Full transcript: Jesselyn Radack on London Real
10:25 Welcome to London Real, both of you. Thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having us. It’s nice to have some Americans in the house, you know?
10:32 We don’t always get that. You know, I want to get both of your stories because they’re both very interesting stories. And I’m glad you’re here so we can have a kind of a trial log about everything that’s going on. You know, Jesselyn, I know you had some recent drama coming through Heathrow, and there’s been tweets about it and articles, so I think we might as well address that right away. What happened?
10:51 You had an interesting time coming from the states into Heathrow. Can you tell us what happened? I know you were there as well, and what went down. I mean, for me, it was just much more extended questioning than I’m used to from customs, and it definitely was about territory that’s different Then, what’s your name? Who are you visiting?
11:14 How long are you going to be here for how many days? It was more about, who are you here to see? And I said, friends. And then from there, who are they? I said, the Sam Adams Associates, who are giving an award to Bradley Manning tomorrow.
11:31 And then he asked for names. So I named, rattled off a few names that were somewhat innocuous for people who are public figures already. And then he wanted to know why I’d been to Russia so many times recently. Because that was in your passport stamp. Yes.
11:49 I had visas, Russian visas in my passport. And I said I had a client there. And he said, who? And I said, Edward Snowden. And he said, who was Edward Snowden?
12:02 And I said, a whistleblower and an asylum, Because legally, that is correct under both those definitions. And then he asked if I represented Bradley Manning. And I said no. And he asked who Bradley Manning was. Again, these seemed absurd questions to be asking who are some of the most recognizable people on the planet.
12:30 But at the same time, it was also starting to intrude into attorney-client privileged information, such as who I represent. Some of people are public. It’s public that I represent Tom. It’s public with Snowden. It’s not public with the majority of my other clients.
12:46 So it was intruding into that territory. And in a kind of a hostile and intimidating manner, like when I said, he said, who is Bradley Manning? I said, a whistleblower. And he said, where is Bradley Manning? And I said, in jail.
13:04 And then he said, he’s a criminal. In other words, I felt like he was kind of questioning my judgment or my answers. And that’s not part of what has nothing to do with immigration or whether or not I’m a threat to the UK. I don’t know why they’re questioning me about work-related, client-related stuff. I am a whistleblower attorney.
13:29 So I both defend whistleblowers and bring causes of action on their behalf. So I’m not sure why I’m getting grilled about my regular job. I don’t think lawyers or journalists should undergo extra security at any border. Do you think it was an attempt at intimidation? Because it seems like a really poor media move for them to do something like this in such a way, because it just makes them look really stupid.
13:57 It worked. I mean, I walked away shaking and feeling very intimidated. And I was definitely upset. I was literally shaking after that. Because I felt guilty.
14:07 I felt like, oh my god, what have I done? Or why am I getting grilled about this and getting the disapproval of you represent it? Heaven forbid I represent a criminal. I mean, there are so many criminal defense attorneys. But I don’t represent criminals.
14:24 I represent whistleblowers. And I definitely, I mean, to the extent he wanted it to be intimidating, it was. And Thomas, you were there. Did it feel a little fishy from the start, as it did? Were you definitely targeted?
14:33 It wasn’t just a casual, what are you doing here, kind of thing? It seemed quite clear that they knew her before she even got to the booth. She was actually specifically directed to a particular booth. And then I went through with just the normal questioning about what I was doing in the UK and what kind of business I had. But then I waited.
14:50 And it was more than just a few minutes. This went on for probably about seven or eight minutes. And it was very clear that it was much more of an interrogation, quite hostile. I didn’t say his demeanor was surly. And it was intended to intimidate.
15:02 There’s no question about that. And it’s clear that she was on some kind of list, I’ll put list in quotes, and they were planning on having this type of confrontation to send a message. But it’s not just her that this is happening with. I myself had a similar experience, not quite as intense. When I was in Toronto, Canada recently, in fact, a couple of months ago.
15:25 And I was actually essentially detained at the booth for an extended period of time under a rather intense question regarding what my intent was in coming into the country. And it wasn’t until I actually showed the sponsor letter where I was speaking at the University of Toronto that he finally relented. It seems like this would be the worst idea possible, because from a media relations point of view, immediately you’re going to be on Twitter, you’re going to be speaking with journalists, and it just makes the UK look really poor.
15:52 And for the amount of value they get from intimidating you, it just seems like a really dumb move. Is that just me that thinks that? Well, I mean, I think it’s not a great PR move, but I thought that would stop after David Miranda. I really didn’t expect to have any trouble getting into the UK. I worried a little bit more about getting into my own country, into the US, after being in Moscow.
16:13 But I really had no worries about coming to the UK, even though I knew what had happened to David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner. So I’m not sure why they’re continuing to do this, other than to take a really hard line with a really broad, I know they have an extremely broad definition of terrorism and of aiding terrorism. And while they haven’t thrown that label at any of my clients, they certainly have made allegations against a number of my clients, including Tom, that they have assisted other nations by putting information out there that the public should know and that they would have the blood of soldiers on their hands if anyone got hurt because of it or that there was a speculative damage that was done.
16:57 So it’s very easy to invent a case entirely built on sand as happened with Tom and to have to go through a lot to defend yourself before you’re finally vindicated. So I am wary of that. You know, I wanna hear more about your visit with Edward Snowden, but I wanna find out a little bit more about Thomas here. I mean, it’s been said that you inspired Edward Snowden to do some of the things he did. Is that true?
17:22 Well, I always hoped that someone like Edward Snowden would come along, standing at my shoulders. I recognize that I have blown the whistle on a number of government illegalities and wrongdoing, including secret surveillance, but that goes all the way back to the fall of 2001, and during the time in which I was a material witness and whistleblower, called before two 9-11 congressional investigations. And I provided them prima facie evidence of a lot of 9-11 related matters.
17:47 I also blew the whistle on multi-billion dollar fraud, waste and abuse, and a significant intelligence failures. So I always hoped that someone, but I was all through channels. I went through every channel that existed. I did make a fateful decision in 2006 after exhausting all previous channels within the government, both at NSA and outside of NSA, but still within the government, I did make a fateful decision to go to the press with what I knew. And you, because I think you originally, you chose not to leak any unclassified information, So you thought what you were doing would at the maximum just be a small penalty you didn’t expect to be completely gone after.
18:22 Well, it was, I knew that going to the press in 2006, given that they had just launched a massive national security leak investigation as a result of the James Risen and Eric Lichtblad article. It was a blockbuster article published in the New York Times in 2005, revealing publicly for the first time the existence of one portion of the secret surveillance program. What the government conveniently called later the terrorist surveillance program, which was at least one link overseas, even if the other link was in the United States.
18:54 I knew that I could actually lose my job. Okay. And you said, I think, you were seeing the behavior on a level that was worse than when President Nixon had done in the 70s. What were you seeing that you had to come out and talk about? Well, I grew up in the 1970s as a very young teenager, and my civic awakening took place during a period in which we had the Pentagon Papers and Dan Ellsberg, we had Watergate and we had a President of the United States resigning their office.
19:21 You know how many people don’t know about Watergate? You know, I mean, I was still young for it, but it’s such a period of American history that if you look back on it, it’s almost flabbergasting to a certain extent. But this is flabbergasting. What we’re going through now, people should be marching in the streets over what NSA is doing. And I think if we were back then, people would be, because what’s going on right now is staggering and I would submit even scarier because of the technology available and the sheer numbers of people that you can spy on and that the U.S. is spying on.
19:54 Yeah, I always ask people when they come here, what’s it what are people like in the U.S.? What are people saying? Because always see what’s happening in the U.K. and most people say that most Americans just don’t seem to have that much of a problem with a lot of the information and why do you think that is? Well, I think people are coming around.
20:08 I mean, I think at least with Snowden, in terms of believing Snowden did the right thing, NSA is doing bad things, and that we shouldn’t have as much surveillance. I think public opinion is shifting. It’s about 60% who believe that right now, and about 40% who don’t. But I think part of the problem is over the last 12 years, since 9-11, there has been so much fear mongering by the government that they’ve been able to create an entire surveillance state based on that by playing on people’s fears.
20:42 And they’re still trying to justify these programs based on, well, when the next terrorist incident happens, don’t go complaining if you kill our surveillance. That has been normalized and inured to people. And so they think, I mean, kids who were born after 9-11 don’t even get what pre-9-11, what a September 10th world was like, and therefore they accept more encroachments into their personal liberty, and there’s that whole, yeah, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear, which is simply not true.
21:19 Right, it’s, I guess if you haven’t lived through a time of extreme censorship and seen the World Wars and all the things going on, and all you can do is read about it in the history books, then yeah, you hear that attitude a lot by the millennials or whatever it is that we call them. And you were basically a few days being prosecuted before you had a big 60 minutes expose which did that you think changed the prosecution attempts or the judge’s attempts? It was a one of a number of public pronouncements and media releases. There had been a blockbuster article written by Jane Mayer and the New Yorker that just been published in the previous week. I’d received the written hour truth telling prize in April of 2011 and the case itself was actually collapsing within the federal court before the judge. And although the government had other options available to it, when we got to that very last week, I ultimately ended up on my terms pleading out to a minor misdemeanor for having exceeded authorized use of a computer. It’s like doing Facebook on government time.
22:20 Okay. And in a nutshell, what were they trying you for and what were you actually revealing to the public? Well, it’s important for your audience to appreciate. I was actually the first whistleblower since Dan Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, charged in like manner, early 1970s, in which he actually went to trial facing 115 years. In my case, I was charged with espionage, just like Ellsberg, as well as obstructive justice and making false statements, which in themselves were false to FBI agents.
22:50 I was facing 30, 35 years plus in prison if I’d been found guilty on all 10 felony counts. This was under the Obama administration, and this was really the opening shot, which is we’re going to send the most chilling of messages, that if you dare hold up a mirror to the government, if you dare speak truth to power or of power, we’re going to hammer you and hammer you good. But the media themselves, although this is just on ourself leading my defense in the court of public opinion, it took many, many months to counter the meme that I was a a leaker, that I was endangering national security, and that I was actually a whistleblower.
23:31 What I was blowing the whistle on was government illegality, violations of the Constitution, massive fraud, waste, and abuse and wrongdoing. Even the major media finally came around. In fact, there was two Blockbuster Washington Post op-eds on the eve of my public trial editorials that actually made the cases, wait a minute, government, maybe you were overreaching here just a bit. He is a whistleblower. Oh no, by the way, and this was hearkening back to the 1970s, which the post was the paper of record for all of the revelations about Watergate with Bernstein and Woodward, right?
24:10 And without that paper, then there would be no Watergate, correct? That’s right. And so they published these really powerful editorials saying, you know, we do have an interest in government affairs. It is in the public interest. And that was quite significant for the post as the paper record to say so.
24:28 And so I ended up vindicated, I was able to hold them off. That certainly didn’t stop the government. And I didn’t end up in prison, nor did I pay a fine. But at the same point, the government didn’t take any PR hits necessarily for that. I mean, as far as you can’t really chalk it up as a necessarily a win for you because they didn’t have any repercussions on the back of that.
24:47 Well, I think in a way, I do think it was a win for Tom because actually the judge chastised the prosecution publicly and that got a lot of media attention and said you made this man’s life you put him through four years of living hell and you you were acting like the british with general warrants coming and trashing his house and treating him like a criminal when he had done absolutely nothing like what you said in the indictment. So Judge Bennett who was actually a Bush appointee, actually a conservative judge, because of that very powerful statement. I think that got a certain amount of media attention. But I think in Tom’s case, in Snowden’s case, in all these Espionage Act prosecutions of whistleblowers, you have to win not just in the courtroom, but in the court of public opinion. Because the very fact that they charge whistleblowers with espionage automatically paints them as traitors and enemies of the state.
25:48 And therefore you have this weird messed up dichotomy, you know, false dichotomy with Bradley Manning with Ed Snowden and with Tom at the time of hero or traitor. And it’s neither. There are whistleblowers who revealed information that evidenced at a minimum stuff embarrassing to the United States, but actually, in fact, stuff that was quite illegal and that was in the public interest to know. And when the judge lambasted the government for this kind of case, are there any repercussions there?
26:24 I mean, are there- The judge can impose sanctions. He did not. The judge can ask the Department of Justice to take a look at it, to refer to the Office of Professional Responsibility. That didn’t happen, but even if it did, OPR wouldn’t do anything in terms of reigning in the attorneys. In fact, I think the prosecuting attorney had been one of the attorneys on the Ted Stevens case, which was completely botched, which he completely botched and which was completely overturned. And then he suffered no repercussions. He had to go back to wherever he was from and spend some time with his family. But then for unknown reasons, it’s This very problematic prosecutor, Bill Welsh, was brought back in and given the portfolio of leakers to prosecute under the Espionage Act.
27:16 Now, you talk about inspiring Edward Snowden. What would Edward Snowden have seen from your case that he could draw inspiration from? Edward Snowden did say, on Laura Portras’ video, that he had studied the cases of Tom Drake and Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers. And I think what he would draw on from Tom Drake’s case is Tom Drake went through every conceivable internal channel to his boss, to the Inspector General of the NSA, to the Department of Defense Inspector General, and to both houses of Congress.
27:49 And not only did they fail to redress his problem, they turned around and sold him out and prosecuted him for espionage. And so I think Edward Snowden made the only choice he could make, which was to go outside of the United States to blow the whistle, because right now there is no protection for national security and intelligence whistle blowers. So you kind of drew the roadmap of what not to do, pretty much exactly. That’s having done everything you were supposed to do, until I ultimately made the same decision as he did, which was, I’m going to go to the press, knowing that in his case, I remain in the United States, look what happened to me, he knew given the nature of my case as well as the others, that he would have to leave the United States, have any hope of securing his own freedom, let alone providing information he needed to get to the journal’s reporters that he already selected ahead of time.
28:40 I mean, this is becoming, it’s really important, this has become a really dangerous development in the United States history and for the world, that anybody who darespeak up about what’s going on inside the government, particularly the government has engaged, in this case, massive surveillance, state-sponsored surveillance, and all kinds of fraud, waste, and abuse, and redistributing massive amounts of money to support the national security, which I’ve said has become the new state religion. If you dare question that, if you dare question authority, we’re gonna come after you, and we’re gonna punish you so severely that even if you survive it, it will send the message to the others. And others, which, and I’ve spoken to any number of people, including reporters, even long-term, what we call deep, deep sources, are increasingly reluctant to speak even off the record with reporters because of their fear that they’ll be discovered.
29:37 And these are people that work within the government. I mean, I have to take extraordinary precautions myself in terms of security. And even with my own very significant technical background, to even begin to have communication with a reporter, knowing about the Secrets of Balance program, the very Secrets of surveillance programs, we’re finding out in extraordinary detail from all the Snowden disclosures, how far they have actually metastasized what I was eyewitness to at the very beginning, the foundation for all the secret surveillance that took place in the intervening 12 years.
30:08 So 12 years later, Snowden has essentially the full documentation of just how far this surveillance apparatus has gone, not just from the United States, but in partnership with the Five Eyes community, particularly with GCHQ and the United Kingdom, but as well as the mass surveillance that it’s conducting against other countries and completely innocent citizens. And the nature of the surveillance state is such that anything is suspicious. And by definition, you’re always looking for suspicion-full activity.
30:39 And so you end up in the pathology of surveillance, you’re always looking for more information, you’re always looking for more data. And for me, it’s particularly egregious because during the latter years of the Cold War, I actually flew as a crypto linguist, a German-Russian linguist on RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft monitoring the Warsaw Pact, monitoring the Soviet Union. And in my particular case, I became an expert in my particular discipline on East Germany, a fascist surveillance state, never imagining that the playbook in which they conducted surveillance would be used as a template for state-sponsored surveillance in the United States on a far, far broader scale.
31:20 They’ve actually interviewed former Stasi officers who just marvel at how far NSA has gone with surveillance and just drooling at what would have been possible if they had had the technology of today back in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s. And yet they developed an extraordinarily efficient, a modestly efficient mechanism to collect all this information, paper-based, indexed, but it’s pretty much had records on everybody within that country. We’re talking about something that makes that look mild by comparison.
31:53 And although the United States is not in East Germany in terms of being a fascist state, it certainly has much of the characteristics in the virtual space of a surveillance state. I haven’t heard that analogy before. It’s very telling, that one. What were your thoughts when you heard about what Edward Snowden did, like the day of or the day after? What was the first thing that went to your mind?
32:14 Well, I was actually on a train when we found out that he actually self-disclosed through the reporters. That was part of his request that he wanted to be known. And in some ways, he also had studied the cases that had preceded him, including mine. That was actually quite rare. I had always hoped, again, this has been the case, I always hoped that I would inspire others that come forward with fuller documentation that would be provided in the public interest to the press so we could all see just how far this had gone.
32:46 See, none of it has surprised me. None of the disclosures from day one. Why? Because I was eyewitnessing so much of it in earlier versions of what later transpired and became more institutionalized. Remember, when I was there at the beginning, this is before there was any Enabling Act legislation, or what I call the kabuki days of legislation, or secret interpretations of existing legislation.
33:12 This was raw power. This was the government saying, you know what, 9-11 is our excuse. We’re just going to get the data. And that’s what I was told in those early days and weeks after 9-11. You don’t understand, Tom.
33:23 We just want the data. So they unchanged themselves from the Constitution. They completely bypassed the Fourth Amendment. complete violation of the violation, they’re violating the rights of US persons on an extraordinarily broad scale. I said it then.
33:38 I said it publicly. The United States was turned into a foreign nation for the purposes of the blanket, dragged it electronic surveillance. Right. For a non-techie who’s been defending people under the Espionage Act with Snowden, even just with that first article, the FISA order that gave Verizon permission to do bulk collection on its customers. It was a holy shit, like oh my god, if that was the only revelation alone that would have been pretty cataclysmic because for once it finally, finally cracked open a door that had been so tightly shut and held so secret for so long and it was Finally, a definite definitive.
34:24 Tom made a crack, but this actually really got in there. And then to keep having disclosure after disclosure. And it would follow a pattern whereby the US government would deny and lie. And then immediately the next day, there would be a disclosure debunking that and showing that the US lied. And saying, oh, well, we don’t collect content.
34:46 We only do metadata. And then they have the article in prison. And so it’s been following that pattern. And I said to Glenn Greenwald, it’s like fireworks every day. Right.
34:57 This is a lifetime event. I mean, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Edward and Stoden didn’t divulge this. And this is open light on all of these things. And now we’re actually having a discussion. And we can actually talk about how ridiculous this is.
35:08 People weren’t necessarily even talking about that before. Right. With Tom Drake, I mean, his case did get a lot of attention. But with Tom Drake and Bill Binney, I mean, they’ve been out saying pretty much a lot of these programs talking about them in their embryonic stages, but it was hard without the actual tangible evidence for people to really get that, that there is an order that completely exceeds the jurisdiction of some secret court that authorizes a telecom to like spy on its own customers and give that data to the government.
35:43 How do you get involved with Edward Snowden and why do you get involved with him? Because right now, unfortunately, I feel like my program’s been turned into a leak boutique, but because, unfortunately, whistleblowers used to be retaliated against by being demoted or having their security clearance pulled or even getting fired. But in Tom Drake’s case, the government crushed the Rubicon because as much as the government has retaliated against whistleblowers, it had never actually indicted one, much less continued with the prosecution of one. So after Tom’s case I ended up being involved in cases like John Kiriakou’s case and Peter Van Buren’s case and other people who were either being threatened with who were being investigated under the Espionage Act or prosecuted and that includes Bill Binney, Kirk, Webe and Ed Loomis who along with Tom had blown the whistle a long time ago and actually got a report from the inspector general substantiating their claim, but that report was immediately classified, so no one saw it.
36:55 And then the government went after the four of them and a congressional staffer with both guns. So, and so with Edward, did you contact him, did he contact you? How does that happen? I can’t get into that too much. I don’t know how that all works, but you did go and visit with him in Russia.
37:14 And why did you do that and was that a tricky thing to do and does that change your life significantly when you are associated with him? Well, I went to Russia along with the reason that we’re here right now in London, which was along with Tom Drake and Ray McGovern, we went over there to give the Sam Adams Associates for integrity and intelligence award to Snowden. It was amazing to go over there. It was even more amazing to actually be able to see Ed because he’s such a warm, smart, centered, articulate, grounded young man.
38:02 But to be able to see him and to know that we were the first visitors, the first people, Americans he’d seen since Hong Kong. It was hugely significant. And then on another level, as someone who grew up as a Cold War baby, the idea that I was actually going to Russia and walking around Red Square. And there’s Tiffany’s and Max Mara. And we had a very hospitable greeting.
38:28 Anatoly Kucirina was very kind. The Russian lawyer was very kind in greeting us. and people were very friendly and receptive. So that was also very different than the mentality I had grown up with. But yes, it was an amazing, profound trip.
38:46 And I’ve been back, of course, again, because I have a client there. But I know people want to throw dirt at Russia’s politics on various issues, but no country is perfect. And on this issue, Russia’s in the right. They did the right thing. Russia had granted asylum to someone who had a valid fear of political persecution based on his political opinion.
39:12 And is Edward at peace with himself? Do you think he knows that he did the right thing in the long term, and that he is fine with that no matter what the consequences are? Yes. I mean, that’s what I can directly identify with. I mean, there are some extraordinary parallels between my case and his.
39:27 There is that moment where you realize that you’re now going to make that fateful decision. And once you make it, you’re at peace with it. For me, it’s for me, it’s when I made that choice to go to the press with what I knew, including information about the secret surveillance programs and also information that was never necessary. We never had to go to the dark side. And yet, none of that actually stopped the surveillance.
39:51 And even with the earlier disclosures, that didn’t stop it either. It was clear it was gonna take someone from the inside like me who had direct access or was able to get access to the actual material evidence. Material evidence I provided earlier was within channels. That was all suppressed and censored. And that would mean coming out.
40:09 And it meant you could not go through channels because obviously going through channels would expose you. And given how all this has evolved over the years, the only way that he was gonna be able to make that happen was actually leave the United States. I can tell you that it’s very clear that if he had remained in the United States, he would have been pulled off the street. In fact, even in my own case, my original private attorney had feared that I was going to be arrested, that I’d be detained, and although I would go through the normal process under the US justice system, he actually thought that they were going to arrest me.
40:46 Now they’ve arrested others since, including John Kiriakou. In my case, because it was the first whistleblower case since Dan Ellsberg, they recognized they were in new territory. They didn’t stop them from going after me, and clearly they were going to send a really, really strong message. I ended up being stateless in the United States. They ended up confiscating my passport.
41:06 They put me on severe travel restrictions. They made him stateless by virtue of revoking his passport while he was in transit through Russia to go on to Latin America. He actually had tickets for an outbound flight from Moscow. And so one of the ironies here is he ends up in Moscow, in Russia, not because he chose to, but because the United States saw fit to revoke his passport. So who’s forced him to remain?
41:39 Because you no longer have valid travel papers. It makes it extraordinarily difficult to continue traveling. You’re stuck where you are. He ends up in the transit zone all those many weeks. If you could have planned it a little bit, if you could have planned it any better, and you had been Edward creating this whole piece.
41:55 Are there little things you might have done differently? Cause he, did he barely make it out of Hong Kong? And was it, I mean, like you said, I think he made it out of Hong Kong because WikiLeaks stepped in. That is the reason he made it out of Hong Kong because they are dedicated to source protection. And at that point, WikiLeaks stepped in and Sarah Harrison in particular.
42:16 And amazingly, again, the US government has bumbled in this case, all along, doing extreme things like downing the airplane of the Bolivian president and not issuing a red Interpol warrant immediately and the revoking the passport in a public way, but not until after he was able to get out of Hong Kong. So WikiLeaks was able to coordinate that and shepherd that and get him to Russia, which really is one of the only countries that has the gravitas to stand up, because even in a country in Latin America, he might not really be safe. I mean, I’ll say it right here.
42:58 Right now, the safest place for him is Russia. Where else could he go to right now and have that level of protection? Under international law, as an asylee, even Latin America. Because we’ve got agents all over the place infesting Latin America. It’s a certain mortgage that’s owned in some countries than others.
43:20 His safety would be at risk. There’s no question about that. And countries that should be granted him asylum have chosen not to, at least up till now. So that was very serendipitous of him to land in Russia. Well, it is one of the ironies.
43:35 But I think, here’s the, it’s like myself. I had a question asked of me by my private attorney. He needed to know right up front when I first met him. And I agree that I have a retainer agreement. He said, Tom, I need to know and answer this question.
43:50 Are you willing to go to prison? I said, yes. Good. He said, otherwise, we’ll just plead this out and maybe a few years in prison and you’re back to your life again. I said, no, I’m willing to go to prison for this.
44:01 He needed to know right up front. If you listen carefully to the first interview that was recorded by Laura Portras, he clearly recognize that even in Hong Kong, his life was at stake. He even made reference to teams that could have picked him up off the street. He was taking extraordinary measures even in Hong Kong, not to just be taken away. So he was willing, knowing he had to escape the United States, he was willing to accept the possibility that he would still be picked up and brought back to the United States. So it was crucial with what happened with wickedly stepping in to rescue him and ensure safe passage, it just so happened in the process of all this happened the United States revoked his passport so now he ends up in Russia and although I’m sure at some point in the future the fuller story will emerge you know how ironic those ironies are not lost on me as I was walking across Red Square myself that was a history of Russia in terms of the Soviet Union I couldn’t go there when I was in the Cold War, it was considered denied territory. It was the Cold War, so not lost on me at all, and yet I’m here saying publicly, once again, even on your show, he’s safer in Russia than anywhere else in the world, at least at this time.
45:23 What does he do from here, Edward? I mean, I think it’s common knowledge that the documents that he has aren’t necessarily even in his control, so if they are going to be slowly leaked over the next five years, that can be done without and independently of him. He obviously wants to probably stay away from the U.S., depending on if there’s some type of plea bargain. What does he do, if you’re Edward? I mean, I think ultimately, I mean, he is very patriotic.
45:47 He wants to ultimately come back to the U.S. He would love to be back in the U.S. because his family and friends are all there, his life. But it’s not safe for him right now. I think as things calm down and as the public around the world globally, as well as within the United States, begin to realize that he actually did a tremendous public service and this courageous act of whistleblowing.
46:21 I think once people have a better understanding of that, it can be safer for him to explore other possibilities if he wishes, but right now he has asylum in Russia, temporary asylum. It expires in five months, so the next logical move is to try to get a permanent asylum for him in Russia. Okay. And how are his spirits and what is he doing there? I think his spirits, first of all, he’s great.
46:48 He has a great sense of humor. I think he is plenty busy monitoring all the changes that are going on around the world in terms of reform. two dozen bills on the floor of Congress in the U.S. alone. The European Parliament is also struggling with this issue and just issued a report.
47:08 Germany is now building its own infrastructure for the Internet to avoid having to cross through U.S. So he, you know, as I think he was before all of this, spends a fair amount of time on the computer. He’s also well-read and was studying Russian history and learning Russian and adapting. And so in terms of the earlier question you asked, does he feel like this worked? His biggest fear had been that these disclosures would come out and no one would care.
47:42 The fact that it’s ignited a worldwide debate, he said, yes, I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do. I’ve created the debate. I have personal opinions about where that should go, but I’m gonna let, it’s up to the public to decide really. So, you know, he’s following what’s going on very closely. We talked about the court of public opinion being more important than maybe even the courts.
48:07 And I was curious where you think it’s gone in the past three months of where you think it’s gonna go. I mean, if you say a zero is, you know, Delta Force grabbing him and a hundred is, we have Edward Snowden day in the US and he’s a hero. Like, where are we on this scale? And do you see it trending one way or the other? Yeah, I see it trending in favor of him.
48:24 I think it initially began, I mean, we had this one week in which the White House’s own hand-picked internal review panel recommended that the bulk collection program be ended. And that was followed by some of the biggest tech giants meeting with the president and telling him that Snowden should get amnesty and that this kind of bulk collection needed to end. And then a federal judge issued an opinion saying that this program was likely unconstitutional.
48:55 And then after that, you get the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which also recommends that the bulk collection program end. So I feel like, you know, this case being about 1% legal and 99% political, I feel like Snowden’s political capital has been increasing and his bargaining power. I feel like we’re turning the Titanic in terms of public opinion, and I think people are beginning to realize he’s not the bad guy here. And in fact, the bad guys are the ones who should be facing the music, like the director of national intelligence who lied to Congress under oath on camera.
49:36 None of these people have been held accountable. The director of NSA, the director of national intelligence, all these people who have test allied to Congress and perjured themselves and created and run these programs. None of them have been held accountable. It is a felony every single time they collect information on people without a warrant. And if you think about that happening on the scale of billions of times per day, it’s almost inconceivable how many criminal violations have occurred because of these programs.
50:12 Understood. You know, Tom, you used to be at the NSA, 16 minutes at a big exposé about the NSA a couple months ago, and they went and talked to everyone there, and at the end they asked them about Snowden, and these guys had some really visceral reactions to Edward. Something along the line of, you know, you broke the code, you did what everyone in the NSA knows not to do, and I just wondered if you saw that and how that makes you feel. Do you A, understand what that is? Were you forced to deal with that kind of mentality?
50:41 I was treated in a very similar manner. I mean, that type of language was used by others. Can you explain the mentality in the NSA? Well, I remember NSA is an institution. They’re a very secret organization.
50:51 They were literally created by just the stroke of a pen by the executive branch. It was not legislation from Congress in 1952 under the Truman administration. Their institution is secret. They protect the secrets. So if you violate that, and it’s not an oath, by the way.
51:06 Some people have told me the only oath that I took was to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. It was not an oath to secrecy, it was not an oath to the president. But in that institution, you protect the secrets, you protect the institution. So if anything is going to make us look bad, you will receive punishment. And what’s happening now is if you expose government wrongdoing and illegality, if you expose the surveillance program, that’s criminal.
51:32 It doesn’t matter that what they’re engaged in is wrong and of a criminal nature. It doesn’t matter that they violated FISA. I can’t begin to tell you how many times, what I was confronted with right after 9-11. That had criminal sanctions. $10,000 fine, five years in prison for every incident.
51:49 Every single one. That meant one unauthorized, warrantless surveillance, electronic surveillance of a US person by definition. You violated the US code, the criminal code. So what has happened to the United States, who are now criminalizing those who would actually hold the mirror regarding government criminality. And yet it’s the government that holds the power, and that’s what makes it so dangerous in the United States to speak up about this.
52:19 And when you see those people with such a hatred towards Edwin, do you think that’s the old guard? Do you think the new guard at the NSA is realizing that they need to change their ways? Yeah, I would just say that 60 Minutes piece was really a propaganda piece, and shame on 60 Minutes for doing that. In fact, they intentionally featured someone playing with a Rubik’s Cube, which had been Edward Snowden’s signal to Laura Portras and Glenn Greenwald. They featured a bunch of young people, rah rah, saying how great NSA was.
52:50 But I do believe that is the old guard, at least in the current hacktivist community. Will NSA recruit some of them? Yes, people who would be white hat hackers. But I do think the technology community is changing enough. I mean, NSA was the most secret agency.
53:11 No one had a clue what it did, or even if it existed. NSA, no such agency, never say anything, NSA. And now everyone, it’s a household word. And I think people see it as this entity. It’s going to have to change.
53:28 I mean, Tom, you said that they need to completely dismantle and subsequently rebuild the entire organization. I think you said that. I have said that. In the best of circumstances, yes, they need to collapse the organization. They really do.
53:40 Is there a place for an organization like an NSA under strict controls and real oversight? Yes. But remember, the history of NSA, if people actually read about it, they’ll find out that NSA routinely violated even US law, even in secret. It all came to a head in the 70s. This is where history is not kind.
54:02 And if we don’t learn the lessons from history, we’re doomed to repeat them, as I would recall from a famous philosopher. This is a case of history is repeating itself, but on a much, much larger scale. We’ve never seen, combined with the technology today, a surveillance apparatus of this scope and scale. And it feeds itself, and it protects itself, and it uses this intelligence it collects for many other purposes besides quote, unquote, the reason why we collect all this is to keep us safe from terrorists.
54:35 Look, even they have had to admit that the 54 incidents or so-called terrorist events that were discovered or blunted or prevented ostensibly by the Secrets of Violence program, it turns out there’s only one that they can even point to, even that one is highly questionable because traditional law enforcement, no doubt, had already discovered it. So what does that say? we’ve spent all this money, we’ve created this massive apparatus that is violating our rights, not just sovereign citizen rights in the United States, but the sovereign citizen rights of people around the world for what?
55:13 What do we ultimately get in return? And Edward Snowden has put, this is what is so important about Edward Snowden’s disclosures, we’re now finally having that real debate, we’re now finally having that real conversation. Do we want to live in this kind of a future? Do we want to live in a future where the Winston of 1984 has to crawl into a corner because that’s the only place that the surveillance cameras cannot see him, which means they know where he is?
55:41 Do we really want to live that kind of future? I don’t think so, and most people can find him, but see, so much of the activity had gone on in secret. And obviously, the government wanted to keep this secret because they no doubt knew, Because if my case is any example, that revealing what was going on inside the government, people would object to it. And as the judge himself, in my case, when he excoriated the chief prosecutor, we just don’t do this to Americans.
56:12 That’s why we had an American Revolution. Here Justin and I are in the United Kingdom, a place where Ike is my second home. But it also, over 220 years ago, we ended up having a constitution. Why? Well, that came out of a revolution.
56:30 And that first American Revolution, as more than a passing student of politics and history would say, looking at what were the primary reasons why we had the revolution. Well, because of egregious usurpations of power by the crown, where you just show up at a person’s house with a piece of paper and say, hey, I can take you away, I can take all your effects away, I can rifle through all your papers, and you have no recourse or defense. Or, under the First Amendment, if you’re associating with somebody and we don’t like it, if you say something that we object to, we can put you in prison or in the stockade.
57:04 Is that really what we want in this country? But that’s what’s happening. I mean, I’ve said my case ultimately was always about, it was really a First Amendment violation. It was ultimately about, can you actually speak about the inner workings of government? Even when they’re doing wrong, even when they’re violating your rights, whether it’s our rights or the rights of sovereign citizens around the world, that’s precisely the conversation that ever stone has ignited.
57:30 But even he was worried that it wouldn’t happen, in spite of prima facie evidence of an extraordinary nature that actually says beyond any shadow of doubt that this is precisely what we’re dealing with. You don’t have a FISA order, which I was well aware of those FISA orders. I was aware of the FISA orders even under the Bush administration. The FISA order, which was before we had the FISA orders, then we had this secret agreement with the court, where you know about our activity, but we don’t have to have any paperwork from you.
58:02 To the disclosures, which is, oh, now we’re going to put it back under the secret court and let the secret court interpret in secret what’s in the best interest of national security. That’s precisely what happened. So you have all this other Enabling Act legislation that created the very conditions which Edward Snowden shows up, and he now sees the full flower of this made manifest over the intervening 12 years since 9-11, and he made that fateful decision.
58:32 Many people said, why would he do this? Why would he? He lived in Hawaii, he was earning a significant income, as a contractor, he had a girlfriend. Why would you give all that up? I’ve said to people, look, there are things much larger than the individual, and if you’re within a system and you’re seeing that it’s out of control, it’s now engaged in mass surveillance, what does that say about our future?
58:57 It’s similar, what’s an analogy for those who follow Star Trek? There was the Star Trek, the original cast had a series of movies. The second movie is called The Wrath of Khan. In that movie, Spock sacrifices his life for the sake of the crew, and even Captain Kirk, his best friend, runs down into him and says, why Spock, why? And he says, it’s a famous line.
59:19 He said, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. Edward Snowden, as I did in the context in which I found myself after 9-11, in my case, I saw Pandora’s box open up, and I knew that the strategic consequences of the United States unchain itself from the very foundations of its own government, the Constitution, unchain itself, were going to have enormous downstream effects. He is now looking into Pandora’s box, and all that has happened since, it says, you You know what, I could keep this shut, I could shut it and just act as if I never saw it.
1:00:09 But he didn’t. It was fundamentally an act of civil disobedience within the system, but ultimately it was in the public interest of know precisely what the government was up to all these many years. And so he went to the press, which is the, as we call it the fourth estate, to say what is so in the public interest, and he left it up to Joe’s reporters to say what is so from what he disclosed to them. I would add here that blowing the whistle should not require personal or professional martyrdom to do so, but really there are no protections.
1:00:49 Even the President of the United States lied about the protections available to Edward Snowden and said, oh, I just passed a policy directive that he could have used to go through channels, and that policy directive, PPD 119, did not cover contractors and was not in effect. So either the president is very ill-informed by his advisors or he’s lying. But to be making statements like that and tarnishing this person, I mean Obama appears unhinged over this, and the level of antipathy towards whistleblowers is really staggering.
1:01:28 Out Nixon to Nixon, he’s really completely undone by this phenomenon of leaking. My answer to that is that if you want to stop leaking, have meaningful, real whistleblower protection legislation. The opposite of what he’s doing. Everyone is listening to this around the world when they’re watching you two speak. I think people are probably thinking, where do we go from here?
1:01:55 Because a lot of people will be outraged and then they’ll go back to their same behaviors and maybe we’ll try to elect similar officials and there won’t be any real big changes. So what do you tell people that they can actually do to try to affect change in some way? For me, I tell people, okay, most immediately, I live in D.C. so I don’t have a voting representative in Congress, but everyone else does and you can easily, there are mechanisms on the internet by which you can easily contact your member of Congress and tell them you support the USA Freedom Act and you’re against Dianne Feinstein’s, whatever she’s calling it, her legislation that would be worse.
1:02:35 That’s an immediate thing. But on a bigger scale, I think people are becoming more savvy and you can encrypt what you do and you can take protections. People used to do privacy settings on Facebook and we realize now that that was meaningless. But if you’re a lawyer, you should be encrypting your communications. If you’re a doctor, you should be encrypting your communications with patients.
1:02:57 If you’re an accountant, you should be encrypting your communications with a client. Why should the government have access to that? It is pretty easy to use PGP, pretty good privacy. Learn basic encryption. I think kids are savvier to this.
1:03:13 I know my kids have managed to block me on Instagram and every other thing they’ve been doing. And they understand the idea of encryption and the idea of having private worlds better than I do. But yes, government reforms are going to occur or not occur or occur in a half-baked fashion. But the technology actually can drive this. And I think if you talk to Jake Applebaum or any technologist who’s working on things like Tor and other protective mechanisms to secure the internet so that it doesn’t belong to the government.
1:03:54 The government is trying to see something that belongs really to the public. And I think everyone, yeah, in this era of Facebook and putting everything out there should think more about their privacy. So it’s a matter of kind of retraining people. You know, look, you may not have done anything wrong, but you still don’t want the government You know recording what’s going on in your bedroom or bathroom, right? So on some level people get that and I think people are getting it more that yeah It’s okay if my friends see this, but why would I want the government to see that? You know picture? I Stupidly posted of myself Smoking pot or whatever They put on Facebook during their misspent youth. Is there more information that’s gonna come out from Snowden and has that marginal benefit of this next latest release. I mean, is that dropping down now? So where we’ve been shown so much behind the curtain that it doesn’t necessarily matter that other information that he has about this or about this, or is there so much more to come that’s going to change the game?
1:04:55 I think there’s a lot more damning information to come. It is such a small percentage, some 1200 pages of information have come out, that’s like 0.007% of what the journalists have. So it’s not really up to Snowden, it’s up to journalists who are trained to report on things in the public interest to decide what would be beneficial for the public to know, but it’s only a small fraction of the information that’s come out. Will people become numb to that?
1:05:30 I don’t think so, because each disclosure affects people differently. You’re like, shoot, I use Yahoo, or I’m a subscriber there, and then you change. Like, OK, I’m going to change carriers. Or you realize, hey, wait, I clicked on WikiLeaks. Could that make me a target?
1:05:50 And people think, well, that’s crazy. That wouldn’t make you a target. Well, talk to Peter Van Buren or Barrett Brown and people who’ve gotten in trouble, Not for leaking to WikiLeaks, but for linking to WikiLeaks. And you find out more about what’s going on. And I think that will continue to change and shape public opinion and reform.
1:06:11 What happens after you blow the whistle? I mean, that’s something I don’t know if you ever thought about when you were doing it. Did you think about what your life was going to be like in five years’ time? And what happens afterwards? It’s in light of what happened to me, obviously, we live in a very different period.
1:06:28 This is not a case where you just lose your job, it ends up being a criminal act because you’re exposing government wrongdoing and legality. All of my whistleblowing took place under what was called the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which obviously didn’t protect me, it exposed me. That was within channels. The expectation now, of course, is if you go through channels, you’ll be exposed and they will end up isolating you. That’s at a minimum.
1:06:54 And it could be worse because they may suspect that you’re actually disclosed, you know, quote-unquote not authorized to receive it. So even going through normal channels or any channels are available within the government is fought with its own peril. Now what’s the third rail? The third rail is going to the press, especially today’s environment. And so what can you expect? You can expect that you’re going to be put on not just a passing list, you’re going to expect to be a primary target. And you expect that the surveillance apparatus is going to find out everything there is to know about you, just like they did with me.
1:07:30 So going back through any and all records that they know, without the system, I mean I was extensively surveilled both electronically and physically over a number of years. And so just imagine your entire life being subjected to a really extraordinarily powerful electron microscope and over a number of years they keep drilling down and drilling down and drilling down to learn everything there is to know about you. Were you impressed with what Edward was able to do?
1:07:57 We hear now that he was running crawlers throughout the government sites and really going that extra mile to get all that information. For someone that’s been in there before, were you impressed by the moxie of him to stay in to gather all that info? I don’t want to use the word moxie. I mean, we have to remember, this is one of the paradoxes of the surveillance state. He’s of the internet generation.
1:08:22 He doesn’t know a life that’s previous to Internet. He grew up with computers. It’s the virtual world. He’s extremely comfortable sitting in front of a computer and all the various technologies go with that for many, many hours a day. I’m familiar with that environment because I myself have been in spaces where I spent many, many hours in front of a computer.
1:08:42 So living the virtual space, now given his particular job and function, this is not something that’s been brought out very well or it’s been mischaracterized. beyond just being a system administrator, he had extraordinary abilities. These are the type of abilities in terms of internet age the government lacked. And so one of the paradoxes is they had to hire people with his skill set off or without traditional education or from traditional schools because only they had lived this space or had the skill sets necessary to work that space.
1:09:21 And we’re actually talking about skill sets beyond just being a power user on internet and a power user of computers. We’re talking about the kind of skill sets that I myself used to demonstrate when I was in a very technical career field, even when I was a contractor at NSA, where you’re down inside the network, you’re at the code level, you understand the topologies of networks, you know how they work. And in his case, he, because of the nature of the job, he would have to be able to range across the network.
1:09:51 You have to be like Tron, the movie. You’re living inside the network. That network would have given an extraordinary reach to many, many parts of NSA, including where a lot of things are stored. Because increasingly in the digital age, just like myself, I went digital many, many years ago. I was one of the early adopters.
1:10:10 That’s why when the FBI came to my house and took away all the electronic media, I remember coming back inside after they left, not just empty because of the absolute violations of my personal privacy, knowing it would never feel the same again. But they had taken away my life. They took away all the computers. They took away electronic media. They took away pictures.
1:10:34 They took away everything that I had grown up with. And I’m not from the internet. I don’t come from, I’m a Cold War baby, because that’s when I was, but I also flew missions during the Cold War. But here, this is the digital age. I had gone digital, so when that life is removed, it’s like, oh, that is who I am.
1:11:01 So it’s important to understand that those who have that skill sets are very comfortable living in that space, but they can also live in both worlds at the same time. And this is really the new world. What’s the other side of this? What’s the dark side is having this kind of, these kind of networks and this kind of reach and the access, and this is where I think a lot more is gonna come out, particularly in relationship between NSA and the extraordinary relationships with certain companies.
1:11:29 Where the point is, what’s the difference? That’s why a lot of the debate right now about where does the section 215 mass surveillance data needs to go. Well, we’re going to give it back to the companies. They themselves are pushing back. You have some kind of third party, it doesn’t matter. Given what NSA already has in place, who cares where the data is, they’re still going to get access to it or there’ll be the ways in which they can have access to it. It’s important to understand that you don’t actually have to have the data sitting inside your system to have access to it. Given the nature of surveillance state, you get the access through other means. In many cases, this access is done by gagging the very companies, you come to them and say, you know what, I have either a piece of paper under this Enabling Act legislation, you have to cough up or give me access because it’s for national security purposes.
1:12:19 So for those who live in that space, whether it’s the hacktivists, whether it’s the technologists, the entrepreneurs, they understand what that is. What you’re seeing now though is pushback. You’re now seeing, and this is sort of what I, for the real, the reality of this, is there are significant economic costs involved. If you’re a company and you have a relationship with NSA by hook or by crook, whether it’s a full partner, partnership with them, partial or under some kind of gag order situation, whether it’s FISA, whether it’s a national security letter or through other means, or you’re just being hacked by NSA. There’s a risk to your revenue stream. There’s a risk to your ability to actually sell products and services in the public domain or in the business domain and that’s already happening. Now some of bling Snowden for that but the fact remains this was this was evidence some time ago even before Snowden. What would be their risk of having NSA so closely aligned and others so closely aligned with the corporate side of this, and the internet service providers, and the telcos.
1:13:28 Well, this is in the public interest, because if I’m a subscriber, as I said at a keynote at the PALS Hotel a couple of years ago out in San Francisco, and I took on, they were the internet and web elites of not just the United States, but of the world. And I took them to task. I said, it’s one thing to monetize the data of your subscribers and then sell it back to your subscribers for a profit because at least that’s by consent. There is a terms and conditions in which I accept as a subscriber what those restrictions are.
1:14:07 But it’s a whole nother thing when you’re also double dipping that same information, that same data, you’re giving it or making it available to the government. Right, and I understand the point you’re making there. I just want to finish on why you guys are here. You’re here to give an award. It’s the Sam Adams Award, and it’s going to Private Manning.
1:14:24 Is that right? And that same award went to Edward Snowden last year. That’s correct. That’s what we went to Russia to deliver. It’s Sam Adams and Associates.
1:14:34 There’s a group of former CIA and Intel professionals who want to recognize acts of courage in the intelligence community. And they’ve made a point of always delivering this award in person to the extent possible. And that’s why we ended up going to Russia last year. And we’re, I mean, obviously Chelsea Manning’s in jail right now, but a representative of Chelsea’s choosing will accept the award on her behalf. But Tom can tell you more about Sam Adams himself.
1:15:11 Well, there’s real history. It goes back to the Vietnam era, which is really a seminal period in US history, which is also the foundation in terms of what happened after the Cold War to understand what has happened. But Sam Adams actually found out about the books, the numbers were being cooked in terms of the strength of the North Vietnamese and their presence within South Vietnam. And so they made the numbers much higher than they really were. And he actually wrote a book about it.
1:15:42 And the Sam Adams Associates Integral Intelligence Award is a tribute really to Sam Adams. And why Professor Manning getting that award this year? As opposed to a previous year? In previous years, unfortunately, because of the court martial that was ongoing, he had not confessed to being a source for WikiLeaks. So to give him an award for that would have undermined that defense.
1:16:12 But now that he has gone public about giving information to WikiLeaks and why he did it, it’s safe. And now that the court-martial is over, it’s safe. It’s not going to jeopardize him or it’s not going to hurt him legally or personally to do that. What is the State of the Union of WikiLeaks? What are they doing these days?
1:16:33 What else can they do? And what are they planning to do? I don’t hear about them as much as I used to. I know they do a lot of things behind the scenes. I didn’t know how much they were involved with Snowden.
1:16:42 I think they’re doing a lot, actually, an amazing amount that Julian Assange has been able to do from the confines of the embassy. They’re still a very active organization. I think they will soon be launching an amazing search tool. I can’t get into that further. You guys went and saw him this week?
1:17:01 Are you seeing him this week? We saw him while we were here because he is a prior recipient. Tom and I are both prior recipients. Annie Michon, who you know is a prior recipient. So we all try to gather once a year to the extent possible.
1:17:18 When we went to Russia, it was myself and Tom, Ray McGovern, and Colleen Rowley, also a recipient. So we try to gather just for solidarity and to see each other. People are from around the world. But I think WikiLeaks is a strong organization and continues to make very important disclosures and will continue to do that. And certainly, that model, I mean, Bradley Manning was the first whistleblower to engage in a large-scale digital so-called leak or disclosure of massive amounts of information.
1:17:59 And Edward Snowden is a second. But I expect more of that will happen. And one of the ironies of having a secret surveillance state that is so locked down is it does create other safety valves. And one of those is people blowing the whistle. And while it may be counterintuitive, if the government really cared about stopping leaks, it would give whistle blowers meaningful protection.
1:18:22 Rather than denying that protection to the very category of whistle blower, you would most want to hear from, which are the people in national security and intelligence who have been engaged in the biggest scandals of the last decade, namely torture and secret surveillance. Right. What’s next for you, too, for the next year? What are your goals? What would you like to be celebrating as far as your own personal successes in, say, February of next year?
1:18:49 I would like to go back to defending run of the mill with the lower cases and not be involved, not have any more Espionage Act prosecutions that have been brought by the government. would like to see that practice stop. And I would like to see meaningful NSA reform. My program in national security and human rights focuses on torture, secrecy, surveillance, and political discrimination. So obviously, other prongs of that are very active as well.
1:19:20 So my ideal would be for the drone program to stop and for the massive surveillance to be reined in. That would be my ideal, and for no more whistleblowers to be criminally prosecuted. I’d also like to see provision, either the Espionage Act be repealed or reformed, and for it to contain a provision for a public policy, public interest defense, or a whistleblower defense. Very good specific goals. How about you, Tom?
1:19:50 Well, I’ve dedicated the rest of my life as a result of my ordeal, because I was able to retain my freedoms and retain my rights. and retain my liberties. I’ve dated any of the rest of my life to defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So any and all actions, any and all events, any and all public disclosures that bring to light not just how far the surveillance state apparatus has gone, but also just national security being used as this excuse to violate rights and the liberties and freedoms of people, not just the United States, but around the world.
1:20:22 And this is partly the longer view of history. History is not kind when it comes to empires. certainly not kind of when it comes to surveillance states. Yet we also have to deal with this thing called technology. The technology in itself, which by itself is benign, is now being used on an extraordinary scale for surveillance at a state-sponsored level.
1:20:48 And it does raise some fundamental questions in terms of who we are as individuals and who we are with sovereign rights. And I think that’s the fundamental question. So anything it rolls that back. So a year from now, well, I mean, I’m out there. I’m here, the United Kingdom.
1:21:05 The two of us are often asked to speak before various audiences. There’s a whistleblower tour stop that I’m now a part of, the Government Accountability Project sponsors. That takes us to any number of campuses. We have to speak with the future leaders of tomorrow today. And in all of those conversations, which have now been further ignited by the Edward Snow disclosures, people are beginning to ask for themselves, what type of future do I really want to live in?
1:21:38 What kind of, and if you’re in a country, what kind of country do I wanna keep? So those are the kind of questions that lead to, well, how do we ensure that? How do I own my own sovereignty in the face of a government of a government who, as we’re now seeing and hearing on such extraordinary scale, as well as other countries that engage in surveillance. The United States, by no means, has a lock on this. It’s just it has clearly developed the largest surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen.
1:22:08 What does that mean for us as people? That’s a fundamental question. What does it mean when that surveillance state is used for economic espionage, industrial espionage? What does it mean? because as Edward Snowden himself has said, it really cuts to the core of who we are as people and our own creativity and our ability to freely associate with others and our relationships.
1:22:28 In a surveillance state, you end up splitting and dividing. You end up in this context of what’s called social enemy, the fragmentation of the very essence of what it means to be a human being. Those are the hard questions we must confront, that we must answer. And it’s very similar, I’ve gone back again because I took an oath four times in my government career to support and defend the Constitution. Well, that was to an idea of how to govern ourselves.
1:22:54 It was a grand experiment, and it wasn’t just gonna happen all by itself, and part of the weakness of even the United States Constitution is whether the will of the people, in terms of we the people, in order to form a perfect union, would prevail. I just want to continue the experiment, that experiment of continuing to create a more perfect union. Do you ever get tired of this fight, Tom? I mean, this is obviously taking a lot out of you. You’re really passionate about this.
1:23:23 Do you ever get tired of fighting? No. Too much is at stake. I would not have done what I did or what I have called a magnificent act of civil disobedience on that part of Edward Snowden if it didn’t matter. If you’re bringing to light things that are clearly and critically in the public interest, then it’s worth the fight.
1:23:47 Is life liberating the pursuit of happiness worth the fight? I would think so. Remember, I don’t want to become, as I did, I was essentially the version of a Winston in George Orwell’s chilling 1984. Who would have thunk, right? Who would have thunk that here we are in the 21st century facing the stark reality?
1:24:10 Now some people, some people say it’s not worth a fight, some people say it’s even gone, some people, and yet I look at history, I look at the, I don’t want to go backwards, what was a Magna Carta all about? That actually brought to the head the so-called divine right of kings to rule over their subjects. If citizens have rights, sovereign rights, and I’ll say under natural law, then why would I stop a fight in which citizens just become subjects to the state?
1:24:42 I mean, that’s going backwards in terms of the arc, that long arc of history. Yes, it’s very much worth the fight. Amen to that. These are really powerful human rights and I just don’t think a lot of people, and I hate to go after the younger generation, but I guess you don’t know what you got until it’s gone, but I think it’s hard to emphasize sometimes this whole really value of the right to privacy. I know when we look at history, We see how important it is, and I hope that people will start to really understand.
1:25:09 But I am encouraged. I work at an Apple store as an expert. I work with 20-somethings and early 30-somethings, although there are people older than me at the Apple store who also work there. When I ask them, does privacy matter? They say yes.
1:25:25 By their choice, they get to choose what’s private. They’ll get to choose what’s made public. They certainly don’t want the government deciding without their consent what is or isn’t private, because by virtue of it being private in a surveillance state, it’s not private, you’re hiding something. The young people get it, they really do. We just have to give voice to that, and voice for them.
1:25:49 And that’s the voice that I give myself as part of continuing this fight, because it’s worth it. It is worth it, all right, thank you so much to the both of you for coming on. I think people have gotten a very intimate understanding. I’m glad you both were here because it really is a good, you know, duality and you guys both bring different perspectives to the whole thing. So I wish you guys all the best with your fight.
1:26:11 I guess they can follow you guys on Twitter. Is that the best fight? At Jesselyn Radack, R-A-D-A-C-K and Thomas Undershore Drake Wong. Okay. Did you laugh at me because it’s our fight, not your fight?
1:26:23 It’s our fight. It’s our fight, right? It is our fight. It is our fight. Yes.
1:26:28 Yeah. No, that’s very good. listening to us on iTunes you can you can see all of our faces on our YouTube channel. I wanted to thank Annie Michon who introduced me to you too. We really appreciate her and all the work that she’s doing out there and I hope you come back and see us next time you’re in London and you know keep us posted on on the good fight. Well do thank you for having us. Now my pleasure as we say on London Real it’s about the journey and I wish you guys the best on yours. Thank you. All right take care.
