SwartzCr/lessig-snowden transcript pt 1

## lessig-snowden transcript pt 1
Lessig: Okay so welcome to a very different kind of Edmond J Saffra Lab Lecture. It's not a lecture it's an interview, and it's not an interview with a person here, it's a person who is many miles from here, although the precise location will not be known. It's an interview with Edward Snowden. Many times people say this is a person who needs no introduction, this person needs no introduction and he will have no direct introduction. There will be a lot of information about him that will come out through a series of questions that i'll be asking him and he'll be answering. We've taken the liberty of asking you to submit questions. I've spent more time than my family thinks I should have trying to integrate uh those questions into my own set of questions and what we'll do is be conducting the interview via uh Google hangout. Um for about the next hour at least. I ask you to silence your phones, this is obviously being recorded and broadcast and uh with no further ado what we'll do is hope the technology brings Edward Snowden to the screen. Here he is Edward Snowden. [Applause]
1:18
Snowden: Hello everybody. Thank you very much for the invitation. I haven't prepared any remarks but I think we're going to cover a lot of very critical issues and difficult questions that don't really have a proper answer, so uh if there's anything uh that you'd like to ask professor I'd invite you to begin.
1:46
Lessig: Great, thank you, um and lets just start a little bit from the personal. Obviously this room and people online are going to be filled with people who know everything there is to know about you and what I've often been struck by is the number of people who have no clear sense who you are and what your values were as you came to work with the NSA and as you came to do the work you did by exposing the NSA. So I wondered if you'd just give us a sens of your own personal background, of your own ideological background as it might relate to this.
2:22
Snowden: I come from a uh a government family. My grandfather was in the military, my father was in the military, my mother still works for the government, my sister  works for the government, and I worked for the government. I was a staff officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. I had signed up to join the US military in the wake of the September eleventh attacks, I had just signed up for the invasion of Iraq because I had believed that fundamentally our government had noble intent, and it did good things, and it did them for the right reasons. What I was not aware and I've grown to become a little more sophisticated in this, while the people in government largely are just that, they're good people trying to do good things for the right reasons. There's a culture that sort of pervades the upper levels of government, the senior officials, political appointees, that have basically become less accountable to the public that they serve. And because of that we see that politics and policies irrevocably sort of irresistibly, they gravitate towards the uh prerogatives of individuals, of these officials, of an elected and unelected class of bureaucrats that can sort of degrade the quality of government that we as individuals enjoy. So as I went through my time in the classified world as the intelligence community would call it, and I went from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency, I worked on a number of public sides and the private sides as a contractor working for private companies, but at a government desk in government facilities using government equipment uh and working on government programs and taking tasks from government employees, I gained an increasingly concerning understanding of what happens on the broad scale. What the results of all these individual decisions are. And that's generally that when decisions are made in the dark, the quality of those decisions is reduced. Now that's not to say that we need to know every decision that the government makes, y'know who's under investigation what this particular program does. But we do have to have a general understanding of  the policies and the powers broadly that a government claims if it's going to be using them in our name, as well as be using them against us. Uh and Ultimately toward the end of my tenure at the NSA I discovered that there were programs of mass surveillance, that were happening beyond any possible statutory authority because these things were constitutional prohibited(?). And I saw that there were, these were things that never should have happened, they were initially authorized in the Bush administration and that administration was fully aware, in their own classified opinions and in the inspector generals report that those programs had no statutory basis. And so we saw developments where they were trying to authorize these under the President's powers, y'know these article 2 powers where basically the president says “we're at war I can do basically whatever I want.” Now that may sound like a great idea and be an important power in times of total war in times of existential threat, but we don't have U-boats in the harbor, and we don't have y'know foreign armies marching on American soil. We haven't seen Total War policies in the United States since  World War 2. So we have to ask 'why were these decisions being made?' 'Why was the public not allowed to participate in the debate?' 'Why is it that even within the separate branches of government officials were not aware of this?' Within the Executive branch y'know in the intelligence community many of my co-workers who also had Top Secret clearances, high level accesses, uh were unaware that these things were going on. The vast majority of Congress had no idea that these programs had been instituted or were being maintained. Even those on the on the Intelligence community, uh, Intelligence Committees in both the Senate and the House were not fully briefed, only the Gang of Eight, that'd be the chairs, the ranking members and then the majority and minority leadership of both houses are briefed on so-called Covert Action Programs and things like that that are the exceptionally compartmented  programs. And the courts had increasingly in the wake of the post 9/11 period had become reluctant to scrutinize decisions or programs that were constitutionally questionable, saying that they lack the expertise or the positioning or uh, what it ultimately boiled down to was the political willingness to confront difficult questions to which there may or may not be rights answers, ones that are right or wrong. So this lead me to stand up and say something about it, and I worked with American journalists and American news outlets to make sure that the public had an ability to make decisions about where the lines in this program should be drawn. Many people are familiar with the story since then, it's still ongoing, reporting continues, but the ultimate basises are that many people consider the last years surveillance and unconstitutional activity of the NSA and so on and so forth, to be ultimately about surveillance and mass surveillance, and that is a critical issue and that is the one with which I am most familiar, and I saw the greatest wrongdoing. However it's important to be aware that the reality that the mass surveillance illustrates is that we have agencies that are working on their own authorities that are working on their own sort of uh institutional momentum to implement programs without oversight, creating these things behind closed doors without the awareness of the public, that are actually changing the boundaries of the rights that we enjoy as free people and a free society. We have lost in many ways the freedom to associate without judgement of the United States because of the metadata that's really an associational tracking program. When we have everyone's call records we have know who everyone's friends are, we know who they contact, we know what they do, we know when they travel, we know where they go, we know how long they're there. There are speech implications to this, there are obviously privacy implications to this, and there is a very strong argument to be made that even if we as a society believe that these powers and authorities would be valuable that we could not institute them through statute regardless, that they simply would be unconstitutional in any form absent an amendment. And we see this happening and being upheald even through international policy decisions very recently, two or three days ago, the United Nations special raparetor(?) on countering terrorism and protecting human rights delivered a report that had beein in the works for I believe several years that found that mass surveillance violate the obligations of states, that the United States and the united Kingdom and many other of our other allies have agreed to under the international covenant on civil and political rights, the ICCBR, as well as, and this wasn't mentioned specifically, but the very same right that he was highlighting in his report was an obligation that we'd agreed to under the universal deceleration of human rights, y'know some fifty odd years back, and that's article twelve, that's that we all have a right to privacy, to be free from unjustified unreasonable intrusions into our lives. And we had this of course under our fourth amendment. So when it came to my story and how I came forward it was not that I saw a particular program and I had an axe to grind. It was broadly that I was witness to massive violations to our constitution, that they were happening in secret and that they were happening as a result of a broad breakdown throughout the branches of government. And this is the key, because when there's a problem in a single agency, when there's a problem in a single branch we tend to be self correcting, that's what checks and balances are for. But the question of whistleblowing, of when to stand up, is really one of 'Do those checks and balances still function?' 'Can you report these issues within a system to a certain branch to a certain organization to a certain office, and actually see those abuses and those policies corrected?' And in this case they were not, we saw that both the courts and Congress and the Executive had all failed in different portions of these programs and protecting our rights. And I think we'll cover that in a little more detail later, but did that answer your question?
[11:25]
Lessig: Yeah, so what striking about the position you've described, both here and also in the interviews that you given is how relatively limited it is for it's justification of stepping forth with this kind of civil disobedience, I mean in particular you've said that the problem you had with what in fact happened is primarily a problem of democratic accountability, you said quote “It's not my role to make that choice” the choice of whether the NSA engages in those activities or not instead it's for the American people quote “I don't intend to destroy those systems but to allow the public to decide whether they should go on.” So the key that you're emphasizing is that we had a process, we had a system of government that wasn't allowing the public to even know about the issues that the NSA was engaging in, and that's the primary justification you have for stepping forward and obviously violating the law in order to make it public.
[12:27]
Snowden: Right obviously it comes down to a question of, y'know, people argue about what is a whistleblower. I tried to raise my concerns internally, they got nowhere. Other individuals who had done the same thing, whether they're Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Weavey(?), Ed Loomis, Diane Roark, who even went to Congress. All of these individuals raised similar concerns and yet the issues were not corrected, were not addressed, and that's again because of the over classification issues that they'd described and the way that these processes had inevitably become more cumbersome and less effective over time to the point where they're essentially broken. I think the ultimate mark of a whistleblower is when it comes to motivations. Are they standing up to change something directly to sort of have a partisan effect, sort of the DeepThroat thing where they get their boss fired so they can move into the next job, that's not whistleblowing under anyone's definition. But really it comes down to  when I stepped up it was not to dictate outcomes, and I think that's ultimately the mark here, it's about allowing the public a chance to participate in democratic processes, in order to play their part in determining the outcome. The reality is that since we saw the birth of this sort of Unitarian Executive theory in the White House throughout American governance, the government has, the public has lost their seat at the table of government. We are increasingly being left out of critical discussions about the policies and the direction that we want steer our society toward. They're being made in our name without our awareness and without our consent, but in a Democratic republic the government draws it's legitimacy from the consent of the people, and everybody who's involved in any kind of research knows that consent is not meaningful if it's not informed. And that's what was lacking, so when I think about the question of y'know how do you see, how do you find the line, the point of justification by which you can stand up both the press, and this is another key distinction – I didn't publish any of these  materials, I never published a single story on the NSA myself because everyone has biases right? And even though I have an expert understanding of these programs, I've worked with them personally, the authorities they operate under, how they're used, again I had the ability to look at anybody's email that was being ingested under these programs, whether that was intercepted domestically or overseas I had the authority to look at both. But I didn't try to push my agenda on to the public because I don't think that would be proper, and I think that many other whistleblowers do the same thing, that's why we go to  the press. The press is a critical part of American society, it's a part of our constitution, that's why we have it, the first amendment, and it's really not the role of an individual such as myself to say what the public should or should not know. But by working in partnership with the free press, we can allow institutions that exist to make these sorts of determinations to then sit down with government, present their evidence for why this is in the public interest, the government can make a counter case and say why this may cause some harm that they may have missed or misunderstood, or the value of these programs misinterpreted by the journalists. And ultimately we can get a decision from there, and there is a kind of accountability borne from that that's lacking when it's an individual that's making the decisions on their own.
[16:28]
	Lessig: Okay so welcome to a very different kind of Edmond J Saffra Lab Lecture. It's not a lecture it's an interview, and it's not an interview with a person here, it's a person who is many miles from here, although the precise location will not be known. It's an interview with Edward Snowden. Many times people say this is a person who needs no introduction, this person needs no introduction and he will have no direct introduction. There will be a lot of information about him that will come out through a series of questions that i'll be asking him and he'll be answering. We've taken the liberty of asking you to submit questions. I've spent more time than my family thinks I should have trying to integrate uh those questions into my own set of questions and what we'll do is be conducting the interview via uh Google hangout. Um for about the next hour at least. I ask you to silence your phones, this is obviously being recorded and broadcast and uh with no further ado what we'll do is hope the technology brings Edward Snowden to the screen. Here he is Edward Snowden. [Applause]
	1:18
	Snowden: Hello everybody. Thank you very much for the invitation. I haven't prepared any remarks but I think we're going to cover a lot of very critical issues and difficult questions that don't really have a proper answer, so uh if there's anything uh that you'd like to ask professor I'd invite you to begin.
	1:46
	Lessig: Great, thank you, um and lets just start a little bit from the personal. Obviously this room and people online are going to be filled with people who know everything there is to know about you and what I've often been struck by is the number of people who have no clear sense who you are and what your values were as you came to work with the NSA and as you came to do the work you did by exposing the NSA. So I wondered if you'd just give us a sens of your own personal background, of your own ideological background as it might relate to this.
	2:22
	Snowden: I come from a uh a government family. My grandfather was in the military, my father was in the military, my mother still works for the government, my sister works for the government, and I worked for the government. I was a staff officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. I had signed up to join the US military in the wake of the September eleventh attacks, I had just signed up for the invasion of Iraq because I had believed that fundamentally our government had noble intent, and it did good things, and it did them for the right reasons. What I was not aware and I've grown to become a little more sophisticated in this, while the people in government largely are just that, they're good people trying to do good things for the right reasons. There's a culture that sort of pervades the upper levels of government, the senior officials, political appointees, that have basically become less accountable to the public that they serve. And because of that we see that politics and policies irrevocably sort of irresistibly, they gravitate towards the uh prerogatives of individuals, of these officials, of an elected and unelected class of bureaucrats that can sort of degrade the quality of government that we as individuals enjoy. So as I went through my time in the classified world as the intelligence community would call it, and I went from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency, I worked on a number of public sides and the private sides as a contractor working for private companies, but at a government desk in government facilities using government equipment uh and working on government programs and taking tasks from government employees, I gained an increasingly concerning understanding of what happens on the broad scale. What the results of all these individual decisions are. And that's generally that when decisions are made in the dark, the quality of those decisions is reduced. Now that's not to say that we need to know every decision that the government makes, y'know who's under investigation what this particular program does. But we do have to have a general understanding of the policies and the powers broadly that a government claims if it's going to be using them in our name, as well as be using them against us. Uh and Ultimately toward the end of my tenure at the NSA I discovered that there were programs of mass surveillance, that were happening beyond any possible statutory authority because these things were constitutional prohibited(?). And I saw that there were, these were things that never should have happened, they were initially authorized in the Bush administration and that administration was fully aware, in their own classified opinions and in the inspector generals report that those programs had no statutory basis. And so we saw developments where they were trying to authorize these under the President's powers, y'know these article 2 powers where basically the president says “we're at war I can do basically whatever I want.” Now that may sound like a great idea and be an important power in times of total war in times of existential threat, but we don't have U-boats in the harbor, and we don't have y'know foreign armies marching on American soil. We haven't seen Total War policies in the United States since World War 2. So we have to ask 'why were these decisions being made?' 'Why was the public not allowed to participate in the debate?' 'Why is it that even within the separate branches of government officials were not aware of this?' Within the Executive branch y'know in the intelligence community many of my co-workers who also had Top Secret clearances, high level accesses, uh were unaware that these things were going on. The vast majority of Congress had no idea that these programs had been instituted or were being maintained. Even those on the on the Intelligence community, uh, Intelligence Committees in both the Senate and the House were not fully briefed, only the Gang of Eight, that'd be the chairs, the ranking members and then the majority and minority leadership of both houses are briefed on so-called Covert Action Programs and things like that that are the exceptionally compartmented programs. And the courts had increasingly in the wake of the post 9/11 period had become reluctant to scrutinize decisions or programs that were constitutionally questionable, saying that they lack the expertise or the positioning or uh, what it ultimately boiled down to was the political willingness to confront difficult questions to which there may or may not be rights answers, ones that are right or wrong. So this lead me to stand up and say something about it, and I worked with American journalists and American news outlets to make sure that the public had an ability to make decisions about where the lines in this program should be drawn. Many people are familiar with the story since then, it's still ongoing, reporting continues, but the ultimate basises are that many people consider the last years surveillance and unconstitutional activity of the NSA and so on and so forth, to be ultimately about surveillance and mass surveillance, and that is a critical issue and that is the one with which I am most familiar, and I saw the greatest wrongdoing. However it's important to be aware that the reality that the mass surveillance illustrates is that we have agencies that are working on their own authorities that are working on their own sort of uh institutional momentum to implement programs without oversight, creating these things behind closed doors without the awareness of the public, that are actually changing the boundaries of the rights that we enjoy as free people and a free society. We have lost in many ways the freedom to associate without judgement of the United States because of the metadata that's really an associational tracking program. When we have everyone's call records we have know who everyone's friends are, we know who they contact, we know what they do, we know when they travel, we know where they go, we know how long they're there. There are speech implications to this, there are obviously privacy implications to this, and there is a very strong argument to be made that even if we as a society believe that these powers and authorities would be valuable that we could not institute them through statute regardless, that they simply would be unconstitutional in any form absent an amendment. And we see this happening and being upheald even through international policy decisions very recently, two or three days ago, the United Nations special raparetor(?) on countering terrorism and protecting human rights delivered a report that had beein in the works for I believe several years that found that mass surveillance violate the obligations of states, that the United States and the united Kingdom and many other of our other allies have agreed to under the international covenant on civil and political rights, the ICCBR, as well as, and this wasn't mentioned specifically, but the very same right that he was highlighting in his report was an obligation that we'd agreed to under the universal deceleration of human rights, y'know some fifty odd years back, and that's article twelve, that's that we all have a right to privacy, to be free from unjustified unreasonable intrusions into our lives. And we had this of course under our fourth amendment. So when it came to my story and how I came forward it was not that I saw a particular program and I had an axe to grind. It was broadly that I was witness to massive violations to our constitution, that they were happening in secret and that they were happening as a result of a broad breakdown throughout the branches of government. And this is the key, because when there's a problem in a single agency, when there's a problem in a single branch we tend to be self correcting, that's what checks and balances are for. But the question of whistleblowing, of when to stand up, is really one of 'Do those checks and balances still function?' 'Can you report these issues within a system to a certain branch to a certain organization to a certain office, and actually see those abuses and those policies corrected?' And in this case they were not, we saw that both the courts and Congress and the Executive had all failed in different portions of these programs and protecting our rights. And I think we'll cover that in a little more detail later, but did that answer your question?
	[11:25]
	Lessig: Yeah, so what striking about the position you've described, both here and also in the interviews that you given is how relatively limited it is for it's justification of stepping forth with this kind of civil disobedience, I mean in particular you've said that the problem you had with what in fact happened is primarily a problem of democratic accountability, you said quote “It's not my role to make that choice” the choice of whether the NSA engages in those activities or not instead it's for the American people quote “I don't intend to destroy those systems but to allow the public to decide whether they should go on.” So the key that you're emphasizing is that we had a process, we had a system of government that wasn't allowing the public to even know about the issues that the NSA was engaging in, and that's the primary justification you have for stepping forward and obviously violating the law in order to make it public.
	[12:27]
	Snowden: Right obviously it comes down to a question of, y'know, people argue about what is a whistleblower. I tried to raise my concerns internally, they got nowhere. Other individuals who had done the same thing, whether they're Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Weavey(?), Ed Loomis, Diane Roark, who even went to Congress. All of these individuals raised similar concerns and yet the issues were not corrected, were not addressed, and that's again because of the over classification issues that they'd described and the way that these processes had inevitably become more cumbersome and less effective over time to the point where they're essentially broken. I think the ultimate mark of a whistleblower is when it comes to motivations. Are they standing up to change something directly to sort of have a partisan effect, sort of the DeepThroat thing where they get their boss fired so they can move into the next job, that's not whistleblowing under anyone's definition. But really it comes down to when I stepped up it was not to dictate outcomes, and I think that's ultimately the mark here, it's about allowing the public a chance to participate in democratic processes, in order to play their part in determining the outcome. The reality is that since we saw the birth of this sort of Unitarian Executive theory in the White House throughout American governance, the government has, the public has lost their seat at the table of government. We are increasingly being left out of critical discussions about the policies and the direction that we want steer our society toward. They're being made in our name without our awareness and without our consent, but in a Democratic republic the government draws it's legitimacy from the consent of the people, and everybody who's involved in any kind of research knows that consent is not meaningful if it's not informed. And that's what was lacking, so when I think about the question of y'know how do you see, how do you find the line, the point of justification by which you can stand up both the press, and this is another key distinction – I didn't publish any of these materials, I never published a single story on the NSA myself because everyone has biases right? And even though I have an expert understanding of these programs, I've worked with them personally, the authorities they operate under, how they're used, again I had the ability to look at anybody's email that was being ingested under these programs, whether that was intercepted domestically or overseas I had the authority to look at both. But I didn't try to push my agenda on to the public because I don't think that would be proper, and I think that many other whistleblowers do the same thing, that's why we go to the press. The press is a critical part of American society, it's a part of our constitution, that's why we have it, the first amendment, and it's really not the role of an individual such as myself to say what the public should or should not know. But by working in partnership with the free press, we can allow institutions that exist to make these sorts of determinations to then sit down with government, present their evidence for why this is in the public interest, the government can make a counter case and say why this may cause some harm that they may have missed or misunderstood, or the value of these programs misinterpreted by the journalists. And ultimately we can get a decision from there, and there is a kind of accountability borne from that that's lacking when it's an individual that's making the decisions on their own.
	[16:28]