Annie Machon - Whistleblower

Full transcript: Annie Machon on London Real

8:50 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. We’re sponsored today by Exrain, who are the makers of way better protein powder and check those, check both of those guys out. On to the show, my host today is entrepreneur Colin Pyle, who comes to London from Toronto. He’s also my co-host in our new hit series Silicon Real.

9:33 There we go. 13th episode filmed yesterday. We got VCs, we got founders of startups. It’s a lot of fun, so check that out. Thanks for being here, Nos.

9:41 You’re doing double duty again this week. Hey, this is interesting one for sure, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. It is. So our guest today is Ms Annie Machon.

9:50 You are a former intelligence officer for MI5, which is the UK Security Service. You resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle on spies’ incompetence and crimes. You are now a writer, a commentator, a public speaker on issues like the war on terrorism, the war on drugs and the war on the internet. Got to hear about this. In 2012 you became a director of LEAP, which is law enforcement against prohibition.

10:12 Annie, welcome. It’s a real pleasure having you here. Well, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Oh, awesome.

10:18 You know your emails are coming to me all with PGP in front of them, and you’re the only person that does that, and, like, that was the first thing I noticed. I showed Colin, and I was like, Okay, so I don’t know anything about that. Okay, well, so PGP. Okay, well, let’s ask. Tell us, tell us about why you send me emails on that PGP, and we’ll just cover that quickly, and then I want to get more into your story.

10:39 Sure. Well, I’m surprised. I’m the only person you’ve ever seen use it. It’s shame on everybody. They should be using it routinely.

10:45 Now it’s the only way to protect yourself and ensure you have any sort of privacy against baddies like the NSA and GCHQ. So PGP stands for pretty good protection. I use an open source form of it, which is actually GPG, and it’s the one form of email protection that you can get and download for free, which most of the geeks seem to still trust as reliable against snooping from the NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. So many of us now are beginning to use it in our circles.

11:11 Actually, some of them been using it for decades, because it’s very important, and we’re just trying to spread the word about that. It’s not the easiest thing to install, but once you have it, it is impossible for them to crack. So I think I would encourage everyone to Google open PGP. No, don’t Google you start page to protect your is, but have a look, and you can download it for free from the internet, and the principle of it is that it’s open source, which means all the source code is developed as a hob as a hobby by geeks, and they put it out there for free, and because it’s all there to be read, the geeks can check what is actually in the source code, so every time the NSA tries to put some nasty little back door into it, they eradicate it.

11:50 So, and of course they’re checking it a lot these days after the Edward Snowden story so it’s very, very safe. Okay, so it’s policed by kind of the own people. The people out there can kind of police the code and make sure there’s no funny business. That’s the whole point about open source. Yes, and that’s why it remains safe, and it’s also asymmetric, so you have a public key which other people can download, and then you have your own encrypted personal private key, and it’s only when those two mesh that you can get the protection.

12:14 When I see people with, you know, their PGP numbers, and it’s a public piece, and then I’m thinking, how can I send them an encoded message when they have given the code to the public? But you’re saying there’s another private piece, then those combined makes them able to read my message coded. Absolutely. So you publish your public key, and you keep your private key just yourself, and then when someone downloads your public key, you can sign and get it all linked up somehow.

12:40 I always feel sound like a bit of a fraud talking about this because I’m not actually a geek myself. Right. It’s not the easiest thing to install at this stage. The open source community are trying to simplify it. However, there is this phenomenon, I don’t know if you’ve heard of crypto parties, globally.

12:54 No, I… You just told us about it. Tell us about them. Well, these are amazing. They were started by a woman called Asher Wolf in Australia only last year, and this is where you get a bunch of geeks volunteering their services and holding a crypto party in their local city, and they say, anyone who’s interested, bring your laptop and we will help you set up encryption, we will help you secure your laptop against snooping.

13:15 So these have just exploded across the planet now. In every major city across the West, pretty much you can find a crypto party at some point. So I’d advise anyone to go along if they’re feeling a bit twitchy about trying to get secure themselves and getting it wrong. Then there are plenty of geeks from this open source community who will be very happy to help. In fact, there might well be another one coming up in London at the end of the month.

13:35 So I advise everyone to go. We should attend that and check it out for Silicon Real. You know, we have a large audience that’s in the States, and you know they watch James Bond movies, but I don’t know if they know the difference between some of the different organizations, and I was wondering if you could just quickly break down the definitions of MI5, MI6, and now GCHQ, which I didn’t even know that much about. Yeah, please. Well, we have three primary intelligence agencies in the UK.

13:59 MI5 is where I used to work, and that’s the UK domestic Security Service, which used to focus on counter-espionage, counter-subversion, the political stuff, and then they took on an increasing amount of counterterrorism as well from the 1990s onwards. They are known officially as, or used to be, as UKSS, because that’s what the UK Security Service stands for. One of our German colleagues pointed out it wasn’t terribly nice name. Okay. From the SS and the Germany.

14:24 Okay, now I get it. So they were supposedly just working to protect national security within the UK, but of course, as the global terrorism phenomenon has exploded, literally, their work is increasingly international as well. Then there is MI6, or Secret Intelligence Service, and they are an international intelligence gathering agency. So they’re the sort of James Bond wannabes. They were just supposed to try and plant spies abroad in companies or embassies or whatever and get the raw material back and then send it into MI5 for analysis.

14:55 And then you have GCHQ, which is Government Communications Headquarters, which is based down in Cheltenham, which used to be the most secretive agency, and now, of course, it’s very much in the public consciousness after Edward Snowden, and they are the snoopers. They came out of Bletchley Park, and they will Hoover up all our electronic communications, and they are very unaccountable, should we say. Okay, is that roughly equivalent to FBI, CIA and NSA, or are the lines getting so blurred these days that it’s really hard to say?

15:26 Almost. Yeah, GCHQ is definitely very partnered up with the NSA. In fact, they’ve had decades-long complete sharing capability under a program called Echelon, which meant that they could snoop on each other’s citizens, each other’s countries, without any warrant, without any oversight, and then share it with each other, so they get around any sort of democratic oversight. MI6, yes, very much the CIA. In fact, the CIA was modeled on them.

15:49 MI5 is slightly different, because they don’t have police capability. They are, they used to be more counter-intelligence, counter-subversion, so they’re not quite the same as the FBI. In fact, we have the Serious Organized Crime Agency here, which is really the UK FBI. So MI5 is unique, but they’re all, you know, a very British model. They’ve been around for 100 years.

16:07 They evolved with no oversight for the first 80 years of their life. There was nothing, no MPs could ask questions about them. They didn’t officially exist, and they were there to stop Russians and to stop political subversives. Then, of course, that threat went away, and they were casting round for work. So rather than our governments say, well, okay, what what are the threats to our national security and how can we best protect the UK’s national security, they said, we have this agency which has got free time on its hands.

16:33 Let’s find them new work, whether or not they’re actually up to that job. So you get these old spooks then having to move into counterterrorism, which is very, very different, where you know fast-paced investigative activities, and you have, in the old days, you had to gather evidence and put people on trial and things like that. And they, you know, they had trouble trying to adapt. Plus, because they were so secretive, it was a bit of a sort of misfit democratically, not, you know, if they’re trying to police people and put people on trial but there’s no real oversight, like you have with the police.

17:01 So it’s a very British mess. Is the short answer. Wow. You know, it’s interesting. Now, because we’ve had Edward Snowden, we’ve had him kind of on the run, I guess.

17:09 Now he’s been given asylum, maybe temporarily, in Russia, and I know you probably feel a bit… I don’t know what the right word is. You feel similar to the way he might have felt, because you were kind of on the run there for a while in ’96, and you had to leave the country. And I was just wondering what your perspective is on Snowden. I know it’s a big question, and the way it’s kind of played out in the last three months, and if your opinions have changed since the first information came out?

17:34 I think my opinions have strengthened along the same line, actually. But yes, he’s the only other intelligence whistleblower I’m aware of who came out and preemptively went on the run before the story broke in the media. Most other whistleblowers out themselves, you know, and then get the story out, or they get caught for leaking. So it did bring back a lot of memories and the tension of trying to flee a country and get through the border controls and get on that plane, and then finally you’re in the air and you’re safe, is quite something to live through.

18:01 Is this from you flying London to Paris when you made that first jump? We were flying London to Amsterdam, actually. It was about the last flight out of the UK on a bank holiday weekend that we could find. Okay, so we were lucky to get out when we did, and that was only about 12 hours ahead of the story breaking. So it was all very, you know, near the knuckle.

18:17 So yeah, I feel a lot of empathy for what he’s been through, in terms of what he’s done I think he’s done… He’s planned it very, very carefully, and he’s been very strategic about how he’s released the information, chosen the information, released it, and then argued about why he’s doing it. And he’s been very clear about that. You know, he would die for his country. He wants to try and improve the way his country operates within its own boundaries and protect its citizens, but he also wants the global population to know how they are being abused as well by this global surveillance infrastructure.

18:47 And the fact that he said his one fear, right up front, was that what he had done would change nothing. I think says a lot, because he really wants to affect that change for public good. So I think I just get the sense he probably has looked at other whistleblowers’ stories and experiences, and he’s learned from our mistakes. So I think he’s played it very carefully. I mean, I’ve called him whistleblower 2.0, but I think he’s way out there, actually.

19:10 He’s very ahead of the game. Yeah. Did he have help, do you think? Did he have coaching from, you know, the WikiLeaks people, or Assange, or anyone, or do you think this was his own masterminded plan as far as how to release the information? I think my understanding is that it was a solo effort, at least to begin with.

19:25 My sense is that he spent a lot of time anting over whether or not he should do it. From what he said publicly, which is very little, and that he chose the material. He thought very strongly in the public interest, and he plotted his way around doing it. You know, he spent months trying to identify a really good journalist to work with and he did. I mean, Glenn Greenwald is a very, very good journalist with a high-profile track record on the subjects that Snowden wanted to talk about was the Guardian.

19:52 Is that the one? Well, you went to Greenwald first. I mean Greenwald has different columns on different places, but yes, obviously he leaked in the Guardian, but I think that process of identifying the right journalist to work for shows that there was months of planning. And then we know that he emailed Glenn, I think, around Christmas time last year, and it took months for the whole thing to build up. So he would have been on his own at that point, wondering what to do, wondering, you know, not being able to talk to anybody or confide in anybody.

20:17 So very, very isolating. Obviously, then, once the story broke, then Greenwald has been very supportive and has the fire in his belly to fight for his source. And obviously WikiLeaks has a sort of high-tech cond, a publisher for whistleblowers is really very keen to help protect him as much as they can with their capabilities at the moment. So I think those first few months must have been terrifying, to be on his own, knowing that if he’s caught if anything slips out, he could face the rest of his life in prison, with none of the information out there.

20:45 So that was that. That was me. So frightening for him. Well, why a UK journalist? Is there a reason you think he didn’t go to the US, or do you think he might not have even trusted the US sources, or the electronics to get to that source.

20:57 Well, he is a very capable geek. So, you know, I think he’s played that very well as well. He knew his way around the electronic surveillance. No, Glenn is American. He’s a human rights lawyer turned activist, turned journalist, and he’s based in Rio.

21:11 So it’s just, he happens to be a columnist on the Guardian newspaper in London, but the Guardian also has offices in New York and elsewhere. But I think, I mean, I’ve said for years when I’ve done lectures about how do you blow the whistle, that the one way that journalists can be picked by a potential whistleblower is to have the right profile. You, we will, we spent months looking at papers and seeing who might be someone good to work with, what the right profile might be.

21:34 I think that’s what he did. So I think it’s more the fact it was Greenwald himself, because he’s been very outspoken in support of WikiLeaks. He’s been very outspoken against the erosion of our civil liberties and things like the Patriot Act in America. And because he’s got that legal and journalistic profile, and he’s a fighter, I think, that’s why Snowden reached out to him. So it has to be trust, and then he also has to have credibility as a journalist.

21:57 Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, there might be other hopeful whistleblowers sitting behind their desks in the CIA or MI6 or whatever, now, and they will be going through the same process and being very careful about who they select, and also how they communicate with them. Did any of the information that Snowden reveal surprise you at all? Or was this, like, I’ve heard a lot of people come out with the “I told you so.”

22:19 We had been talking about this a lot. People on The Joe Rogan Show had been talking about this, and I had listened with one ear, like a lot of the public, and just dismissed it. But were you surprised by anything? Not really. I mean, as you say, everyone suspected what was going on, but to have the proof to, you know, have it really rammed up in your face, I think, is still shocking.

22:39 The sheer scale of it as well. But I mean, of course I was more aware, the most, about the sort of capabilities they have. And one of the things that I remember from the good old days in the 1990s was this Echelon program, which was the NSA, CIA, and also Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, all sharing their SIGINT, their electronic surveillance capabilities, and working their way around each of their democratic oversight processes by using Echelon. So I was aware of that.

23:07 I suppose the updated version, and the sheer scale and capability which the internet offers the spies, is still quite shocking to have it confirmed. And then more articles have come out where, you know, the NSA has shown that they can break a lot of these encryption technologies, where they can go through a lot of things. They’ve done it through wiretaps and court orders, and they’ve had all these different ways the NSA getting this information. Well, also that, but also I think the other thing that was vaguely shocking to me as a Brit was quite how far up the ass of the NSA, GCHQ, had crawled.

23:36 Okay, does that really surprise you? I mean, you worked for MI5 for a long time. Isn’t that the history of the collaboration? We saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. We know there’s a long history of them being constantly supplying information to the Americans and then not really getting a lot in return.

23:51 Called “special relationship.” Yeah, I know. True, I was aware of that, but I think just the fact that information’s now come out showing how the scale of the funding that the NSA is putting into GCHQ, to show the internal reports that demonstrate how focused GCHQ senior management are on providing the information that the NSA wants, not what GCHQ and the British government might require for British national security. That really shows that we are just a vassal state, and that GCHQ is just doing the bidding of its paymasters.

24:21 And I think that’s shocking as well, because if they are there to protect our national security, our national sovereignty, and they’re focusing on the priorities of the NSA, then how is that helping British sovereignty? It’s not. So I think that’s little bits like that. I find, the confirmation again is shocking. Right.

24:38 It’s interesting, because geopolitics are fascinating, and, you know, the fact that the UK always had this special relationship with us is because it’s an island nation. It, you know, it doesn’t want to see Europe united. We’ve seen what that happens. It’s dangerous. They’re always going to be allied to the US.

24:51 The US is a big global power. I mean, it’s great when people say, “Tony Blair, stop, you know, stop being in the back pocket of the US, but is there any choice really for the British government than to be heavily allied with the US, you know because they have got huge powers like France and Germany in the EU to contend with, maybe not militarily, but economically. I mean, is part of that understandable or not? The expression you’re giving me, I’m guessing not.

25:15 I think historically it is understandable. After what happened in the Second World War, and also the fact that the UK was excluded from the first round of the EU, you know, the old European Economic Community. So of course they’re going to buddy up with the US, because it gives them a seat at the top table still, and the fact that they are the only country that can supply the sort of capability that GCHQ and MI6 and MI5 can, in that so-called special relationship, allows them to feel that they still have a major role to play globally.

25:44 You know, the establishment still, I think, to this day can’t really fathom that we’re not really a global player, that we’re second tier, that we lost the Empire almost a century ago, so they’re trying to hang on to past glory by hanging on to the US coattails. The other option would have been to integrate more with Europe, of course, but that opportunity is gone. So, and it probably isn’t going to happen. Where do we go from here? I mean, I talked to people I know in the States, and they had this kind of a shrug thing that with the information it was a big shock.

26:09 It was a shock to me. I mean I was like, Jesus, every Gmail I’m typing. And, but a lot of them are just like, yeah, there’s not much we can do about it, and they’ve kind of rolled on. What, what do you think we go from here? We’ve got all this new information.

26:20 How do we behave different, or what do we do different as citizens? You know, got to be smarter. We have to be. Okay. Get teched up and protect ourselves, because we can’t guarantee our governments are going to protect our privacy, and, you know, the right to privacy was put in place in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, straight after the Second World War, to stop the abuses of Nazism, to stop the abuses of totalitarianism.

26:39 And we seem to forget and think that human rights are a luxury. They’re not. They’re fundamental, and privacy is one of them. And the reason they’re so important now is, you know, many people say, ‘Oh, I’ve got nothing. I’ve done nothing wrong.

26:50 I’ve got nothing to hide.’ But that’s bogus, because we know from the lessons of history that what you’re doing today might still be legal but tomorrow might change the laws, and it’s not so suddenly you might be out there waving a placard as a, you know, part of an occupied protest or environment protest, thinking I’m exercising my democratic rights, then they change the law. Suddenly you’re defined as a domestic extremist or terrorist, and we all know how terrorists can be treated now.

27:13 You don’t have any rights so the goalposts can be shifted very easily. We saw how that worked in the run-up to Nazi Germany in the 1930s you know, the journalists, the trade unionists, the communists, the Jews, and so it went on, and that can happen in any country, and I have to look at the shredding of all our civil liberties in both the US and the UK since 9/11. What we’re looking at now is a de facto police state. You know, all the laws are in place, they’re just not being applied to most citizens yet.

27:40 So I think it’s not a case of having anything to hide. It’s having a case that I have a right to privacy, and I can’t guarantee my government will uphold that right. Therefore, I need to take the steps to do it, because if I don’t have privacy, I can’t freely read or watch information on the internet without them knowing what I’m reading or watching. I can’t freely say what I think to my contacts without them listening, and I can’t, I just don’t have the freedom of thought, therefore, to put together new ideas.

28:06 So I begin to self-censor, and then once you start self-censoring because you’re frightened of what the authorities are picking up, how does the argument you’ve got nothing to hide still work, right? Then it is a police state, and then you are, and then Big Brother’s watching, and yeah, your life is completely controlled by your own paranoia or by your own fear. Yeah, exactly. So you know in order to have freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, all those basic rights that we spent hundreds of years fighting for in the Western World, in Europe, we need free media, and I don’t mean, you know, the Daily Mail or the BBC.

28:36 I mean the internet is our free media. That’s what we need. It’s fundamental. I was trying to explain this concept to someone in the States, and they’re like, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ that usual story, and I was like, all right, well, they’re going to record everything you’ve done, say, for the next 15, 20 years, and say at some point you become an activist, or say you run for political office, and someone doesn’t like you who has the NSA connections they don’t even have to go public about that email you sent, or about that affair you had, or about that website you went on.

29:01 All they have to do is send you a private message and say, look, we have this information, we can make it public, or you can just shut up, get out of the race, go do your separate ways. Absolutely. And then that’s a lot of power. Yeah, or you might be an activist when you’re younger, and then, you know, further down the line you’ve grown up and you a nice corporate job and all the rest of it, and suddenly that group becomes deemed to be a terrorist group or something, and, oh my God, you were a member of a terrorist group when you were younger.

29:26 So you know, these things can follow you. And if that sounds fanciful, I mean, look how they treated the Occupy movement, both in the City of London, where a leaked police document was given to Occupy showing that they were being deemed to be a domestic extremist or terrorist group, and this was a letter that the police sent out to all the banks in the area, so Occupy could have been arrested under the terrorist legislation if they chose to, and again, you know, in New York we saw the same thing, where suddenly CCTV cameras were everywhere, monitoring their every move, and all their information was scooped up. So just because you’re out there protesting the banks doesn’t mean you know you can’t be black-bagged, potentially.

29:59 Yeah. And I walked around and saw all those protests, and, yeah, there wasn’t really anything extremist or violent going on there. It was literally an occupied movement, and I tried to. It seemed to be a shift, a mindset, are trying to demonstrate. You, yeah, it’s tough.

30:12 Like, I find people are so busy in their lives and there’s so much on mind, like me talking, you know, about my own life. And so I think that way often I’m just like, I got nothing to hide right now, and it’s quite encompassing on on a person’s life to take the steps to make sure that no one’s watching, and actually it’s not that difficult. So I have to go to one of these crypto will be the simplest way to do it, and once you’ve got it set up, then it’ll just run, so it won’t impede your life at all.

30:42 So it’s fine. Yes, it’s just taking that first step, having the awareness that there are requirements to do this, you know, understanding the importance of privacy, and then doing it, and then live as you would before, and that’s it. Yeah, it’s like any human right. When you have it for so long, I think you forget it, and then you don’t realize that it’s a crucial part of living in a free world, and and it, it’s something that you only realize when it comes to bite you.

31:03 Right? Because I think if you just kept going, and for the next 50 years I never went into politics or a big CEO job or anything like that, then maybe nothing would happen. Do you know what I mean? If you’re lucky. But if the fist room…

31:15 Well, exactly. I know, but it’s something that, you know, today’s actions, the reaction doesn’t happen today. It happens down the road, and I think people often put those in the back of their minds. Well, let me explain what it’s like to live with no privacy, because I have, after the whistleblowing years, we went on the run around Europe and then lived in exile in Paris for two years, and during those years it was a huge story, exposing the crimes of MI6 and MI5, and David Shayler, my former partner, was in the newspapers all the time.

31:41 It was a story that ran and ran, and we knew we were being watched, so we had a flat where we couldn’t assume that the rooms in our flat weren’t bugged, including our bedroom, where we couldn’t assume that our communications were not intercepted. In fact, we knew they were, because sometimes they played up and we caught them out. So you can’t even have a word with your mother, for example, who’s upset about something, because everything is being recorded.

32:06 And this is late ’90s. This isn’t communism in the ’70s, this is very fairly recent. Yeah. So, you know, we, I would have, if something happened with a family, I’d have to spend hours running around the locality with telephone cards in order to find different public phone boxes, so I could just speak to my mother with privacy. That’s assuming that her phone wasn’t bugged as well.

32:26 So there’s that, and then there’s also the sense that Your friends can be reporting back on you. So for example, we know a couple were turned. They were forced to report back on us, because they were caught out doing stuff, minor stuff. So it’s this sort of awareness that you have no privacy at all is very corrosive to the human spirit. And, sure, we were in an unusual position then, we’d blown the whistle and we’d taken on the authorities, knowing what to expect.

32:51 But this is the position that we’re all in now, whether we’re doing anything wrong or not. So it’s just that corrosiveness of it. I think it is until you have experienced it, you don’t realize quite how bad it is. Can you give us a little bit about your background? I know you told the story a million times, but for people that don’t know what happened with you, can you give us kind of the summary, potted history?

33:10 Yes. I worked in MI5, an intelligence officer from 1991 to 96. How did they recruit you? I wanted to be a diplomat, so they sent me a Ministry of Defence letter saying there may be other jobs I find more interesting. Okay, was that based on your background and your qualifications?

33:24 Do you think, probably yes. I mean, I was Cambridge and Classics, so there were a lot of classicists in the spies. For some, they like recruiting from our. Yeah, yeah. So I went along, and I got recruited over a period of 10 months.

33:37 I wasn’t interested to begin with, because at that point, in 1990, they had a stinking reputation. There had been a whole series of spy scandals in the ’80s, including subverting the miners’ strike and Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, bestselling book, and things like that. So I wasn’t interested, but they were shifting their area of work to counterterrorism, and they said that they didn’t do political stuff after the Cold War was over, and they had to obey the laws, and blah, blah, blah.

34:00 So anyway, it sounded good. Eventually, after 10 months, I started working there, and I joined. And then my partner, ex-partner David Shayler, joined soon after we met, and got together, and we worked there for six years on the political stuff, which they said they no longer did. Irish terrorism, international terrorism. And the stuff we saw going wrong included files on government ministers, which, of course, is a problem, because it goes back to, they have information that can then be used to pressure the ministers.

34:26 Illegal phone taps, IRA bombs that could and should have been prevented, then weren’t, and people died, and then MI5 lied about it to cover up to government. Innocent students going to prison for a terrorist operation they didn’t commit in London, and then MI6 funding al-Qaeda in Libya in illegal operation to try and assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1996, and this went wrong. Innocent people died. It was illegal under UK law, and that’s what broke the camel’s back.

34:56 So we decided to resign and go public. So you were close, and then the Libya thing, you were like, I don’t want to be a part of this organization anymore? Very much. It was sort of incremental stages, and as you move between different departments, you think, okay, that’s an old historic department, perhaps the others are better. Okay, this manager is appalling, perhaps the next section, but things kept going wrong and escalating, and many of, many of us left around the same time.

35:16 I mean our intake was flooding out that year. They had record numbers, because everybody hated what they were seeing. Most of them couldn’t go, you know, go public because they had children or mortgages or whatever. So we did, and David had some journalistic experience before he’d been a spy as well, so he sort of knew that world a bit better, and he approached a newspaper. There was a very slow sort of courtship, because they distrusted each other, and finally the story broke in 1997.

35:43 We went on the run the day before it broke, and literally on the run around Europe for a month, and then I went back and was arrested, and our flat was torn up by the police and everything, and then David’s brother and his best friends, and journalists, and students, widen ever out, were also arrested, because of this case. Then we had a year living in hiding in France, then they arrested David and tried to extradite him from Paris to the UK, and they failed, but he went to prison then, and then we had two more years in Paris, which is lovely. So worst places to be on.

36:15 Yeah, exactly. If you’re going to exile yourself and go to Paris, and then he came back voluntarily in 2000 to stand trial for breach of the Official Secrets Act, and two years over, two years after that, finally got in front of a jury, and of course was convicted, because what they did, they had a whole series of pre-trial hearings which shut down what he could say in the courtroom, so he couldn’t say anything in his own defence, why he’d done what he’d done or anything, so of course he was found guilty. So that was the story, really.

36:41 What was more shocking, actually, in a way, I mean, it’s bad enough for him to go to prison, but was the media coverage of it, because the judge made a formal ruling at the end of the court case, as they always do, which is, you know, Shayler did what he did in the public interest. There was no financial motivation, no lives were put at risk, and yet the headlines the next day from the journalists in the courtroom said precisely the opposite. It’s like, ‘Shayler sells agent lives down the river for money,’ which is like, wh…

37:05 So how long, how, what was his sentence? He was facing six years max, but he got six months, actually. Okay, I have to. I did a very good mitigation plea for him, in fact it was the only time either of us could say, in the whole bloody legal process, why we had done what we’d done. So I think that helped, but yeah, it was difficult, and he spent quite a long time in Belmarsh, which is quite rough, you know, the high-security prison.

37:28 Okay. In retrospect, would you have done it again? Did you expect that, pardon my French, s*** storm to happen or not? We sort of did. The slight problem was timing, because it took so long to get the newspaper to start even running the most low-level stories in the summer of 1997, after this very slow courtship that the story broke.

37:49 In trying to think of the date now, July 24th, and as expected, what David was expecting was there would be a s*** storm. There would be pushback from certain press, and other press would call for an inquiry, and he also expected the government to injunct him, take out an injunction against him and the media, and they did, which of course meant the s*** storm grew, because all the media then said, why are you doing this, you can’t gag us with a free media. And, that was great, and suddenly we had a lot of support, and there was a push for an inquiry, and a push for him to give his evidence to the government, and for there to be a proper look at what the spies were getting up to.

38:24 And then we woke up the next morning to the news on the press that Princess Diana had died that night in Paris, so that was us lost. I mean, you know, no more media coverage, and we were just lost in France at that point, and that was it. That was it, because that was going to be in the media for the next month or two, and then we just lost any pressure. Yeah, yeah. So, Fant, the timing was just so unfortunate.

38:44 You cannot factor that in. And I mean, in a slightly gruesome way, when, Ed Snowden story broke this year, I don’t know if you noticed, but Nelson Mandela went in the hospital and almost died, and then they kept him alive, and kept him alive and I was just thinking, they’re going to pull the plug at a crucial moment of the Edward Snowden story. The barrier Do you, does the web go that far, or is there a point where you’re like, this web doesn’t go that far?

39:06 It’s just me being paranoid. I think a bit gruesome. But yes, so it did remind me of the, you know, of all the stories that could have knocked the Shayler whistleblowing off the headlines at that point. Pretty much that was the only one that could. So after that, we had to sort of fight a rear-guard action ever afterwards, so if that hadn’t happened, there is probably a parallel world out there where there would have been an inquiry, and David wouldn’t have gone to prison twice, and the spies would have had a chance to reform, because that’s all we were pushing for, if they work unaccountably and out of control, then, and in a very secret world, then mistakes are covered up.

39:39 They’re not learned from, and you get this sort of groupthink mentality, where it becomes the norm to keep on working that way and keep on making the same mistakes. So actually, we get less protection from spies when they’re not overseen properly and not reformed properly. And I think, indeed, that’s what we’ve seen since 9/11, where, in the 1990s they did not get involved in torture cases at all, because they’d seen how counterproductive they were in Northern Ireland in the ’70s.

40:02 So the old boys said, we’re not going to do this. Then, of course, you get 9/11, and they, start getting quite brutal along with the American intelligence agencies, and we have a situation where their groupthink, the sort of closed secret world of the spies, who want to please the CIA and the FBI, so they start doing things, and nobody can challenge the fact that they’re using torture. Nobody can have that ethical discussion, because they’re told to shut up and not rock the boat, and because it’s so inward-looking as an organization, you get this group thing, and I think that’s how they spiral down this very dangerous path of torture and extraordinary rendition, and things like that, secret courts as well.

40:40 Now, so has that changed? Has that been reversed by some of the public knowledge of some of these things being done, or do you think the mentality is the same? I think the mentality is the same, if not getting worse, because they can get away with it. They will continue to get away with it. I mean, we saw this around the GCHQ disclosures, when suddenly this Tempora exercise operation was announced.

40:59 I don’t know if you remember this, where GCHQ mainlines into the fiber-optic cables, the key fiber-optic cables between North America and Europe, and they pick up everything for the NSA that way. And this is their jewel in the crown, apparently, their unique capability, which they can offer to their overlords in the NSA, that gives them the leverage. So, at that point there’s a lot of outcry. At that point our foreign secretary, William Hague, stood up and said, oh yes, but they’re doing this, but they’re doing it with my oversight, as required under RIPA, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and it’s all legal.

41:31 And then more information came out showing that actually it wasn’t all legal, because the sheer scale of that data mining was way beyond the scope which could be covered by RIPA and signed off by William Hague. So the fact that this is exposed, the fact that it is outside the law, and the fact that the government is very happy straight away to stand up and say, no, no, they’re working within the law, will protect them, shows that nothing has shifted. And I think it’ll only get worse, because there isn’t a will for most people to push back and demand proper accountability, because, as you said at the start, you’ve got nothing to hide.

42:04 Yeah. In that parallel world, would you and David have been heroes in some way? Oh, I think in that parallel world we would still have been heroes to some people and villains to others. I mean, this is the sort of schizophrenic nature of whistleblowing, is that this is how you always deemed to be a traitor or a hero, and it’s actually quite a strain on the psyche to live with that, I think, as well. So I think we would always have been seen that way, with that duality.

42:26 However, we might have made a difference. There might have been some change affected, and this again goes back to what Edward Snowden said. The one thing he’s really frightened of is that what he does will not affect any change, because people just won’t care. Is Edward Snowden a hero in your opinion? To me, yes.

42:43 I think he’s gone about it very carefully, with great forethought, and everything exposed to date has been very much in our public interest, we the people. And I think he’s been very brave knowing what he faces, because in the UK, if you do this, you face two years in prison for each charge under the Official Secrets Act. Of course, now Obama is waging this war on whistleblowers in the US. I think he’s gone after seven since he’s come to power, which is more under the Espionage Act 1917, which is more than all other presidents have tried to use that act against whistleblowers since 1917.

43:16 So he is waging a war on whistleblowers, and seeing what happened to Bradley Chelsea Manning, and the treatment and the torture and the 35 years in prison, and seeing what happened, and was threatened to, the NSA’s Tom Drake, for example. Snowden knew what he was facing by doing this and to still go ahead and do it shows, I think, ultimate bravery. Is he a martyr by giving up his life to expose this information, or is it not that noble? I don’t think he is a martyr.

43:41 I don’t think he’s given up his life. I think he’s fighting, and being as clever as possible, not have to give up his life to do it, but he has said for the record that he would be willing to, if that’s what it came to. But I think, if he can survive this process, somehow build a new life, somehow, and get through it, he will be a wonderful beacon of hope to future potential whistleblowers, because the only way our governments can stop whistleblowing is to crush the whistleblower every time a big one comes out.

44:05 So once you crush them, everyone else is too scared for a decade to do something similar. And then, of course, the fear fades. Generations change, and then a new whistleblower comes out. It happens every decade, but because of that crushing of each whistleblower, it takes that long to come forward. So I think if Snowden can be seen to survive, then that will accelerate that process, and we’ll have more whistleblowers coming out, and we need them.

44:28 We need them. Do you think it’s easier for whistleblowers now than sort of when you did it, in the late ’90s? Has technology made it easier or harder? Only if you’re a geek, like Edward Snowden, so you know what you’re doing. I think that’s what’s made him so effective.

44:42 Okay. Other than that, no, it was easier to do it in the old days, right? Yeah. But was there more censorship then? Could the president make a phone call and say quash this story, and now they can’t.

44:52 So is it easier in that way? Is no, I think the censorship is the same as it always has been. It’s always been there, where, our prime minister could ring up the editor of the newspaper and summon him to Downing Street and take him to the garden and berate him. But what if it’s a blog, or what if it’s this, they can’t, that. So the tech increases the capability, potentially, of the whistleblower, provided they don’t get caught doing it.

45:12 So unless you’re a top-notch geek, you probably will get caught, because you’ll leave traces somewhere. The media has always been a potential blockage anyway. The old media, because they can be censored, they can be denoticed in this country, for example. They can be injuncted. They can be issued with production orders from the secret police to hand over all the material which the whistleblower has provided as proof of what they’re claiming, which is what our newspaper had to do.

45:34 They had to hand over all the proof. And that’s why I’ve been so supportive of the WikiLeaks model, because here the whistleblower can securely give the information, and they can hold it, and it can’t be seized back by the police, so that information, that proof, will always be out there, and then the whistleblower can either out themselves afterwards and say, it’s me, I want to fight for this, these are the issues I think worth fighting for, or they can remain an anonymous leaker and get on with their lives. So in terms of the tech, it makes it much more difficult to stay under the radar, unless you’re a top-notch geek.

46:06 You’re very, it’s much easier to be traced, in terms of the old media there as much a blockage as I think they always have been. They’re too vulnerable to censorship, and also they’ve created another problem for themselves, which is most of the investigative journalists are not tech-savvy enough to protect the whistleblower either. And this is something, because I talk at journalism conferences, is all over the place. And I’m quite aware of the security aspect most journalists are just not even aware of what they don’t know.

46:32 So, you know, you get that faithful phone call from a, you know, possible whistleblower, and then how are you going to demonstrate to that potential top-notch geek that you understand the security implications, and you can protect their security? How will they trust you? And again, this is why I think Greenwald was chosen, because he has a track record of being thrown on top of these issues too. He must have been been watched. Someone must be constantly watching him.

46:54 Oh, now, yeah, now absolutely. During… No, was he known as that guy? So he’s taking steps to worry about his encryption, even people listening. Is that why he lives in Rio?

47:03 I’m, yes, because he’s been there a few years now, so I’m presuming. Yeah. No, there was a very interesting piece he and Laura Poitras, you know, the filmmaker who broke, made the first film, wrote together a while ago, which was how the story broke, how the contact was made, and it was Laura, actually, who had such a good track record, because she’s been under surveillance doing other films and things like that. So she’s very tech-savvy, so she and Glenn made sure that their systems were absolutely locked down, in the most paranoid fashion, in order to protect this unknown whistleblower who was reaching out to them.

47:36 That’s what journalists need to be able to demonstrate to the world, to intelligence whistleblowers particularly, because they are going to know what they’re facing. They’re going to know how they’re going to be watched, and they’re going to be really paranoid. So the journalist needs to take that equally seriously, otherwise they’re just seen as amateurs. It’s a very good point. If you’re listening, and you’re a journalist, you know, I keep thinking J.

47:55 Edgar Hoover. I don’t know why, but you know, if there’s a movie out recently. But, you know, J. Edgar Hoover ran the, what, the FBI and the intelligence in the US for six presidential administrations, and he basically, you know, had presidents effectively scared of him, because he had files on all of the presidents, all of the Congress, a lot like you said in my five, or, my six, was five had files on the MPs. So do you think we’re going to get at some point to that scenario?

48:19 I mean, is Obama in control of the NSA? Does it get to be where it can be out of control, and it can be threat, threatening people in that way? I’m sure it already is. Okay, yes, no doubt about it. No, I mean, I think our democracies are broken, both in the UK and the US.

48:36 They’re corporatocracy now, you know. It’s the big corporations. It’s the big military security intelligence complex, which is way worse than the military-industrial complex. It’s sort of burgeon into this amorphous monster in the last 50 years. And we’ve seen repeatedly that lobby groups, trade blocs with strong lobby power, powers, and everything can subvert our democratic process totally already.

48:58 So the NSA and organizations like that, as well as their secret information, their secret power, will be part of that process. It’s interesting, because he kept those files so secret, and like when he died, they were apparently destroyed. Who knows? But it’s, yeah, I don’t know, but it’s strange, because this information that the NSA has now on everyone, that could potentially become public. So you don’t have one crazy old man who’s guarding these files.

49:22 It could be everyone having access, which is even more dangerous, and then suddenly all your personal information is out there. Would you feel as comfortable then that you’ve done nothing wrong, and you’ve got nothing to hide? You want your medical records out there? You want your little visit to the local STD clinic a few years ago out there in public? You know, secret phone calls to your mistress or whatever.

49:42 I mean, it’s, it could all potentially go out there, and suddenly, if you think about it in those terms, all of us want privacy. That’s why it’s important to maintain it. Besides the encrypting ourselves. I mean, what’s the main thing that’s on your mind, like, going forward, as far as issues that you think need to be addressed? I mean, you talked about journalism protecting their sources, you protecting your own self.

49:59 Are there bigger movements are there political ideas that you think we should be really moving forward or pushing everyone for transparency, or is that futile? I think there’s a few rays of hope at the moment, certainly in Europe, because of the Echelon scandal, you know, the Five Eyes thing that was exposed in the 1990s. Because of that there were a series of hearings at the EU Parliament, the year afterwards, and so they came up with a for what they should do about communications across Europe then, and a report was issued in July 2001.

50:31 Unfortunately, it was then buried two months later, but the European Parliament recommended that Europe wean itself off its dependency on American infrastructure, internet infrastructure, American internet companies, all that sort of thing, because they could see the potential for abuse through the Echelon system. So what they recommended was that European countries focus on developing their own companies, their own Facebooks, or, you know, telecoms, or even the fiber-optic cables to protect against this American predator. And then, as I said, the report got buried because of 9/11.

51:03 Now, though, because of all the scandals, the EU’s gone back to it, and there are ongoing hearings at the moment in the Parliament, and many political campaigners are pushing to go back to this. This is an opportunity for Europe to protect our citizens’ security and our privacy, because we have a duty as governments of these people not to allow a foreign power to snoop on the wall but also to develop our economies by building up local infrastructure and local business, so that could be very good for our broken European economies, if our politicians will go with common sense and not be lobbied out of it by some or get some nasty phone call from the White House. I think, in fact, I’m Duncan Campbell, the guy who broke the Echelon story way back, has now given evidence to the European hearing, and I think I’m going to be there at the end of the month.

51:50 So, okay, there’s a lot of us going there, and really feeding in a lot of information. So I think that’s one aspect of hope. And organizations like Anonymous or the Pirate Party, or whoever, can activate around these sort of things, like they did to try and stop the actor Bill last year, which was another ghastly piece of American ease, that was, you know, they were trying to get the European Parliament Mara stamp, which is about piracy in the EU, so we can make a difference still.

52:14 And I think this is a golden opportunity, if we can get enough people to push for it. So, like, Mark Zuckerberg was in Washington this week. Like, what is that? Just all just smoke and mirrors? Do you think, do you think he’s actually, like, a pretty good guy, and he actually doesn’t want to give an entire feed to the US, or is he just in their pockets?

52:35 I don’t, I don’t know if in the pockets, but, I mean, the whole setup, the whole infrastructure of Facebook and the way it operates, is the Spy wet dream, right? I mean, it does. We, we offer up our lives to, and whoever wants to watch, including all our networks, including where we’re going to meet, including what campaigns you were involved in. That’s what spies used to have to do. They spend weeks, you know, trying to identify your friends, and things.

52:56 Here, it’s boom. Yeah, here, have it, you know? Yeah, so the fact that this network exists is not per se malign. It’s a bit stupid of us to just give our lives over for free, but the fact that it’s now been proven there are these back doors there has been cooperation with all these big companies, like Google and, Facebook as well. I think that is an issue, and whatever happened along the line, it has been corrupted now.

53:21 So that’s, that is a problem. You know, you’re a very busy woman, a lot of these different activities you’re working on, and so I’m wondering, why do you get involved with LEAP? You’re a director of LEAP, and, if you can tell people, what is LEAP? Thank you. Law enforcement against prohibition is a global organization.

53:40 It’s only been going for just over a decade. It’s a global organization of serving and former legal professionals who protest the failed War on Drugs. They say that prohibition is what causes many of the problems that we associate with drug use. So we have lawyers and police officers, and some form of spooks, and DEA people, prison governors, judges, even some drug czars, including the former EU drugs czar, who now say, from our prof professional expertise and experience, the War on Drugs has failed, and this is why.

54:11 And it can be looking at the C, the problems caused at local community level, with the breakdown of trust between policing and police, or it can be on a more global level, so for example, the fact that the global drug trade is worth up to half a trillion dollars per year, and all that goes into the hands of not just organized crime and violent gangsters, but also funds over half the designated terrorist groups on the planet. Yeah. So you think about it: we fight the war on drugs that creates prohibition, that drives this huge trade.

54:41 I think it’s the third biggest trade in the, you know, in the whole world, underground, and into the hands of these people, including our terrorist enemies. And then on the other hand, we’re waging the war on terror, so we have this two-front war. Yeah, exactly. It’s a win-win for the military security complex, you know. It’s great for all, you know, prisons.

55:00 It’s great for law enforcement. It’s great for military. It’s great for everything like that. So it’s big business. And what does LEAP do?

55:07 Are you trying to make these things aware? Do you have certain initiatives that you’re working on? Is it big in the States, or is it more difficult in the States? Well, it started in the States, because, of course, the US is the fountainhead of the War on Drugs. I mean, they’re the sort of the turd in the pipe when it comes to reforming the UN conventions.

55:25 Heard that one before. A good one. So yes, it was founded 11 years ago by five police officers there, and it’s now grown exponentially. So we have a presence in 120 countries globally. We’ve got over 100,000 supporters.

55:38 What we aim to do is educate primarily, and just say, look, we’re not some free-the-weed group who wants to have a… To from our professional expertise, we say the War on Drugs has failed, and here’s why, and here’s why we need to have a rethink and an adult debate about what the options are, because the UN convention started 50 years ago, and the aim of creating a drug-free world has egregiously failed. I mean, you know, there are more drugs now than there ever were.

56:03 They’re stronger, they’re cheaper, There are more users. I mean, it’s just crazy. So this goes to Einstein’s definition of insanity, you know: something doesn’t work. You try doing the same thing again and again, expecting a different outcome. You’re not going to get it, and that’s what we’ve seen with this, and it’s reduced whole regions of the world to narco states.

56:20 You know, violence and things like Latin America, Mexico. Yeah, just, yeah. So, you know, they estimate that since they ramped the War on Drugs up there, seven years ago, over 70,000 people have died in the crossfire, sometimes incredibly brutally. Or you look at whole SES of North Africa, which is the major transit zone of cocaine, and whole countries have descended into narco states. There’s violence everywhere Mali, Guinea-Bissau, even Libya since Gaddafi was killed.

56:47 90% increase in the heroin trade, most of it is controlled by the local militias and insurgent groups, and oh, the al-Qaeda militants in Libya, or Afghanistan, where since we’ve intervened the acreage under the poppy growth now doubled in most areas and trebled in some. So the trade there is worth half a billion dollars per year, and all that goes into the hands of our terrorist enemies, the Taliban. Then we’re supposed to be fighting them. You know, half a billion dollars can buy a lot of weapons and collusion costs and things, so the sheer stupidity and madness of this, on a global scale, just I find absolutely gobsmacking, and that is not before we even get down to the local harm, the local communities, the damage done to individual lives, the criminalization of people who just want to take something, who might have a health problem, but then are thrown in prison, and the violence on our local streets, and the fact that dealers can get out to our children much more easily, because the whole thing is unregulated.

57:41 Every which way you look at it, it’s a mess. So I’ve got involved in this, and I, it might seem like an odd fit with some of the other stuff I work on, but I do see a link. You know, the whole war, war on concepts, isn’t it? Really, or war on nouns, where you’ve got the war on terror, the War on Drugs, the war on the internet, and now the war on whistleblowers, and they all feed off each other, and they’re all used. Particularly, the War on Drugs was like a prototype for the war on terror, where it was used to intervene across the world.

58:08 It was used to destabilize countries. It was used to shred our civil liberties and invade our homes, Now we have the war on terror we can use for that, so we don’t need the War on Drugs so much. See that link as much. Before 10 years from now, is it worse or better than it is today when it comes to prohibition of drugs and the War on Drugs globally? I think the prohibition will end, and I think, you know, our grandchildren will look back on this period of madness, thinking what the hell are, you know, our forbears playing out as everyone looks back on alcohol prohibition as a period of madness too.

58:38 Right. So it will end. It’s a case of when, and also how we can manage that transition, because at the moment what we have is a sort of global treaties which is one size fits all, so all the countries are supposed to adhere to these UN conventions, and, each situation each country with different cultures and different roles in the trade will have to work out something individually for their nation state, what will work best for them. So for example, if you’re a consumer country in Latin America, how you deal with regulation, ending prohibition, and regulating and taxing that trade will be very different from how a transit country, very vulnerable transit country or Far Eastern country, Middle Eastern country, will deal with it, or how we in the West deal with it.

59:18 But we’re already seeing in the West, of course. Many countries in Europe have decriminalized drugs. Portugal is very famous for the Netherlands of course, and in America, you know, going back to the turd analogy, the sheer hypocrisy of this blockage in the pipe, where you have two states that are fully legalized, even recreational cannabis use, and then trying to say to the rest of the world, “don’t do as we do, do as we say.” It’s crazy. It is crazy to watch, and then to see that it’s still federally against the law, and it’s that law is being broken every day in Colorado, hundreds of thousands of times.

59:49 And so, but you know, even in the Netherlands it’s decriminalized, but you can’t produce it yes, which is, it’s stupid too, right? This is a huge problem, because this means decriminalization, you don’t penalize the people who use it, right, which is harm reduction, which is fabulous, and we’ve seen it in across many, many European countries, but it leaves the trade, as you say, in the hands of the gangsters and the terrorists. So this is particularly where LEAP comes into it, because you know, we’re not interested in the low-hanging fruit and, you know, grabbing somebody smoking a joint.

1:00:18 We’re looking at the organized crime, and if you take away the profit motive from that trade then that will, you know, that will disappear. Governments can regulate. They can strongly regulate. They can do what they want individually, as nation states, and if they so choose to, they can then reap the tax benefits of it as well. There was a report, came out from the Beckley Foundation, which does a lot of scientific research, was announced a couple of weeks ago, and this, Amanda Yeah, Amanda Fielding.

1:00:41 Have you had her on? No. I had Professor David Nutt on, and I met her at one of his conferences, so now she’s fabulous. So I have, sort of, do a bit of work with Beckley as well. Okay.

1:00:49 But this recent report was very conservative, and it basically said, if cannabis were legalized in the UK tomorrow, the increased revenue to the Treasury would be conservatively 1.25 billion per year from tax revenue, and all the judicial process savings. So how can the Brits not afford to think about this? You know, it’s, we’re a broken country financially. Yeah. How can anyone not afford to think about this?

1:01:11 Sure. Current events. I want to get your thoughts on Syria. I find that a lot of times there is the story in the news, and then there’s what’s really happening, you know, with all the bargaining and what’s happening under the tables. And since you’ve been kind of in the intelligence service, you probably have some thoughts and insights about what the real bargaining is happening between the US, between Syria, France, UK.

1:01:31 What are your thoughts, and where are we going with this? Well, it’s a mess, isn’t it? It’s a first step. Where do you even start with Syria? I suppose the thing that leaps out at me is this, bogus chemical weapons use issue again.

1:01:46 So bogus. You think it’s just, well, I mean, it looks, from what the UN inspectors have said, that there was some chemical weapons used, but nobody has a clue about who it was, and the fact they immediately said it’s the Assad regime, and the fact that it would be so counterproductive for the Assad regime to have done it does smack of a sort of, should we say, false flag or dirty tricks type attack. That’s because, you know, after Obama said it’s the red line, and if he crosses this, we have to do something.

1:02:09 So it’s the same old tired excuse as they tried to use in Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction. What’s interesting on the Internet is the views are, everybody saying, what a load of crap. Of course, not, you know, we don’t believe you this time. Sure. But I’m believing Putin, Russia, over over the US.

1:02:25 Things have changed, you know. For me, when I’m, when I was listening, watching that story, I was like I don’t know. Here, I, I kind of buy Russia, like, let’s figure out who actually did this. Yeah. I mean, he came across like a grand old statesman, didn’t he, dealing with it, and Obama just looked like a Brad.

1:02:40 I know. Russia wants to bring, go, go to the table. Like, hold on, what’s going on here? It’s a strange situation, because like you said, Obama said this is the red flag, then it happened, and then Obama says, oh, I guess we have to do something, but then, of course, he doesn’t really want to do anything. So it’s a very, very posturing, threatening, dangerous situation.

1:02:58 One explanation for that would be that, if it were some dirty trick, then who would benefit most from forcing the Americans into the conflict? Israel. Right. One possibility, you know, if we want to sort of peek under the behind the curtain and see where the vested interests are. Yeah, that’s interesting, because that whole, well, and that whole region, if any kind of shift in that region has unknown consequences to everyone, and even the Israelis.

1:03:23 I know, not traditionally got along with the Assad regime, but a lot of times people say Israelis would rather have them than someone else. I don’t know if that’s changed now. Who knows? I mean, you know, the opposition in Syria is just such a mess, and so many of the more organized, influential SE segments of it seem to be openly and avowedly Al-Qaeda links, like the al-Nusra Front and things like that. So how, and we know this is happening already, the CIA and our special forces and the SIS can be on the ground giving help to these people, and potentially funding and arming them, again, despite all the lessons of history.

1:03:56 I just find flabbergasting. I listened to the entire interview last night with Charlie Rose and the president of Syria, and if you listen to the whole thing, it’s pretty interesting. I mean, I am not into, generally into conspiracy theories, etc., but when you listen to what he said, he said, okay, you say terrorists, you know, but if these people came to your country and did these things, if they did that to your country, you would do something about it.

1:04:20 And you, he just goes through all this reasoning, and, right, he sounds much more reasonable than he’s put out to be, you know, when you actually sit down and talk to him. Well, he, he was sort of thrust into this presidential role, wasn’t he? I mean, he was happily living a quiet life in North, leafy North London, working as an anaesthetist or whatever, that eye surgeon, what’s the word? Yes, thank you. Ophthalmologist.

1:04:40 So there he was you know, he was the second son, happily married, leading this satisfying professional life, suddenly his elder brother is killed, so he has to step up to the plate. I don’t think he would ever envisaged that he would be this sort of international bogeyman, dictator, you know, wanted by the US and things. Yeah, he kind of has that feel about him. What, what is the NSA doing right, and what is the US doing right when it comes to intelligence gatherings or anything where you’re like, okay, this is good?

1:05:05 I think it’s a rampaging beast, this is out of control, Godzilla in a china shop. Is there any, anything where you can see where you’re like, okay, I can see that this is actually helping, or is 100% of what they’re doing just madness to you? I think two answers to that. First of all, it would, because we, this is hysteria that’s going on. It would be very useful for all our countries individually to take a deep breath and say, okay, what are we actually trying to protect here?

1:05:31 Our national sovereignty or national security? How can we best protect it and police it, and, you know, what are the threats coming in to try and attack us? How do we, you know, fight back against them, and then rejig their intelligence infrastructure to work within the law, to effectively stop those threats and nothing else. They should not be seeing their peoples as threats potentially, which is how they’re treating us. So that is certainly one aspect.

1:05:56 That’s not to say good people don’t work in the services. Trouble is, a lot of them tend to leave, but I’ll give you one example. There’s an organization of former spies called the Sam Adams, Sam Adams Associates for Integrity and Intelligence, which is a bit of a mouthful, and they give an award every year to someone coming out of the intelligence world who has demonstrated integrity. Normally it’s whistleblowers. I mean, people like Coleen Rowley from the FBI and Tom Drake, and WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, of course, this year have received the award.

1:06:25 But the one last year was to a guy called Dr Tom Fingar, who coordinated the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, which in the US is I think 16 intelligence agencies, and he was asked to get the thinking of all 16 agencies on the Iranian nuclear capability. And unanimously, all these agencies said they stopped trying to get weaponized uranium, develop the bomb, in 2003. No indication they’ve tried to restart this program, and Fingar pulled all this together, wrote his report, and was subject to immense pressure by everyone in the American establishment who wanted that year to go into Iran in 2008.

1:07:03 They wanted an excuse, and Fingar just said no, and then eventually this thing appeared in public, and they had to admit that this was the thinking. So by his refusal not to cave into that pressure, he saved potentially millions of lives in Iran. So people like that with integrity, who can continue the fight on the inside and do it, I think, should be a lesson, a model to serving officers, and that’s the difference that one man’s bravery can make. And hats off to him.

1:07:28 Okay. Okay. Why do you live in Germany? Is it for security reasons? And do you miss the UK?

1:07:32 Well, I’m back in the UK quite regularly, so I can get all the bits I need. Well, partly it’s a man, of course. Okay. But also, a few years ago I was looking at, you know, some of the stuff that was going on with my electronic communications, and things like that, and I was just getting sick of never feeling secure, because you know, I’m a bit of a campaigner, and I do public speaking, and I write the odd article, and that’s it. I’m not breaking any laws, and yet my mobile phone started playing up, and it acted as a recording device.

1:07:59 So, be sitting on the desk, and people could hear what was going on around it, when they were trying to call in, but before the line opened. So I think some sort of software been implanted, and then it malfunctioned, and then I found out, 2008. So I thought, what the f***, why are they doing this now? So that’s when I thought, time for a rethink. Germany is great, was great, because they’ve had the police state thing.

1:08:21 They had the Gestapo, they had the Stasi. They know how bad it can get, but how quickly, so they do have a very strong constitution to protect the rights of their citizens, including not electronic snooping without due cause, and all that sort of stuff, so they are pretty good. Or so we thought, of course. Since the Snowden stuff’s come out, it has emerged that the BND, which is like the CIA in Germany, has, in fact, been mainlining off some of this PRISM stuff and helping set up other very snooping devices, like the XKeyscore.

1:08:51 So they are actually right at the heart of some of this illegal global snooping, and the question at the moment is how much did the political classes know about this, or were they acting rogue? And we have yet to get a straight answer, should we say, from Angela Merkel. So Germany’s not perfect, but at least it is much more conscious of how bad it can go and how quickly. Right now, the new iPhone is out today, and the new operating system is out. Do we stay away from that device?

1:09:15 Do we stay away from Apple? What, what is your advice to people? Absolutely, they’re dangerous shiny, precious things. I’m, I’m not having a pop at one company or another. It’s just the whole concept of proprietary software, closed software, which is what Microsoft works on, which is what Apple works on, which basically means that everything that goes on under the hood of your computer or your iPhone cannot be verified by you.

1:09:39 You can’t get into it, you can’t see what’s going on down there. If you use something which is open-source, so it’s sort of developed by hobbyists, by hackers, by geeks. It’s all out there on the internet, and you can download it for free, and you know, it doesn’t have back doors, because they check the code to make sure there’s nothing nasty in there from the NSA, then that’s much more stable, and much more secure, and in fact, any flavor of Linux, which is the major open source way of using, I use Ubuntu, is actually much easier, and much nicer to use than most of the proprietary systems, particularly as Microsoft spiraled into this strange parallel universe of Vista and Windows 8 and things like that.

1:10:16 It’s all counterintuitive. So there’s that aspect. It’s the proprietary aspect, the closed aspect, which makes it dangerous, and it’s also, now we have proof, post-Edward Snowden, that yes, these companies have been cooperating, very, very closely with the NSA, and also handing over the data and the records of their customers at the request of the NSA. You know, if they needed it in the past, so that collaboration as well makes them dangerous in my view.

1:10:41 Are you labeled a conspiracy theorist, and if so what does that make people think of you? Or people called that was an interesting one. I mean, I have been called it in my time, but less and less more recently, because so much of what I talk about is now coming to be proven true, like all this internet security stuff. So rather than me being seen as this mad paranoid person who probably sits hunched in a basement, you know, sort of on their computer, suddenly actually, oh yes, what she said she’s been saying for years.

1:11:08 Oh, they are doing it. She, she might be right about that. She’s right about that. What about the other stuff she talks about? So the phone is ringing for speaking engagements.

1:11:15 Sometimes, yeah. I mean, when the Snowden story broke, and things, it just went bonkers. I could barely get off my phone to go to the bathroom. You know, it’s interview after interview after interview. So, that’s fun, but I can’t keep that up forever, so one or two days is fine.

1:11:28 Yeah, the conspiracy theory name is an interesting one as well. Culturally, the way it evolved, I think, CU in the ’90s, even if that was in common usage. Of course, David Shayler would have been labeled a conspiracy theorist when he exposed the Gaddafi plot. He was always dismissed as a fantasist back then, so it wasn’t really in common usage even then. Was the JFK the first modern version of that word, of that term?

1:11:51 I think so. Yeah, but it didn’t really cost the pond until, after 9/11, I think. And then, okay, then of course everyone who even questioned the official account, even whistleblowers from the intelligence agencies, could be dismissed that way. So it’s, it’s a very sort of lazy label, and ad hominem attacks are the laziest ways of trying to undermine someone’s arguments. Anyway, so can you describe what that is for people that don’t know?

1:12:14 CU. I was taught that one debating when I was a kid, in like 15 years old, and they’re like, ad hominem attacks are not the way to debate. But for people that don’t know, what is an ad hominem? Latin for ‘against the man.’ So basically, it’s name-calling, a bit like you know you do when you’re a five-year-old in a playground, right?

1:12:30 Yeah, right. Don’t listen to him, because he’s a poo-poo pants. Well, that’s pretty much the level of a lot of debate you get on, for isn’t it? Especially smart, poo-poo pants. Right.

1:12:40 Yeah. Just because you P your pants doesn’t mean you’re dumb, right? You might have a point. No, especially on the BBC and a lot of cable television. I find it’s just, sometimes, I don’t, I can’t believe I’m watching these things, because these people are just discrediting each other, and discrediting each other, and not actually talking about the argument.

1:12:55 Who, that guy the was it Alex Jones from the US who was talking to Piers Morgan and just was like making fun of his accent? Do you remember that? Alex Jones. Alex Jones. That was like, that’s the epitome of, I guess, that is pretty ad hominem, right?

1:13:09 Yeah, he wasn’t. Yeah, I guess that is. He wins that one. I’m curious, when I graduated from university, there was a small desk, of the recruitment fair that was the CIA recruiting. This was ’93, and I was at MIT, and I guess they might have wanted some people, but they didn’t talk about it much, and I’m, we always ask the advice question kind of at the end of the show, and I was wondering what advice you give to the people out there finishing university, where this used to potentially be this, you know, exciting career.

1:13:38 This, okay, you said James Bond doesn’t exist. They’re usually hanging out in the embassy, you know, bar, you know. They’re not really doing that, but what do you say to those people? Do they stay away from these agencies? Do you encourage them to go in and change these agencies?

1:13:53 Is that a viable career for someone who’s, I mean, theoretically, I think that’s the great thing. We need to encourage people to do, people with strong ethical frameworks, to go in there and try and change the systems from within and improve the systems from within, because that’s the only way these secretive agencies will reform realistically. So we need all the good people we can, going in. The trouble is, I know from experience, how difficult it is. Everyone is always told to keep their head down, don’t rock the boat, just follow orders, that sort of thing, and then there’s that sort of peer pressure to go along with whatever they suggest, which can get worse and worse and worse.

1:14:27 So anyone thinking of doing it, please go in, please try and affect the change, but just be aware of the sheer pressure and the pushback that you might face. And then, of course, one day you have to think, well, might I see something so heinous I’m going to have to take the next step and be a whistleblower? Would you be prepared to do that, or would you, or could you be capable of living with yourself if you don’t? All right, could be time to go to Russia.

1:14:50 I guess if you go… It’s interesting, because we talk about this on Silicon Real. It’s the innovator’s dilemma, and it seems to apply a little bit to intelligence services, except they’re not corporations that can be broken by new change, but it seems like it’s hard to get someone to, to, to look at new ideas, and they’re doing things the wrong way when it’s a government institution. Yeah. It’s, it’s a huge governmental monopoly, basically, the most secret and protective monopoly on the planet, as well, you know, where they’re not accountable.

1:15:15 They can get away with mistakes and lies. They never held to account or put in prison. It’s almost, technologies allowed them to be lazier than they once were because they can, you know, like you said, they can just break into Facebook, and it’s all there for them, right? Or or grab information, and it just makes their job easier that way, rather than actually have to, you know, compile evidence and build a case, and then, and then go after them. Right.

1:15:39 Well, the other, thing to be aware of is it’s not just all this electronic surveillance. Obviously, you know, there’s a focus on it at the moment. There’s also the infiltration aspect, where if you’re an activist group or whatever, either you might get infiltrated by undercover cops posing as activists, or by people who are run as spies into the groups by MI5 or MI6, or, increasingly these days, by the corporate spies, the mercenary spies, as I always think of them, which are the sort of, security organizations like Kroll or Aegis or Diligence, and these have exploded in size over the last decade.

1:16:11 There’s a big corporate need form in the US. I mean, everyone gets background checks and credit checks and drug tests for just normal jobs. It’s not just the corporate staff, it’s also, for example, if you’re a defence contractor, a defence firm, or something, and there’s going to be a protest against your new weapon, you know, outside your gates, then you can hire one of these companies to send infiltrators in to infiltrate these groups and subvert them from within.

1:16:32 And I mean, there was one jokey reference I read a while ago now What was it, that any big environmental activist organization, you go to any big demonstration or something, the chances are that up to one in four people there will be working for someone, which is horrifying. One in four. Yeah, it might be overegging the pudding a bit, but, and these people are often ex-official spooks, so they know all the sort of tradecraft and everything. There might be some amateurs there as well, who are usually the ones who are spotted, but, you know, in terms of privacy and effective activism, it’s very difficult when you’re up against all this.

1:17:03 You gave advice to the people thinking about getting to the service. I was wondering, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and you’ve been in through some interesting places in your life? Whoa. Best advice I’ve ever received? Probably, get out before it’s too late.

1:17:20 Yeah, catch that plane to Amsterdam. Did people in MI5 know you guys were going to make this move, or did you have to keep it just between you and David? Totally, between just the two of us. Okay. We couldn’t even let our family know.

1:17:31 So the first they found out about it was reading the newspaper front pages. I keep thinking of Jason Bourne, like, because Jason Bourne’s doing all this stuff, but he knows how the system works. So he knows how, like, okay, if we do this, we know this is going to happen, and we know this is going to happen, because you’re, you’re versed in secrecy. It was much more spy-like, going on the run, than it was actually working there. It has to be said, you wearing different disguises and things.

1:17:52 Sort of. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Wow.

1:17:54 The last bit of advice we always ask is, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Annie and give her a bit of advice, What would you tell her? Blow the whistle a year before, not just before Diana dies. Okay. Well, for the media timing, or just it would have been smarter earlier? It would have been smarter earlier.

1:18:13 I think, as well, because if we had gone public in 1996, it was the f***ing end of the Conservative government. They were deeply unpopular, and the Labour opposition would have jumped on the case as well, and said civil liberties, whistleblowing, intelligence agencies running amok, and they would have fought to get an inquiry, too. Of course, Tony Blair had just been elected, summer of ’97, with his honeymoon period. He just discovered probably all about his big fat MI5 file, so he did their bidding as well.

1:18:39 As for the timing with Diana, so, yes, I think that probably would be rather a key thing to have done differently. I wouldn’t want to not have done it, though. Okay. Every whistleblower needs a PR plan. It sounds like I, you really need to know how the media is going to receive you, how you’re going to counter the different ways that the government’s going to try to discredit you.

1:18:58 Like you said, Edward’s done a pretty good playbook of how to do it, and like you said, if you get hit by a media event, like, you know, I remember watching Mandela and he was at, at the New York Times, he was right in the top. Mandela, Snowden, Mandela, Snowden. And, yeah you don’t think about that being a factor, you know, when we think about whistleblowers? Well, I wish I hadn’t, actually, because it’s such a grim thought, but yeah, pretty grim. Just to just to wrap up.

1:19:21 What are you going to be doing in five years or ten years? I was thinking, when she was talking, she’d be a great consultant for the NSA to reform the whole organization. But what will you be doing? I mean, this political office? Anything you’re interested in or what will you be doing?

1:19:33 God alone knows. I mean, I have difficulty enough planning five weeks ahead most of the time in my life. Are you in demand, and in to, to speak? Or what’s the biggest demand for you? I mean, which, which thing do people really like to hear your opinion on right now?

1:19:46 Mainly, I suppose the biggest demand is for me to give, set public speeches to a variety of different organizations. I suppose some of the areas I cover are the, the influence of the media, the government, and the spies over the media, and the whole whistleblowing thing, how to protect a source, that side of thing. So the sort of media talk, and also the drugs issue is pretty big, and civil liberties and whistleblowing. So those are the three things I do.

1:20:10 And then of course, if some particular story breaks, then there will be TV interviews, there’ll be writing articles, there’ll be radio interviews, that sort of thing, and then it dies away again. What I need to do at the moment is a new book, which I’m gestating, should we say, and I just need to have a bit of, you know, a bit of time, just to sort of break the back of that and get it moving. So in terms of where I’ll be in five years? No idea. hopefully still doing the same sort of stuff, perhaps making a bit more of an impact, and hopefully working with a few more whistleblowers that have come out.

1:20:39 Okay. Do you get, I guess I can’t ask you, if you get contacted by whistleblowers, but they do, do you get advice from people that kind of want to know what to do routinely? Yes. I get asked a lot. There’s a lot of people, though, you can’t, you know, you’re not sure where they’re coming from.

1:20:52 I mean, it could be a sting operation, that sort of thing, as well. But, having contact with WikiLeaks and working with organizations like the Sam Adams Institute is, it’s stimulating. It’s interesting. It feels like we’re trying to make a difference. Go ahead, go ahead.

1:21:06 Sorry. There was a big geekfest in the Netherlands every four years, and this was the year, and they had a big whistleblower track, so we got a lot of these American whistleblowers over, you know, Coleen Rowley, Tom Drake, Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, and, all of them. So we did this big spook panel, and, it was just fantastic, showing that you can survive the process, encouraging other whistleblowers to come forth, and also trying to get the geek community to really help and support the technological side, for most whistleblowers, and they really got it.

1:21:33 So I think there is hope. There is push back from this endemic surveillance state. I think the geeks might be our best chance to save the world. What is Anonymous? Kind of like that geek whistleblower oversight, or maybe what’s your take on Anonymous?

1:21:46 Well, they’re Anonymous. Yeah. Well, I’ve had contact from some. They’re very supportive to the whole concept of whistleblowing, so I feel like they have my back, shall we say, if anything happens to me. Good.

1:21:58 Good. I want to have someone from them on. What’s your, just to finish up, what’s your take on Julian Assange? WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Julian Assange. Julian Assange is a man.

1:22:07 I like him. Okay. I think he has consistently shown, all the way through his adult life, his attitudes to ethics and the capability of technology, a certain sort of protectiveness to people who might potentially try and do something like blow the whistle. I mean, he’s been through the process in his late teens as well, and I think that the vision of WikiLeaks is, well, changing, you know, what he was trying to do, and why he was trying to do it. You give the information to the people, you impose transparency and accountability on evil big corporations, evil governments, evil intelligence agencies, and let the people make up their minds, and then only that way can you have true social justice.

1:22:42 I mean, that is, it’s so blindingly obvious, but until he said it in that way, I think most people didn’t think of it in that way, and the technology nowadays gives us the chance to do it. So WikiLeaks is a trailblazer. Julian Assange personally is a trailblazer, and I think, the whole issues in Sweden have been blown out of all proportion. And if you know anything about the case, rather than just what’s been represented in the mainstream media, but the timing of the way the women did it, the fact they were trying, allegedly, to sell the story, the fact that it was dropped and then it wasn’t dropped, and it was picked up by political opponents of his, the fact that KL Ro has been in bed with the president of Sweden for years.

1:23:21 The fact that Sweden has helped out with all this NSA surveillance stuff. They’re in bed with the USA, so all of that stacks up as greater complicity than the Swedes would want to present and say, of course, we’re independent. They’re not. So I think that that is a slight problem, and it’s been overblown, but personally, as a man, he’s, he’s bright, he’s funny, a very dry sense of humor, and very committed to what he does. So yeah, I like him.

1:23:45 Is he going to get out of that embassy in London, or he could be there for a while? Who knows? I mean, it is a prison of sorts, but at least he’s got the internet. And for a geek, to have his computers taken away, that would be the worst form of torture possible. So I think he’s happier there than he would be anywhere else at the moment.

1:23:59 Isn’t there a movie coming out pretty soon? They had warned about him a few months ago, but I know he didn’t. There was another one, I think there’s two. Yeah, and both of them are hatchet jobs. They, so the first one, was based on, the WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the German who wrote a book on the back of this.

1:24:16 He’s the one who took all the really key data away from WikiLeaks, including lots of Bank of America information, which would’ve been crucial at this point, right. So he wrote a book, and then, David Leigh and Luke Harding from the Guardian also wrote a hit piece book, and this is what formed the first film, which I think was weak. Still Secrets or something, and there’s some new one, which has come out, which is worse. Yeah, yeah. It’s, he refused to be interviewed by both of them, right?

1:24:41 Yes, yeah. Okay. You know, it’s, I could listen to you for a long time, Annie. Thank you so much for being here. I know you did some filming for The Culture High yesterday.

1:24:48 I can’t wait to see you in that movie, even though you’ve been here. How do people get a hold of you? Do you tweet, websites? Yeah, sure. No, I do all that, although I don’t try not to use Facebook.

1:24:58 I just have a presence on it, so I never respond to people there. My website’s the best. It’s AnnieMachon.ch. So it’s based in Switzerland. Keep it safe.

1:25:06 Is that the safest place? Y, and how do we know that? Well, because when WikiLeaks came under global assault, it was the only country that did not take down the WikiLeaks website, right? They said no freedom of expression, so not a lot of people I know are now moving to Switzerland for that reason. So that’s another handy hint.

1:25:23 I’m on Twitter, it’s just AnnieMachon. All my social media, type, crap is on an About Me page, so you can find me that way. Excellent. Awesome. Thanks so much for being here.

1:25:32 I learned a ton. Is your brain hurting from all that information? I should have taken notes. I have to rewatch this and get rid of my iPhone. Yeah, that was fantastic.

1:25:40 Everyone’s going to love watching this. There was a lot of information. Thanks so much for being here. I appreciate, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can see all of our faces on YouTube channel London Real, and we’re on Twitter, Facebook, the whole thing. And until then, it’s about the journey.

1:25:53 Annie, I wish you all the best. Please come back sometime. I will be very happy to. Thank you very much for inviting