
And he said this on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Conference to reporters, and he was like, this is like a, you know, terrible thing.
Like, oh no, this is one of the nicest things anyone's ever said about me.
Like, this is a remarkable thing.
You know, we made global communications more secure by seven years.
That's a lot happens in seven years.
Absolutely.
So let's talk about this third clip.
You know, we spent time talking about the significant risks that were in the air from this reporting, not as a means of congratulating ourselves for our great personal courage, but in order to illustrate Just how many tools Western governments have to punish people and to try and intimidate them if you actually do real reporting that undermines their interest, if you expose the lies and illegalities they do in secret.
WikiLeaks was certainly hanging in there the entire time that we were doing this reporting.
The first time you and I met, Laura, was when you came to Rio.
You were working on a film about WikiLeaks at the time and came to interview me as part of that film.
The fact that, you know, they were being persecuted back then was certainly something that was very much on our minds.
And then once we did the reporting, the threats that people like James Clapper were making both privately and publicly, the U.S.
or rather the U.K.
invading the newsroom of The Guardian and forcing them through threats to destroy those computers, although it was something The Guardian I think quite cowardly ended up acquiescing to unnecessarily.
It was a pathetic image to see the Guardian destroying their own computers while government agents stood over them instead of forcing them to go to court and getting an order to force them to do that.
And then the other episode was the detention of my husband, David Miranda, when he had gone to visit EULA in Germany and was traveling back to Rio through Heathrow International Airport and was detained for 12 hours under the terrorism, a terrorism law.
I remember that day very vividly and the only reason I believe he got released was because the Brazilian government under Dilma Rousseff was very aggressive about demanding his release.
It became a big diplomatic scandal between the UK and Brazil.
It was the biggest story in Brazil that the British government obviously picked David in large part because he was Brazilian, you had traveled out of Heathrow, in and out of Heathrow without problems, even though you were actually on the government watch list for the United States.
And so this scene from Citizen Four is when they did release him.
And I went to the airport at 4.30 in the morning to get him.
And there was a huge throng of international media there.
And you had sent somebody to film that scene and it became part of Citizen Four.
Do you want to talk about the clip before we show it?
First of all, sort of going back to sort of the larger context, I mean, like in the work that I do, I mean, I think it's important that it's also the work, you know, that both of you talk about.
The sort of the myth of American exceptionalism, like that.
We go around saying that we care about press freedom, and yet we're trying to put Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life, right?
And the importance of constantly talking about that.
And one of the tools and techniques that the government uses when they want to Target journalism that they don't like or criminalized journalism that they don't like is to use the label of terrorism So I know that very well.
I was put in a terrorist watch list in 2016 after making a film about the war in Iraq and This is what the UK did when it detained David David had come To Berlin to work with me.
I'm not going to go into a lot of details, because that's not something I do often, but it's true that I didn't trust many people.
And I trusted David.
And I wasn't going to trust anyone else.
But I know now, in retrospect, I have no doubt that there weren't multiple intelligence agencies following every step of his travels.
And they were just looking for the right moment to target him.
I'm sure that they were in Berlin.
And I'm not going to speak to the Guardian's decision to route his flight through London, but it's true.
I'd already been there.
And I think it's just a reminder that so many people made this reporting possible, not just the people whose names are out front.
My name, your name, Glenn.
So many people took enormous risks, and David was really took, you know, incredible risk as somebody who wasn't holding a U.S.
passport.
and was taking enormous risks to enable this journalism with no personal benefit and only personal risk.
And I'm forever grateful to him. - All right, let's show this clip. - All right. - All right. - All right. - All right. - All right.
Thank you.
Oh, my God.
Thank you.
David.
OK, OK, OK.
You just have to walk in.
How are you?
Good, good.
I'm totally fine.
I didn't sleep at all.
I couldn't sleep.
I know.
What that really reminds me of is that when that happened,
we both felt an obligation to present this very defiant and fearless posture because we wanted it to be very clear that the attempt to intimidate us and our reporting was not going to work, that we were not in any way, that we were not in any way, uh, uh, Frightened by what had happened.
We weren't bothered by it.
This was something we felt very important to convey And yet over time, you know David started to acknowledge first to me and then to himself that in fact, you know, it was very very traumatizing because And I this is something that I didn't think about at the time and I found it so interesting that I didn't which was that I think if you do hold an American passport as you said Laura You just feel like you're kind of, in a way, protected.
But, you know, he talked about the fact that if you're someone who's not white and you don't have a British or an American passport and you are accused of violating terrorism laws in the UK or the US, the governments have proven that there is no limit on what they will do to you.
And he spent that day, you know, imagining things like being taken to Guantanamo or, you know, not necessarily the most rational things, but with a good component of rationality to them.
And I remember, I'll never forget, the British official called me that day and said, David had been detained under a terrorism law.
The first thing I did was go immediately online and found both of you.
I don't remember in which order.
But I do remember, Ed, that I don't think I've ever seen you as angry as you were that day, neither before nor since, because there was just something about it that was so, you know, it really revealed, you know, it really revealed, it Exactly the reasons why these governments can't be trusted with these kinds of powers and just like the abusive and thuggish nature of what they will do.
Like why was that something that, I mean you've talked about, you know, the admiration that you've had for David many times, but why was that day in particular something that was just kind of very emotional for you?
First off, I remember getting sort of a live update from you and when David was finally released and you had communications and the breakdown of what had happened and how it was handled.
I mean, I was just extraordinarily impressed by his courage, which was almost otherworldly.
At one point, you know, he's in interrogation with terrorism officers.
Lord knows how many spies in a cell in Heathrow.
And, you know, they're like, oh, you know, do you want some water or something like that?
And the guy's got to be parched.
And he's like, I don't trust your water.
And the message that sends and, you know, just the human the human desire to escape the situation, just even for five minutes, the pressure to say, yes, please, you know, give give me something.
He didn't give an inch.
You know, that's an example that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
But it's you say you this is something that I had to deal with many times when I was like, you know, what are they going to do with my family and people traveling to meet with me?
It was just so greasy and underhanded to intercept somebody who was a family member of a journalist, you know, working on this, who was directly traveling in the service of a journalistic task, in a journalistic role, you know, on a ticket that's funded by a newspaper.
And they knew this.
They knew this, but they didn't care.
And that was the point, like, the whole thing where they, like, they notified the White House in advance.
They're clearly coordinating.
A decision was made at the very highest levels because they knew the implications of this.
And they went, what can we get?
How far can we push?
Will this person cooperate?
And is this something that we want to repeat?
And it's important for people to understand, I think, the power of not cooperating and sending the example, this is not going to go down the way you think it is.
And I think the world owes David a debt of gratitude.
He's a remarkable man.
A good friend, but most importantly, he was a good person who did good work for all of us.
So let me just as kind of the last question, I just we talked about him a couple of times, but I do want to conclude by talking about Daniel Ellsberg, because this was somebody who, for me, was one of my childhood heroes.
And the fact that I was able to become a friend of his and then
Work with him at his side and at yours, both of yours, in the organization we created back in 2011, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which originally was about trying to break the blockade that the government had pressured corporations like Bank of America and MasterCard and Visa and Amazon from essentially excluding Wikileaks from the financial system to prevent them from fundraising an incredibly dangerous power to give the government
extraditially with no charges just to cut off their funding.
And now it's expanded to become, you know, a very broad-based press freedom group.
But the ability to have gotten to work with Daniel Ellsberg for me was one of the great honors of my life.
I kind of consider him the pioneer, like the grandfather of modern-day whistleblowing.
You know, this kind of large-scale disclosure of the way the government keeps secrets in order not to protect American people but to protect themselves from the lying and the law-breaking that they do.
Clearly, he, I think I can speak on behalf of us, inspired us in all sorts of ways.
I know he did for me.
He He, you know, is widely reported to have terminal pancreatic cancer.
He's at the kind of end stage of his life.
So, both in terms of like what he meant for the story, but also just like the impact that he had on the world, Laura, what do you, what do you see as his kind of legacy?
Daniel Ellsberg is, you know, the example of, you know, the For a whistleblower doing the right thing, you know, somebody who was exposed to knowledge that he knew that the public had a right to know.
And, you know, and I do think often that it shouldn't be the case that whistleblowers like Ed and Dan and Chelsea have to risk their lives for us to know what we've learned from them.
That we know that our elected officials actually have the protection.
They could go and read anything into the public record and face no criminal consequences because of their position as elected officials.
And yet they refuse to do the right thing.
For instance, anyone who was elected in Congress could release the classified torture report.
Just release it to the public, read it into the public record, and they don't.
And it's really, it's not a good sign of society that people like Ed and Dan have to take the risks that they do when we have people in elected leaders, so-called leaders, who could do that and face very little consequences criminally.
Yeah, just along those lines before I ask you that same question, I do think it's worth remembering, first of all, before Daniel Ellsberg went to the New York Times and gave those documents to the New York Times, he tried to get senators to use their constitutional immunity
that essentially says that members of Congress can never be held accountable for anything they say on the floor of the House or the Senate, to read the Pentagon Papers into the record knowing they could not be held accountable, and they refused to do it and forced him into the position of committing with the government-regarded felonies, You don't?
almost went to prison for it.
And there was something very similar, which is two members of Congress, Ron Wyden, and I forget the other Democratic senator now.
I don't know if you guys remember, you can tell me, but Ron Wyden went around for, what's that?
Yeah, Senator Udall.
I said Udall?
Yeah, exactly.
Senator Udall went around for two or three years, hinting and like winking and saying, oh, if you only knew what the NSA was doing in terms of their interpretation of the Patriot Act and what powers they've claimed for themselves, this would shock you.
But they would never say what it was, even though they had that same power to go onto the Senate floor and talk about it without any consequences at all, leaving it to Ed to risk his liberty, Which he did.
He could have easily ended up in prison.
Probably the odds were overwhelmingly that he would have, but instead to end up, you know, now nine years in exile.
Might still.
And you still might, exactly.
And that risk isn't still there.
Hopefully it's not going to happen, but they left it to you to go and do.
And exactly as Laura said, it is the failure ultimately of people in power that Leave it to ordinary citizens who are defenseless to go and do what they should be doing themselves.
That's how Danny Alsberg came very close to life in prison.
That's how Ed did as well.
So in terms of Danny Alsberg, who I definitely see as your predecessor, he always said that he regarded people like you and Chelsea Manning and Jelena Saenz His people he was waiting for his whole life to kind of emerge.
People who did exactly what he did in the same spirit.
He's long been one of your most vocal defenders from the beginning.
How do you see his legacy and his life at this stage?
I mean, Dan is a dear, dear friend of mine.
But when you scope out of the personal, the remarkable thing about Daniel Ellsberg is he became an archetype.
He established the archetype.
There will probably never be another Daniel Ellsberg, but there will be many, many people.
Uh, who follow his example, and I am absolutely one of them.
I do not believe I could have done what I did without the example of Daniel Ellsberg.
When I was agonizing over what to do, should I say anything, how should I manage this, I watched a documentary, which is a beautiful callback to Laura's involvement, called The Most Dangerous Man in America.
And just seeing his example, you know, how the White House villainized him, said all the worst things.
They immediately went after him.
They used the media.
They used the dirty tricks.
It provided just the bare outlines of a template that I would continue to flesh out, look at, and revisit, and poke at, and modernize.
Something to work from.
A sketch of how it should be.
What are people at their best?
and daniel alsberg when he released the pentagon papers was a man at his best um and you know one of the things that that struck me you know when we talked about the russia thing and everything like that uh that was when everybody was was uh starting to freak out about that for the very first time in the beginning and saying you know i should come home i should come home i should go to the courts uh
Daniel Ellsberg came forward, and he had never spoken with me at that time, and he said, no, absolutely not.
The United States of 2013 is not the United States of the 1970s.
Our court system provides no meaningful defense against this.
He'll be convicted.
The story will be shut down.
He won't be able to argue his case.
The jury won't be able to decide the central questions.
The truth won't even be allowed to be spoken in the court because the government will object and the judge will sustain it.
And that's how the system works today.
And I think the most Consequential thing about Dan, his life and his example, is that he allowed us to scope out from that individual to look at the systemic problem.
Through his example, he actually provoked the state into revealing itself for what it is.
Which is an entity that will stop at nothing, frankly, to preserve its own power.
It's not about national security.
It's not about homeland security.
That's rhetoric.
It's about state security, which is a very different thing from public safety.
He taught me that, and I think we'll be learning from his example for a very long time.
Absolutely.
And from yours.
And so I just like on a closing note want to say, you know, I went into journalism to do stories like the one we did together where, you know, you fulfill your function.
You as a citizen, Laura and I as journalists in this case, where you discover deceit and abuse of power by the most powerful people in the society, and then you use journalism and whistleblowing in order to expose it to inform the public of things that should never have been kept from them.
In the beginning I do think it ushered in a huge amount of change even though the NSA is still there's the building it's not collapsed in on itself they are still spying you know I think the example that you set at as a whistleblower that the film inspired that we were able to do in terms of reestablishing the spirit of what journalism is supposed to be about is, you know, one of the great honors of my life.
It's one of the things of which I'm proudest 10 years later, more so than ever.
And the fact that, you know, even though we did, as Laura said, do it with a large number of people without whom it really would not have been possible, it began with the three of us in that hotel room in Hong Kong.
And I'm very honored that I got to do it together with the two of you people who I really admire and whose integrity and courage I have immense respect for.
And so I'm thrilled we got to do that together.
I'm thrilled we got to spend this 10 year anniversary together talking about it and talking about the implications of it.
And I really just want to thank you for taking the time.
It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope we can do it again in 10 more.
Absolutely, our 20 year anniversary.
It's kind of like those high school reunions where every 10 years everyone gets a little older, but you still forge ahead with it.