Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in
an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a "social norm."
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but
also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to
ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from
monitoring what they do in their personal lives.
4:50 Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every
single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy
because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out
a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want
you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email
accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them,
because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read
what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a
bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide."
5:26 Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. I check and (Applause) I
check that email account religiously all the time. It's a very desolate place. And
there's a reason for that, which is that we as human beings, even those of us who in
words disclaim the importance of our own privacy, instinctively understand the
profound importance of it. It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which
means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and
thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. But
equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a
place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. There's a
reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us not just terrorists and
criminals, all of us have things to hide. There are all sorts of things that we do and
think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our
spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn.
We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think
and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we
say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. People can very
easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the
authenticity of that belief.
7:01 Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. It
isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. The reason is that
when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our
behavior changes dramatically. The range of behavioral options that we consider
when we think we're being watched severely reduce. This is just a fact of human
nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and
in virtually every field of discipline. There are dozens of psychological studies that
prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they
engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Human shame is a very powerful
motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're
in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own
agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the
mandates of societal orthodoxy.
8:08 This realization was exploited most powerfully for pragmatic ends by the 18thcentury philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who set out to resolve an important problem
ushered in by the industrial age, where, for the first time, institutions had become so
large and centralized that they were no longer able to monitor and therefore control
each one of their individual members, and the solution that he devised was an
architectural design originally intended to be implemented in prisons that he called
the panopticon, the primary attribute of which was the construction of an enormous
tower in the center of the institution where whoever controlled the institution could at
any moment watch any of the inmates, although they couldn't watch all of them at
all times. And crucial to this design was that the inmates could not actually see into
the panopticon, into the tower, and so they never knew if they were being watched or
even when. And what made him so excited about this discovery was that that would
mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any
given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance.
The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault realized that that model could
be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human
behavior: schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces. And what he said was that this
mindset, this framework discovered by Bentham, was the key means of societal
control for modern, Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of
tyranny punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents, or legally compelling loyalty
to a particular party because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is
a much more subtle though much more effective means of fostering compliance with
social norms or with social orthodoxy, much more effective than brute force could
ever be.
10:07 The most iconic work of literature about surveillance and privacy is the George
Orwell novel "1984," which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a
cliche. In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance, people
instantaneously dismiss it as inapplicable, and what they say is, "Oh, well in '1984,'
there were monitors in people's homes, they were being watched at every given
moment, and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face." That is
an actual fundamental misapprehension of the warnings that Orwell issued in "1984."
The warning that he was issuing was about a surveillance state not that monitored
everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at
any given moment. Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith, described the
surveillance system that they faced: "There was, of course, no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment." He went on to say, "At any
rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live, did live,
from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard and except in darkness every movement scrutinized."
11:16 The Abrahamic religions similarly posit that there's an invisible, all-knowing
authority who, because of its omniscience, always watches whatever you're doing,
which means you never have a private moment, the ultimate enforcer for obedience
to its dictates.
11:33 What all of these seemingly disparate works recognize, the conclusion that
they all reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a
society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every
tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system. Conversely, even more
importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think
and reason and interact and speak without the judgmental eyes of others being cast
upon us, in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside, and that
is the reason why, when we allow a society to exist in which we're subject to constant
monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled.
12:29 The last point I want to observe about this mindset, the idea that only people
who are doing something wrong have things to hide and therefore reasons to care
about privacy, is that it entrenches two very destructive messages, two destructive
lessons, the first of which is that the only people who care about privacy, the only
people who will seek out privacy, are by definition bad people. This is a conclusion
that we should have all kinds of reasons for avoiding, the most important of which is
that when you say, "somebody who is doing bad things," you probably mean things
like plotting a terrorist attack or engaging in violent criminality, a much narrower
conception of what people who wield power mean when they say, "doing bad things."
For them, "doing bad things" typically means doing something that poses meaningful
challenges to the exercise of our own power.
13:24 The other really destructive and, I think, even more insidious lesson that comes
from accepting this mindset is there's an implicit bargain that people who accept this
mindset have accepted, and that bargain is this: If you're willing to render yourself
sufficiently harmless, sufficiently unthreatening to those who wield political power,
then and only then can you be free of the dangers of surveillance. It's only those who
are dissidents, who challenge power, who have something to worry about. There are
all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well. You may be a
person who, right now, doesn't want to engage in that behavior, but at some point in
the future you might. Even if you're somebody who decides that you never want to,
the fact that there are other people who are willing to and able to resist and be
adversarial to those in power dissidents and journalists and activists and a whole
range of others is something that brings us all collective good that we should want
to preserve. Equally critical is that the measure of how free a society is is not how it
treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those
who resist orthodoxy. But the most important reason is that a system of mass
surveillance suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways. It renders off-limits all
kinds of behavioral choices without our even knowing that it's happened. The
renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, "He who does not move does
not notice his chains." We can try and render the chains of mass surveillance invisible
or undetectable, but the constraints that it imposes on us do not become any less
potent.
15:12 Thank you very much.
15:14 (Applause)
15:15 Thank you.
15:16 (Applause)
15:21 Thank you.
15:24 (Applause)
15:30 Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you. The case is rather convincing, I have to say,
but I want to bring you back to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden for a few
questions, if you don't mind. The first one is personal to you. We have all read about
the arrest of your partner, David Miranda in London, and other difficulties, but I
assume that in terms of personal engagement and risk, that the pressure on you is
not that easy to take on the biggest sovereign organizations in the world. Tell us a
little bit about that.
16:03 Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens is that
people's courage in this regard gets contagious, and so although I and the other
journalists with whom I was working were certainly aware of the risk the United
States continues to be the most powerful country in the world and doesn't appreciate
it when you disclose thousands of their secrets on the Internet at will seeing
somebody who is a 29-year-old ordinary person who grew up in a very ordinary
environment exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked,
knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life or that his life would
unravel, inspired me and inspired other journalists and inspired, I think, people
around the world, including future whistleblowers, to realize that they can engage in
that kind of behavior as well.
16:47 BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden, because you have
spoken with him a lot, and you certainly continue doing so, but in your book, you
never call him Edward, nor Ed, you say "Snowden." How come?
17:00 GG: You know, I'm sure that's something for a team of psychologists to
examine. (Laughter) I don't really know. The reason I think that, one of the important
objectives that he actually had, one of his, I think, most important tactics, was that
he knew that one of the ways to distract attention from the substance of the
revelations would be to try and personalize the focus on him, and for that reason, he
stayed out of the media. He tried not to ever have his personal life subject to
examination, and so I think calling him Snowden is a way of just identifying him as
this important historical actor rather than trying to personalize him in a way that
might distract attention from the substance.
17:40 Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis, the work of other journalists, have
really developed the debate, and many governments, for example, have reacted,
including in Brazil, with projects and programs to reshape a little bit the design of the
Internet, etc. There are a lot of things going on in that sense. But I'm wondering, for
you personally, what is the endgame? At what point will you think, well, actually,
we've succeeded in moving the dial?
18:05 GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist is very simple, which is to
make sure that every single document that's newsworthy and that ought to be
disclosed ends up being disclosed, and that secrets that should never have been kept
in the first place end up uncovered. To me, that's the essence of journalism and that's
what I'm committed to doing. As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious for all
the reasons I just talked about and a lot more, I mean, I look at this as work that will
never end until governments around the world are no longer able to subject entire
populations to monitoring and surveillance unless they convince some court or some
entity that the person they've targeted has actually done something wrong. To me,
that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated.
18:45 BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED, is very articulate in presenting
and portraying himself as a defender of democratic values and democratic principles.
But then, many people really find it difficult to believe that those are his only
motivations. They find it difficult to believe that there was no money involved, that he
didn't sell some of those secrets, even to China and to Russia, which are clearly not
the best friends of the United States right now. And I'm sure many people in the room
are wondering the same question. Do you consider it possible there is that part of
Snowden we've not seen yet?
19:20 GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic. (Laughter) If you wanted to, and I
know you're just playing devil's advocate, but if you wanted to sell secrets to another
country, which he could have done and become extremely rich doing so, the last
thing you would do is take those secrets and give them to journalists and ask
journalists to publish them, because it makes those secrets worthless. People who
want to enrich themselves do it secretly by selling secrets to the government, but I
think there's one important point worth making, which is, that accusation comes from
people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these
various governments, and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like
that about other people "Oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he
must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" they're saying a lot more about
themselves than they are the target of their accusations, because (Applause)
those people, the ones who make that accusation, they themselves never act for any
reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by
the same disease of soullessness as they are, and so that's the assumption.
(Applause)
20:29 BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much.
20:32 BG: Glenn Greenwald. (Applause)
1:58 CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story -(Applause) this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a
consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you
began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading
the way to June's revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this? ES: You know,
when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the
intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of
good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things
that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that
shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's
awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in
government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle
with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way,
that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the
solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no
laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in
intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the
information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to
enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together
with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the
public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk.
And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American
people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've
had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has
resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks
that have been played up by the government have never materialized. We've never
seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that,
I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made.
4:45 CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If
we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are
here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience
what that was that was revealed.
5:02 ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of
controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. Much of the debate in the U.S. has
been about metadata. They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're
talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That
allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's
phone records, things like that -- who you're talking to, when you're talking to them,
where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It's a
program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could
deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some
of these companies did resist, even though some of them -- I believe Yahoo was one
of them challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an
open court. They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we've seen,
something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a
talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have
reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is
those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's
considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11
government requests. These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of
corporate America in a free and open Internet should be.
6:47 CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different
technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program,
and where data collection began from them. Now, they have denied collaborating
with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA?
7:09 ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means
to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence
analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the
provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn't mean that there's a
group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling
around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away.
Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are
somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this
information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. It's not stolen from
the lines. But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies
pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant
process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of
basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last
year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to
the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even
these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful
manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need
our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the
interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over
the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take
great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue.
8:59 CA: What more should they do?
9:01 ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right
now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to
enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today,
if you go to look at a copy of "1984" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of
that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service
can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of
Andorra. They can all see it because it's unencrypted. The world's library is
Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot
choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we
need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a
great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by
default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on
their own. That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide.
10:12 CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next
slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that?
10:22 ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this.
This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that
the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there
any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of
American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we
don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. We can't tell you how many
communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would
be to invade your privacy. Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the
reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the
capability already exists. It's already in place. The NSA has its own internal data
format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication
came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they
have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more
communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in
Russia about Russians. I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be
aiming for.
11:43 CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data.
The headline says, "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." Tell us
about that.
11:54 ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing
thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal
documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there
had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we
knew this story was coming. But what's especially interesting about this, about the
fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a
single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected
more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in
Washington, D.C., by accident. What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get
that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until
the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then
requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that.
What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being
broken thousands of times every year?
13:20 CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all
this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got
nothing to worry about. What's wrong with that point of view? ES: Well, so the first
thing is, you're giving up your rights. You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm
going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it
doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter
because you never know when you're going to need them. Beyond that, it's a part of
our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic
societies around the world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call
their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones,
people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train,
they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these
events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your
government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what
they're going to think your intentions were. We have a right to privacy. We require
warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion
because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the
entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great
a temptation to be ignored.
14:55 CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. I heard a quote recently
from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is
the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you've committed one of the worst
acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that?
15:21 ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of
his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments
worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now
he's saying it's a flea bite. So we should be suspicious about the same sort of
overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let's
assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a
narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney
do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the
national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are
not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the
Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American
businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our
society. It's a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond
us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the
security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world
expect us to abide by.
17:13 CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a
few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more
revelations to come?
17:27 ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don't think there's any
question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.
17:41 CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation.
Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the
techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last
few months. It's about a program called "Bullrun." Can you explain what that is?
18:01 ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their
candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is
called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they're
named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They're programs
through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate
partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to
secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that
makes them degrade the security of their services. They're building in backdoors that
not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research
and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. And this
is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of
something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will
live a less safe world overall. We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be
able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those
communications or subverting them for their own ends.
19:27 CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to
cyberattacks from other sources?
19:38 ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've
seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They've
been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in
charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense
over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. If
we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in
Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making
sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of
our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting
America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the
foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're
going to be paying for it for years.
20:40 CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of
America's defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying.
20:50 ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism,
you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it,
because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this,
outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely
unconstitutional. Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now
has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White
House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have
never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it
really terrorism that we're stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say
no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well.
21:48 CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war
against terrorism?
21:53 ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again?
21:55 CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the
war against terrorism?
22:01 ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the
intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes
an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and
programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs,
the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. They asked the FBI to go to
Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But
Congress and the American people said no. They said, it's not worth the risk to our
economy. They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains.
But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the
justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress,
without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed
doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it
offers no value.
23:03 CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal
question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in
right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the
treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a
story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who
want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear?
23:36 ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me
dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning
thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don't want to harm my
government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to
completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a
trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is
not appropriate. We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. We shouldn't be
criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do
despite the risks.
24:32 CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I
know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the
following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless
act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act
that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? Those are the two
choices I'll give you. I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those,
that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up.
It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them.
25:15 ES: I can see you. (Laughter)
25:18 CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act?
25:22 (Applause) (Cheers)
25:25 And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand
and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate
around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. It's not left or right, it's not
really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a
generational issue. You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it
seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something
done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that?
26:02 ES: It is. I think it's very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic
freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the
world, it's not a partisan issue. These are things that all people believe, and it's up to
all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open
Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if
we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to
keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and
that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world.
26:49 CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world
wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would
you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim?
27:02 (Applause)
27:04 Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way,
traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but -27:17 Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I
have to make the choice between the two.
27:26 CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about
about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes
sense? ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the
Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the
chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this
unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that
one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of
their political expression. And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly
what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure
of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not
just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in.
28:34 CA: Do you have a question for Ed?
28:36 TBL: Well, two questions, a general question
28:39 CA: Ed, can you still hear us?
28:41 ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back.
28:45 TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment.
(Laughter)
28:50 ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem.
28:52 TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think
would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about
the web we want?
29:08 ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a
question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. I think the
Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation
but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the
technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world
who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the
weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. We'll get
not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that
we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but
anything that we could have imagined.
30:06 CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation
since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It's not
Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are
now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of
that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something
about that. And you do too.
30:36 ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother
have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established
something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of
privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become
cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and
rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn't happened since the government's
surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why
we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of