Edward Snowden's interview with Dan Gillmor — Süddeutsche Zeitung Editor...

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I want to welcome everyone to this broadcast and let me just say hello I'm Danielle more from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and I'm with the global editors network that's putting on the heck days for investigative reporters here this week and it's a great honor for me personally to be able to introduce to you someone who has a in ways that most people can never do has changed the world and change journalism in the process and we have a lot to think about because of what Edward Snowden has done and i'm going to now put his picture back up and leave it up because he is the person you're here to see uh I have it not on this screen but unlike computer next to it i have a tweet from Edward Snowden that says a new report if you use AT&T they've been tracking you since 1987 and secretly selling it to the cops without a warm this is pointing to a story and an online publication in the u.s. called The Daily Beast.
Haha I I guess you're showing it to us from your computer and this is a pretty remarkable stuff and it makes it worth starting off with a question that I think we have to answer and ask anyway as journalists and then start to find answers that I you know journalism is getting not a lot harder to do in some ways especially national security or investigative journalism I in a world of pervasive surveillance and i wanted to start with asking you about what we should be thinking about as journalists given what's going on and that story was a remarkable new peg on this issue so please jump in yeah i mean this is the central issues investigates q sorry I see where this little problem here in Greece s had been three years since i'm gonna have to remove angry the unless you can mute your stage mind okay actually whoever's working the tech fix that that's great thank you so much for that um yeah one of the central issues that we're facing in investigative journalism today is the whole question of can you maintain a confidentiality extortion because of course journalist can't work without sources without having people who work inside the institutions with that organizations within agencies of government for telling him generally what's going on or confirming fact or a journalist hey I heard this or this official make this statement of what does that actually mean what is the truth and unfortunately particularly in the United States we see that there has been an extraordinarily aggressive push in the last decade.
I to punish this and this is something that's not just happening in the context of shall we say for example uh national security leaks alone although this is where we see it in the primary case where an individual comes forward and there whether or not they're talking about programs which could be illegal could be unconstitutional but which indicate some kind of questionable activity something that could be a basically a violation of law the government will actually use its authorities not to go after the sources of the news reports criminal and journalists have actually been courts have leaned on them to try to get them to disclose their sources let me see if I can actually find the source that i have for the apologies yeah so we have the new york times in the United States and correct me if I'm wrong is that mirrored for you or is that readable because i'm seeing a conflict where I can't tell if you guys are seeing that backwards or forwards or seeing it the way it should be okay good perfect yet so this is the executive editor of the new york times you can think of well you're Aldrin was I don't need to explain that but for people in the stream for watching this at home this is what you can think of is sort of the the director of the New York Times and she said that the obama white house which campaigned on the platform of being the most transparent white house administration in US history was in fact the most secretive that she had ever dealt with in 22 years of her career in Washington and covering presidents from Ronald Reagan onward now this White House is brought forward more criminal leak investigations of journalistic sources of then all other White House administrations combined and this is something that continues to grow we see a sort of hand waving about a new leak investigation coming for an official who is a contractor was working for the NSA who is secretly arrested in august but this was only revealed a month or possibly a little over a month later and appears that the Obama administration basically doesn't want to charge this individual with espionage until the next White House administration comes in so sort of they can cook the books and the numbers will fall in the other administration instead of running up Obama's this is james rising he's the most famous national security reporter at The New York Times again the White House and the Department of Justice leaned on him to get him to reveal his source about a CIA operation that had gone wrong.
They had been attempting to send fake plans to the Iranians in theory but they had actually screwed up the plan it was a bad plan actually accelerated the Iranian nuclear program instead of hindering it because the booby trap that they thought they put in the plan was ridiculously week in the scientists who received the plans I could immediately corrected now despite that being cleared prevailing public interest out individuals charged but this brings us back to the central question of okay so we know the government's now are trying to go after journalist sources but how is this actually happening mechanically how are these sources be revealed which brings us to the story that mr Gilmore mentioned in the introduction which was just published yesterday in an outlet called The Daily Beast by journalists can flip about this program at NSA called are sorry this program at AT&T I apologize called hemisphere now the idea here I these are the the basically the summary of the new facts from the story is that AT&T is recorded basically everything that travels over the network and saving it they have a storage facility i believe it's been estimated in the range of petabytes of data by being a million gigabytes and they're storing the metadata of communications right this is not what you said on the phone call this is just the fact that you picked up the phone and dialed someone on it who you dialed how long you were on the phone with the width and you know how frequently are calling these people so on the kind of analytics to come out of it who are your routine contacts when a new story comes out who do you call first of four comment.
This is the kind of things that can be derived from that kind of metadata they've been storing them back to 1987 and here's something that is a new fact because that story or that fact was actually brought forward by the new york times in 2013.
Although they thought the program was only used for drug investigations in the united states yesterday we found out that is being used for everything down to Medicare fraud which you can think of is a.
Kind of social medical benefits in the United States because remember we don't have universal health insurance there see you sort of get money from the government for this benefits directly so the second thing is this about a cell tower data right your cellular tower data is when you think about well I'll get into that in a second but they were storing these records going back to july of 2008 which is far longer than all of the other service providers in the United States horizon the other leading off own company in the u.s. holds them for about a year spring rolls them for a year-and-a-half based on what we know at the time in 2008 moreover what's really fascinating heroes although pretty much every law-enforcement agency in for every telecommunications service in major established governments with major intelligence agencies has some obligation to share information a with law enforcement agencies they have to do this in response to a legal request typically often one that signed by a judge of War Horse piña and these agencies are these a telecommunications service providers have to respond very narrowly right they have to say all right we'll give you just this that the police asked for this story revealed something that was very different and I suspect this is happening around the world on a more frequent basis where these intelligent or excuse me i keep getting them confused because the work is now so similar nowadays and these telecommunications agencies go well we already are required to store this information for one reason because we've gotta be able to turn it over to government first certain period but this since this is a business can we come up with some structure of value add to do we make this more attractive the government can make them pay for this and so AT&T experiment and then they found out the answer was yes instead of just holding it for the statutory requirement of one year or even going sort of above and beyond like sprint going for a year-and-a-half a simple store this forever have been doing this since 1987 or back to 2,000 date in the case of the cell phone tower data and then rather than the demanding the government come to us with a warrant and force us to search this data what if we just sold them access as a service.
What if we said rather than the government having to get a warrant they simply get some lower standard of legal process like an administrative subpoena which doesn't have to be signed by judges in many cases it can come from the law enforcement agencies directly where the agency or the officer just said i want this can you provide this and then they send some money to these companies and they'll return they'll actually do the search for the lactis sort of mini NSA here now what's interesting about this 2008 of july date that struck out struck out the story of like a sore thumb for me and again this just came out yesterday so this is very much developing maybe you guys could do some follow-up reporting on this uh-huh is that they say it goes back to july two thousand name that's such a strange date because in the united states that is the precise month that the FISA Amendments Act or the FAA as we call it which is that an amendment to is 1978 law which basically is what allows the United States this amendment is what allows all of the US intelligence agencies to search through anybody who is not an American their records without warrant.
Instead the certain tourney general signs general warrant for classes of behavior things like they think you're associated with a foreign government or you have some information on counterterrorism or something like that then the agents of the NSA for example myself and ye could on our own assertion of what a legal standard we refer to as reasonable articulable suspicion which is a very low legal standard we call it internally a gut feeling that you can write down we can then go to these companies and say provide us this or we can search on the basis of your email address and pull anything out of the system but that also happened in july of 2008 so as soon as this law was passed and this law actually came into being because of the lobbying of communications companies such as AT&T in the wake of two does one the Bush White House created a warrantless wiretapping program which was not authorized by any statute or law on the president's own authority was later found to be unconstitutional and said we're going to start collecting records from everybody from the largest telecommunications companies in the United States but how did they do that they went to these companies that brought a letter from the president basically saying will you help us.
This is not authorized by statute and this is in fact of very questionable legality but the president's asking we just had a terrorist attack will you help us.
Unfortunately many of these cases these companies said no matter what the law says sure we'll help you but then thanks to the work of people like you sitting in this room investigative journalists uncovered was actually happening it was supposed to come forward in 2003 interior times that reporter we talked about earlier James rising found out about this program the New York Times got a call from the White House and please don't do this before the election basically there will be blood on your hands and everything like that what New York Times actually said yes they didn't publish the story until after bush was reelected and I believe in 2005-2006 the story finally hit the front pages because that journalists change risin was going to publish this I in his own book and the New York Times didn't want to be embarrassed by getting scooped by the reporter so they brought it forward this meant all of those telecommunication service providers that had secretly been collaborating White House immediately got soon by their customers on a massive class action basis because the penalties for violating these laws that they had done we're in a criminal context 10 years per count but in a civil context i believe thousands and thousands of dollars for every communication they intercepted now they were intercepting billions billions of communications parte de so this would have led to the largest civil damages in history likely and put them all out of business.
So they said look we're going to cut you off government unless you immunize us against the civil suits what's fascinating here they said don't only immunize us from these claims in the future we want you to retro actively immunize against the lawsuits that have already been brought against us for the laws that we already broke and strangely enough the government did this in 2007 they passed an emergency law that only would exist for one year which basically everybody in Congress voted for without really reading you're thinking about because they cleverly entitled the protect America Act the next year in 2008 this law was made permanent under the FISA Amendments Act that we just revealed was in june two thousand eight now why is this relevant to you why does this matter so much the reason why is that cellphone tower data that was started being collected in june or july two thousand ice sorry started being saved since july two thousand eight on a permanent basis reveals so much more than just who you call on the basis of how cellphone technology works right how did you when you dial somebody how does sort of the world know to make only that phone ring when you're calling from this number here.
Well they need to make sure that the person calling you is basically an authorized subscriber they paid their bill and everything like that that they're connected to the service which means that every cell phone tower that this person is around their cell phone is constantly announcing Here I am Here I am.
This is the sim card number in my phone this is the handset number of my phone so they can work out the compatibility for that and what I'm dialing this phone number you need to do the reverse on the other side you need to look for their sim card you need to look for their handset number and you've got to find out of all of the cell phone towers in the world which one are they connected to and of all of the different cell phones that are connected to cellphone towers which one is which one is theirs so only the cell phone rings that's what kind of the brief synopsis for that but what this means is that every where you keep your cell phone with you everywhere your cell phone has ever traveled is creating these registers nations with the merest cellular carrier at the same thing happens with the people that you're meeting with now I don't like to be the kind of person that's sort of all tin foil hat and says you know you can trust your phone you can use things like that but you need to be aware of when you need to maintain the confidentiality of your communications that is you need to protect was actually said within the communication what happened within a conversation and then when you need to have a higher level of protection when you need to actually protect the anonymity of the parties involved when the source can be linked to it in any way when there can be record that they called your desk they called your office that you met with them at a coffee shop that your two cell phones were in the same parking garage at the same time this unfortunately the paradigm that were very rapidly moving toward and I think we need to be focused on the fact that this stuff isn't just coming from governments now this is coming from businesses they're collecting far more than what is necessary for the basic operations of the businesses and really scrutinize what this means for your sector for your instrument for the traditional methods of investigative reporting and how we can start to counter them and if necessary defeat these capabilities to protect sources so we're here in the offices of the German publication Soulja is item and should we presume here in Europe that the same activities are taking place and in other countries around the world you alluded to that you do you think this kind of recording and storage is taking place everywhere it's definitely having it phone companies the question that's of primary importance in distinguishing jurisdictions today is through what legal mechanisms what burdens can government's get this information out of the phone companies when they say we have to provide this to them and is it legal.
For telecommunication service providers to say well if the government doesn't compel us to do this stuff we don't have legal process our customers don't actually own these records these are records that we the phone company would allege that wheel you don't have an interest in the privacy of your cellular phone records.
This is the way it is in the United States under nineteen seventies supreme court decision that I called Smith versus Maryland that established a principal in the United States we call the third party doctrine when you dial a phone call when you send an email when you use the internet this is how the government is maximally interpreting that we haven't actually gotten this reviewed since the nineteen seventies so we don't know if it'll still pull today but the government and these companies are interpreting it to me that you don't actually have any control over these records you don't have any say over how they're used their the property the company therefore if the company wants to voluntarily start selling these records and not necessarily the advertising companies not selling to anyone but secretly to the government as a service that's actually legal they're not breaking any laws now Germany does have some better restrictions in some ways that many other European a jurisdiction they have for example the foundation g10 privacy law but we have seen laws being passed in Germany that are presented as if their intelligence reforms but as we actually start to go through the fine print and she was saying they are legitimizing the policies of mass surveillance or as the government would call them bulk collection and this is a fundamentally dangerous thing because all of the things that cause the scandal they're now saying well we're not going to stop them.
We're actually going to expand that we're going to send these capabilities we're just going to make them more open yes we will spy on everyone but will tell you that we're doing it so then it's okay well then so what let's let's get a little specific on what what should journalists be doing and and maybe extend back to the general public that doesn't particularly want to be spied on but journalists have a special case here what what should we be doing in our daily practices with phones with email etc that well if I try to give you sort of the this is what you do here's how you do it.
This would take much more time that we have available today specifically but let's talk about the more important practical things and this is actually I i think a a sectoral thing right journalists have a specific professional need as a class to have access to truly anonymous communications they recognize ya that privacy is a foundation right right you cannot have freedom of the press without a right to privacy because without that you cannot protect the confidentiality of that journalists source communication and without freedom of the press without a meaningful freedom of press sorry you can write anything you want but you can actually learn anything it doesn't have that much meeting right up.
Privacy is what gives these other rights Privacy is kind of the fountainhead from which the meaning of other rights is derived freedom of speech doesn't mean very much unless you have the space to decide what it is that you actually want to say unless you have that that protected area in which you can confide with friends with colleagues with rivals the things that you're thinking about and sort of test them to see are they reasonable are the is the reasoning that I used to develop these ideas these arguments these stories that I want to share a rigorous enough that I want to share them with the public without suffering the prejudice and judgment of a larger crowd that doesn't have any particular interest in my well-being and the same thing goes down the freedom of worship are you simply inheriting a belief and you are afraid to test it you're afraid to try something else because you're afraid of how you'll be judged or do you have the ability without people monitoring without people seeing what's going on with you to figure out how it is that you truly want to worship how it is that you really want to live but this thing here is how do we come back this how we ensure that we enjoy a free press that is actually an effective investigative tool in the next decades the coming decades and the central thing here is in much of the reporting around these surveillance issues we have seen journalistic outlets who have unfortunately been somewhat timid about condemning these actions in their reporting their actual reporting right in the editorial side they'll take a ball position they'll make an opinion piece here they'll say this is bad but in the reporting tape they will not use their institutional voice to make an actual calculation here about the value of these programs and the threat that they represent to the traditional operation of the press to the traditional operation of a free society and a threat they represent individuals and this is understandable rightmost journalistic institutions I simply want to report but this side said and but this site that without really getting little but this is a core interest of journalists and this is one of the few public levers of influence that we sort of civil society have over these extraordinarily powerful government institutions right we're talking about spies that if we're being honest I do have a mandate to break laws with a startling regularity as long as they can justify it in their terms behind closed doors to government officials as being for the public good but if we can weigh the public good more openly if journalists have access to some of these facts and can actually assess them independently outside of those closed doors of government we can start having very different conversation where the government actually has to make a real are and shall we say more fair balancing of interests then they do if the press ax less adversarial e on this issue the press can and i would argue should be absolutely as adversarial as possible here because you're one of the only ones which really can this more than a technical fight is a policy fight because if we get to the point of technical battles you're going to be fighting underfunded newsrooms are it's going to be underfunded newsrooms against some of the wealthiest intelligence agencies in the world and this is not just me a alleging this is something that we actually see it's fact this is ahmed mansour he's a dissident operating out of I could get their country of origin wrong here so i'm not going to state it i believe it's guitar or UAE the fact check me on that one this was an individual who has been hacked countless times last several years recently malware was discovered on his phone that was created by a commercial group called the NSA NSO group which is a us-owned corporation now originally founded in his rear but it's us own and they were selling million-dollar implants right that would break into the latest and greatest iPhones and other things you know your android phone so on so forth to track him because they didn't like his condemnation of their policies this was reported into your times this thing is a consistent and continuing problem I don't have the extra reporting here that just happened last few days but we have seen more stories just in the last few days that coming out of the intercept and elsewhere that show these governments are increasingly hiring technical talent are paying up to half million dollars a year in salary for people who aren't even that hot but they're simply willing to work for these governments to specifically target the communications of activists and journalists journalists are special typically manages targets and this is something that the NSA itself has done they've targeted journalists in areas like Pakistan where they thought they had access to interesting information maybe about al-qaeda maybe about adversary groups out there maybe about political groups of the journalists just get it first so journalists are increasingly a threatened class I when we think about the right to privacy and the point that I'm trying to make here is yes i can give you tips on how to protect your communications but you're going to be engaging in an arms race you simply cannot win you must fight this on the front pages and you must win if you want to be able to report in the same way that you've been able to do for the previous centuries honestly well that's bad news.
Yeah I you wrote a piece allow back for or were quoted in the intercept with some of the things that ordinary folks can do and I in 1997 or so i put pgp on a computer is using and at the bottom of my newspaper column put the fingerprint and in three or four years that it was there got like three or four emails one of which that I want I just want to see if this works and then 20 years later installed pgp orgy gpg again on on my current computer and it was still really hard to do stuff doesn't seem easy yeah this is a again one of the real problems that we have is we have technologies that can protect communications in an unbreakable format when they're in transit right governments have reactants this is if we throw them in a pool of acid saying you know you're shutting us out we're going dark we know this is false any government official claims were going false or we're going dark I is lying there making a knowingly false statement or they have been informed or briefed by someone who's making a knowingly false statements of we know this because we have classified documents from inside government and we have a reportage from journalists or in private sessions with these officials were behind closed doors they described today as the Golden Age of surveillance and of course based on the stories we see yesterday regarding the operations of the telecommunication service providers and stories that we have from prior years like 2013 now where were talking about things like prison of course we're the biggest internet service providers from around the world were voluntarily cooperated far beyond what was legally required of them with government such as the United States bypassing moral requirements as long as they weren't as long as the targets are united states citizens and so on so forth that that things are pretty bad for our side for the government side it's never been easier but how we reconcile this with this idea that you know these are theoretically as far as our understanding of mathematics goes unbreakable communications well it's because what we're doing is we're boarding mass surveillance when we use encryption we're not stopping targeted surveillance because even again if you have the most well encrypted device in the world if the government spends a million dollars to pay hacker to explore your phone personally they will very likely succeed in our current state-of-the-art it is simply true that often is easier than defense and this is an unfortunate artifact of the fact that governments around the world have prioritized offensive capabilities for the benefit of spying on people so much more strongly than they have defensive capabilities preventing our countries from being act and this is what's leading to the kind of dynamics we see today we're suddenly uh other hackers that the government is not approve of our starting to say hey we're getting we're gonna act all of the time whether it's the office of personnel management whether it's this recent Democratic National Committee hack whether it's all of these other things about infrastructure hacks fear the power grid being attacked these were preventable problems ah but unfortunately we don't have this pressure that should be simply blistering coming from newspapers going we are the most advanced societies in the world we are the most connected societies in the world and in some sort of computer-based conflict on making an intentional effort to avoid the word cyber here because cyber simply means related to computers are in computer-based conflicts we have more to lose.
We can hack Russia 10 times right it will cause less damage to them than one hacked us will cause we can heck North Korea a thousand times and they will suffer less damage than if they hack us a single time.
This is not a game that we want to get into then why are we doing so is because policy is short-sighted and policy is only short-sighted here because it is not being publicly debated it is not being openly scrutinized outside of this audience of a few special interests up let me ask you when you've talked a bit about journals and newspapers and when you had to make a decision what you were going to do with the documents from NSA you made a disorder you made a choice and that choice was to go to journalists rather than putting them out there as has been done some other yeah I could have bodies up on my own so would you talk a bit about why you did that what was the reason that you went to journalists with a forum for me this was very important because I had such strong political beliefs i had discussed this with my colleagues internally these programs are not my hand on my intentions of course.
Or if I had I certainly couldn't say this in a recorded google hangout on youtube or the FBI would be talking to my co-workers and uh not so pleasant but yeah so I showed them things like for example the heat map that the NSA had this was a top-secret program so helpfully called boundless informant I that the closer to read it is the more yellow it is the more we're collecting communications from these regions this is not a total map but this is a pretty accurate map generally for what we had where we going except it excludes some of the programs that most strongly target the United States so the United States but in reality bright red I if this were including all of the statistics from us telecommunications service providers such as AT&T which at the time were providing these records directly to 18 her herd to the NSA but in the wake of 2013 were by law prohibited from doing so directly and had to change this around a little bit but it shows for example we were collecting more communications from Americans than we were from Russians and this begs the question of what is this right.
Was this what we set out to do was this how the NSA was supposed to sort of defend freedom and democracy and liberty and all of these things that if you take a positive view on what these people sign up to do and often did because I was one of them was this consistent with our mission and unfortunately most of these individuals agreed that it was not however maybe I was wrong right I wasn't the director of the NSA I wasn't the top lawyer maybe i didn't know what i was talking about me those making a huge mistake.
I didn't want to harm anyone and more critically even though I knew my intention wasn't harm anyone is very concerned with the risks that I made a so I set out to devise a system in which I could mitigate those risks the maximum extent possible.
By imitating the model of checks and balances that was supposed to exist in the United States government that had unfortunately failed these sort of three co-equal branches of government that are sort of supposed to police each other you have the executive you have the Congress and you have the courts and they're constantly supposed to be attacking each other to see if they have sort of gone too far.
I provided information to journalists on the basis of documents that i believe were necessary to demonstrate sort of criminal activities that occurred within government but I told the journalists that they should never published document on the basis of my sheer claims or allegations and that they should publish no story this was an actual condition of receiving access the article are the archives they could republished no story that they could not independently come to a public interest determination or sorry that they could come to an independent editorial determination was in the public interest and no meaning here that wasn't just newsy rights not just that we get clicks not just that it you know as of historic interest but we actually needed to know in a democratic context and I believe they've done a pretty good job of doing this now beyond this as an additional check on their judgment because you know they have commercial and institutional incentives they would go to the government in advance of it publication not to give the government video the government didn't get a video on any of these stories but to tell the government generally here's what we're going to be publishing and why did we understand this is this going to put any individual risk is there something we didn't understand here uh is this sort of detail going to reveal some agent behind enemy lines and the government would have a chance to make their case that journalists didn't understand this this had gone too far that somebody would be placed at risk and in all cases that i'm aware of this process was followed and I believe that this is the reason why.
I am so confident that no one has come to harm as a result of these stories this is why this reporting won the pulitzer prize for public service which is the highest price in journals in the United States for reporting um and this is why i believe despite the government having every opportunity in a sensitive since 2013 to say you know people died as a result of this this was a horribly irresponsible thing here in 2016 we have never seen a single piece of evidence credible or not uh than individual has come to harm his results of this reporting now a lot of people are going to be thinking about this in the context of WikiLeaks and I do want to say one thing quickly here which is that WikiLeaks originally occupied a very similar model they worked with the New York Times and other press institutions to give them access to the archives but they didn't publish everything bulk a guardian reporter did make a mistake and publish the password to the archive the WikiLeaks have been sharing openly in a book that they sold which then let everybody in the world get access to this so WikiLeaks made this sort of editorial pivot decision to publish everything involved at that point and everybody said this was incredibly irresponsible but that did happen in 2009 and in the trial of chelsea manning in 2013 the government was asked to show the harm that resulted from this policy and show who was hurt as a result and they declined to do so because it wasn't actually any evidence of doing that and even now I'll whether it's on the basis of the sort of insider sources and classified reportage of things that i read within the intelligence community or anything else it does not seem that anybody actually was hurt or died as a result now there's a question here of was it riskier and it's fair to say that you know maybe it was but i think it's very important for journalists even journalists who disagree very strongly with this model publication to remember that we do the evidence for making allegations and there is a difference between the risk of harm and the fact that part up before we get to some questions from the journalists here I've one more one of asking hot whistleblowing looks like a very lonely and obviously risky thing to do and I wonder if journalists should know things about what whistleblowers go through that maybe we don't think about that would help us be better at receiving and asking for material from whistleblower yeah i think this is a big problem i'll try to keep it short because i know we got a lot of people never want to get two questions we don't have much time but when I was thinking about how to go through this I wasn't actually sure that I was going to go through with it because I was scared I was nervous I was not sure that would make a difference i think everybody struggles with these things and so the first thing I need to do is I need to establish contact with the journalists and there's a very famous story of course where I tried to teach glenn greenwald one of the journalists that I wanted to get in contact with how to use that gpg you described earlier which is almost impossible to use correctly safely would not recommend that unless you are truly fighting against an adversary that is you know only this old proven honestly pretty janky technology is the reliable shield that you have for your layering it with other technologies so one fails you still got that as a fallback but he almost lost the story because he never follow when I was literally hear you know going NSA in the daytime and nighttime recording videos specifically for him on how to use GV g and he's going to all thanks so much for that yell get it set up next weekend never doing it.
Try to put yourself in the position of the source now this is also really something that requires a lot of instinct on on the part of the journalists because I've seen this everybody who is open one of these new secure drop confidential drop boxes for press outlets has seen it most of the stuff you get will be honestly crazy people because there are a lot of honestly crazy people out there and they're fascinated with the idea of secrecy encryption conspiracy and it's just like they're gonna be all over it but crazy people typically write like crazy people.
It's I get a lot of them who write to me on twitter i can assure you if you cannot i think you guys know you know you get a feel for it but if somebody feel even a little bit legitimate even if you don't know where they are even if they have established bona fides try to hear the mail try to give them a little bit of rope try to get a little bit of leeway if they say you know try to use this tool and just trust me it works i may be given a shot.
Don't jeopardize your work you know go to your throwaway computer not the one that has all your secret sourcing material on it because that could be one of those million-dollar hackers sitting in Dubai but there's a need to accept that people might be providing the information who you don't know their identity your journey you're normally you know journalists say you can tell me your identity.
I won't tell my editor I'll protect you there are sources who were like myself i did this is a no no you don't understand you won't know my identity yet i'll provide other things that establish my bona fides but until we meet in person you're not really going to know i am and it was until the journalists really left and I had left that was the case because sources aren't sure if they can trust you.
Just like you're not sure you can trust them okay let me ask we are first question can be able from one of the journalists here who was part of the Panama papers.
Revelations which started at this organization so people are going to come up to the camera here and do it directly hi hi my name is Vanessa I'm a data journalist with suggestions lighting and yeah when we publish the Panama papers in April you were actually the first person to me about it 20 minutes more walking know LOL i'm actually you leaked all the and we are still wondering how you did you think you know people thought that I have some inside source you know was somebody on the team told me that actually no I saw it on twitter i was on Twitter somebody else had leaked about it i don't know whether they were from your team or whether they were from one of the partner institutions I can't remember at this point I was just some small tweet somewhere and it had the link to your site which had already gone lie i believe you had tweeted it out but it had populated and so I saw this site and I went Wow and I wrote up the tweet about it because it you know i heard your story I was pulling your boats and everything about the volume of the week in the user it really impressed me was amazing reporting and so I wanted to push it out and make sure it was seen by as many people but yeah I i wish i had more interesting story again I i I'm sorry I broke the embargo but I didn't agree to it.
Well thanks for that and the most serious question as well as investing investigative journalist i'm also interested in your opinion on how intelligence services actually can use platforms like WikiLeaks or even turn the lists out to influence politics is is it a real threat.
Yeah i mean but the question here is is it actually a threat if people are disseminating true information i do think it's quite dangerous if we're getting doctored information if we're getting a manipulated things because now suddenly it introduces this dynamic where we don't love anything is true but nobody has actually shown these recent documents to be inauthentic or false or even make the claim that specific documents false there have been some people who have tried to kind of imply it in a general sense but I mean any journalism recognizes Dodge when they see it but the thing here that i would think is it is concerning that we have people hacking into private individuals emails and then publishing them because that's a dynamic that we've never seen before but these are very powerful officials who are in positions of privilege and things like that and it is revealing matters of public importance and it is being handled in a responsible way journals are going through these things and making sure they can mitigate risks where possible again i'm reluctant to use the word mitigating harms here because it's very difficult to see that there there's any evidence that harms have actually occurred but if intelligence services stop spying on the public generally and instead start tearing each other's dirty laundry in a truthful way are they actually having us or they open doors for better understanding of society now this requires this to not be unilaterally unilateral effort right we don't just want our adversaries revealing our dirty but we would need to see the same thing worse but maybe we think we would actually see a more truthful understanding the world at that point that benefits us I don't really have a position on this I'm just speculating here but it does concern me if we see journalists were saying I'm nervous about getting too much true information about powerful officials and government and that seems like the opposite instant the opposite in reaction that they should have I do think it's fair and reasonable for journalists to say hey let's be careful about protecting individuals information that might be revealed in these documents that is not of any public interest.
Thank you.
We have a another question hello you could say link yeah I Nicholas from major part and the I to talk and I were a bit of concern and during the investigations journalist newsroom around the globe gather information about really achieves of people involved in political of human child cases and now that journalist and you know speak and built tools together they want to share this information with other people too to help us develop bells two more fish official t such big data sets and find the novels on my knees.
You know people are sharing that and giving their name instead of some of someone else and intact for contracts for example and should we get concerned to become some kind of you know journalism NSA because looks can contain a lot of personal information and use them a lot of personal information if we start to store it and share it between journalists ya can be tricky to solve this problem you know this is a very a very complicated question i can't say that i got the right answer you know what do I know I didn't graduate high school but in terms of general principles here there's the question of position for these large datasets even my own right when we have this sort of top secret archive that's resulted in so much public good.
There are details in it that shouldn't necessarily be published because they are provided to journalists for a background understanding of what the government's actually doing behind closed doors.
Both bad and good because they need to be able to independently assess so whether the government is lying to them or not the government is being truthful about the value of this program whether they're just blowing smoke but after much the reporting been done how do you protect it in a a fairly responsible way right you can mitigate all risks and at this point we don't really need to mitigate risks to that extent because we're no longer living 2013 the intelligence agencies have had plenty of time on their own to mitigate these risks and so on so forth risk reduces overtime right when it's a surprise.
It's more dangerous than a days after the passage of years but in this context where you're trying to for example investigate is some official if I understand you correctly question gravelly some official is engaged in corruption but they're smart enough not to put the secret swiss bank account under their name so they put it under some distant relatives and on a cousin a brother you know spouse's or whatever and then later investigative journalist wants to say hey can you search for this individual see if they're in there I and the question is how do you police that access how do you protect people who are in there who are actually legitimate users of a legal service or banking records or private emails and i would argue this is actually the role of journalists to make those decisions in a free press right its people in the public the Civil body the civic body citizens can say whatever they want they can do whatever they want but they're not necessarily a burdened with any special responsibility to be judicious for discrete or anything like that governments of course don't really care and will do absolutely anything they can to protect their secrecy and prerogatives but journalists are somewhere in between they are charged to represent the public as the strong arm to challenge the government's monopoly control information but also corporate institutions things like these corrupt law firms like mossack fonseca but I when there are these hard questions who should decide should the government make a lawsuit they establish a rule or should we recognize that journalists are the only professional class who is really prepared and makes a career out of these kind of decisions this is the editorial judgment i would say where you have to recognize that journalists can will and should make mistakes journalists should mitigate risks where possible but they should embrace it doing journalism properly the cost of democracy is uncertainty and then pursuing things you could get things wrong you could go too far you could make a mistake here or there and you do hold an obligation to mitigate the risks when you can and when you do something wrong to try to respond to them in the most responsible way but don't pretend and do not accept any kind of argument or burden imposed on you by the other side that says you have to be perfect if you make a mistake you d legitimizes you because if we do that what we're doing is we're limiting the public's right to know their access to knowledge about things that really do matter in a particularly datasets that are pretty questionable to begin with plastic fan second exists to create shell companies so in this context yes you you don't want to expose people unfairly or people are who necessarily aren't doing anything wrong but at the same time you should recognize if there are indications of badness is you're getting tip-off some things like that and they are existing in a pre-existing suspicious dataset this is something that should be investigated doesn't necessarily say bypass the publication decision entirely but I think we have to recognize that we can mitigate risks we cannot eliminate them yes but I'm concerned because we are still storing data about people that are might all might not be built in this cases right yeah so this is the long-term this position I don't think anybody has a good answer for this but this actually brings up the question of another industry another sort of professional class which is struggling to find their place in the moment and this is librarians maybe we should create a special library or some kind of a university structure something that is respected and can be trusted enjoys some measure of faith by the public that they will do the right thing where they specialize in securing and holding over the long term these kind of sensitive data sets and making them available for legitimate investigative use and by this i mean civil investigations not governmental investigations necessarily but allowing newspapers and journalists to move on to the next story and overtime actually as they connect this to other datasets you know it's not that they're becoming the NSA I for journalism it's that they're becoming the public body of knowledge about the truth of the world what's really happening for the public while trying to manage those risks and most responsible way.
No consequence to thank you we're running up near the time we had let's try to get two more questions and if we can anybody else want to come up i gotta keep it short though and then i have i'm going to have one final one for you after a couple of buildings idea i'm janna school running for the Duchess item and have a personal question are in two years ago there was a discussion about you and possible asylum in Germany so I was wondering whether anything has changed on that or whether you think you have to stay out of the EU and the transatlantic context forever that we have seen some changes I mean in the last year we saw the where is colleges we saw the European Parliament actually passed a resolution saying that you member states should not honor the criminal charges against me because their political in nature and I should not be extradited this from any other state in the EU this was passed in favor and more broadly they said that whistleblowers need to be protected and should be protected not just me right let's recognize this larger issues and what happens to me and I think that's the the real focus here it is unfortunate that the German government despite seeing everything that's happened despite seeing the fact that there has been harm the fact that the United States government has done investigations and found for example the program's revealed these kind of mass surveillance records that telephoning telephony metadata program under section 215 of the Patriot Act was actually ended this reporting led to the most significant reforms in US surveillance capabilities since the nineteen seventies and these programs hadn't been making a safer in fact they had made a concrete difference in a single investigation and this is the White House's groups saying this not sort of radical opposition groups saying this it is I think really unfortunate that they're still saying they can't do anything.
Not because it wouldn't be the right decision but because they think the United States government would punish them and they would let Germans die by not sharing vital information with Germany if they granted if they protected my human rights I I think that's just a a a very disappointing thing because if human rights are becoming negotiable.
Because there's another large powerful government that is benefiting you in some way if you don't respect that how Germany stand up to China if a similar circumstance happens in any other context it doesn't have to be a particular individual human rights aren't chips that you can trade around and moreover let's be real here I if I don't.
To get to to political uh but in the context of the last few years it's fair to say that global opinion of my decisions has only increased over time as it has become more clear that the only consequences that have come out of this journalism and i don't mean my journey which means recording that actually hit the story because again i had never published a single block in my own the consequences have been positive a lot of the allegations against may have changed the idea that the United States government would sanction germany in retaliation for protecting whistleblower is a fantasy and honestly it should be an embarrassment good all right hi I'm Fred I'm a developer with rocio p and we're here the heck day right so I want to kind of ask the inverse question to my friends colleagues which is how do we become be generous men say so I mean you spend more but more time than anyone studying all those NSA programs that must have been a few way you thought oh my god i wish that kind of analytical capability was used for Public Interest purpose it's so which ones to be we built it would be nice to see if sea world in which surveillance were working for the public rather than against it largely but it is a dangerous road and I get concerned about creating systems that can be turned around.
There's a proliferation context here however in your defense these capabilities come we can't stop them we already see their commercially available in more and more contexts there was recently a story in the intercept just a few days ago by reporter named rj Gallagher on the mass surveillance sort of hardware vendor in New Zealand who is creating the mass surveillance systems that are used in the united kingdom but before four this briefly i think what you're missing that the NSA has is the intersection of datasets right it's like we were just talking about with AT&T you can have a metadata repository for one calls were being made and that's super valuable on its own it reveals a lot of information but when suddenly you can tag on the location of these calls were made from you have a far more in-depth set of capabilities when you can now I correlate this web traffic when you have been correlate this with email traffic that's when it starts getting truly terrifying the question that I would turn around on you is if you made a journalism machine that rivals the NSA how could you actually ensure that would only be used appropriately that you don't actually have to responding this is where I know I don't have an answer but I i do have a last question that is a I next week I'm going to be introducing to a bunch of a couple hundred journalism students Laura Poitras brilliant film Citizen for about Hong Kong and the events there and what you've done.
These are smart interesting and very concerned about the future kinds of people do you have anything you want to say to young journalists about the future and what they should be doing I think something understand is how wrong we can all be when i was younger i grew up in the federal family I grew up in the shadows and say throughout much of my adolescence I signed up for the US Army when everyone else was protesting the Iraq war because i believe the simple truth which was the government would not lie to us now I based that on a simple calculation which was that it simply wouldn't be worth it to them the long-term costs would be much greater than the short-term gains but the reality is that government is not a capital G where it's a single institution things rationally coherently in a coordinated fashion there are a number of different parties different groups different interests inside government that are looking out for their own agendas and in many cases the capability for the individuals who rise the highest levels of government are those who are honestly the most capable manipulators whether this is something about another way politics work something about the way influence works you know I I don't want to speculate there but what this means is that actually it is our most powerful officials that we should trust the least and in my experience it is the ones that are the lowest on the totem pole the working-level people that i SAT beside every day who could actually be trusted the most now this is not to say it applies in all cases there are exceptions on both sides but when you see a powerful official simply asserting something and you see newspapers simply repeating it and not critically evaluating it.
This is a dynamic that should concern everyone and you should be sure to say that even if everyone else engages in this i will be different that's a great note on which to end and I want to thank you personally and I know that the room will want to thank you for joining us this has been pretty interesting stuff thanks so much for being with us thank you it's my pleasure.


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