Supernerds

Conversations with Heroes

Edited by Angela Richter

In collaboration with Julian Pörksen

With drawings by Daniel Richter

Kindly supported by Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.

This book was made during the production of Supernerds – Ein Überwachungsabend by Schauspiel Köln, gebrueder beetz filmproduktion and WDR.

© by Alexander Verlag Berlin 2015

Alexander Wewerka, Fredericiastr. 8, 14050 Berlin

www.alexander-verlag.com, info@alexander-verlag.com

All rights reserved.

Editors: Julian Pörksen, Rainer Lindheim

Proofreading: Harriet Curtis

Layout: Antje Wewerka

Cover Design: Daniel Richter

ISBN 978-3-89581-388-7 (eBook)

Angela Richter, born in 1970, has been house director at the Schauspiel Köln theater since the 2013/14 season. Her work combines the areas of theater, performance and journalistic research. In 2006 she founded the Fleet Street theater in Hamburg, which she ran until 2010. Artistically she has been dealing with the phenomenon of internet activists for quite some time. She lives in Berlin and Cologne.

Daniel Richter, born in 1962, is one of the most famous contemporary German painters. Since 2006 he has been lecturing at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and now lives in Berlin.

For David

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no
division between military and civilian participation.”

Marshall McLuhan

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Henry David Thoreau

“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for
new weapons.”

Gilles Deleuze

You cannot arrest an idea

@atopiary

Ah, I’m sick to death of hearing things

From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites

All I want is the truth

Just gimme some truth

I’ve had enough of reading things

By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians

All I want is the truth

Just gimme some truth

John Lennon

I met Julian Assange at the beginning of July 2011, at a dinner with Slavoj Žižek, which I had bought on Ebay. I used the occasion to tell Assange about my plan to do a piece on WikiLeaks, based on interviews with him. I didn’t expect that Assange would go along with it, God knows he had enough problems at the time. He was under house arrest and was being monitored by an electronic tag attached to his ankle. His WikiLeaks publications had angered world power USA, and thoroughly disgraced them too. As we now know from the Stratfor-Leak, a secret grand jury was in meeting at the time preparing a sealed indictment against him. As well as that, he was being threatened with extradition to Sweden. He was to be questioned about allegations of the abuse and rape of two women with whom he had slept. The issue in this ongoing case is mainly about the use of condoms. Despite all that was going on, we still somewhat surprisingly managed to have our initial meeting at Soho House, London in March 2012. It lasted several hours, during which time it was Assange who mainly asked the questions. I was nervous at the time, and I’m sure I wasn’t making a great impression. As we were saying our goodbyes he casually said that I had convinced him, and gave me the nod. His staff member Joseph Farrell subsequently advised me that I should be ready, as the next meeting would take place very soon.

For the following weeks and months I waited for news from London. During that time I broadened my knowledge and spent a lot of time on Twitter, where I not only followed WikiLeaks, but also notorious members of Anonymous as well as the genius hacker group Lulzsec. Day and night I thought of nothing else, and also didn’t talk about anything else, much to the annoyance of those around me. The more I found out, the more questions came up. I developed an obsession with the subject and got completely engrossed in the depths of the internet.

As I hadn’t heard anything from WikiLeaks in months, I started to have my doubts about the whole endeavor. In mid-June I went on a long planned trip to Key West, to swim with dolphins in the wild. I had barely arrived when I got word from WikiLeaks that I should come to London immediately. Assange had lost his last case in Great Britain and was to be extradited to Sweden within two weeks. On Sunday 17 June 2012 a cocktail party was hosted for Assange at the home of Baroness Helena Kennedy, to which friends and potential supporters had also been invited. On the following Tuesday I was to meet Assange at his hideout in Kent, together with Chris Kondek, who was to film the meeting: the interview finally seemed within reach. I left the dolphins and booked the next flight to London.

I rushed from the airport straight to the party, unshowered and jet-lagged, and discovered to my surprise that the majority of his supporters were intellectuals and artists. There were also some representatives of the British establishment with a soft spot for freethinkers. I can still remember thinking that something like this would never happen in Germany. The hostess herself, Baroness Helena Kennedy, a lawyer and member of the House of Lords, supported Assange and gave him legal advice.

There were about two dozen people present: supporters, lawyers and the WikiLeaks team. I also recognized documentary film producer Laura Poitras, human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, and activists Peter Thatchell and Victoria Brittain. It was a hot summer’s day. Cold drinks were being served out in the villa’s garden. Finally Assange gave a small speech in which he thanked everyone for their tireless support. He looked strangely awkward and embarrassed and seemed very uncomfortable talking about his imminent trip to Sweden. When we spoke later on about how I planned to do the interview, he said to me that our Tuesday meeting might not happen, but only if he couldn’t help it. I was immediately alarmed and asked him what he meant, but I only got an evasive cryptic answer as he mumbled something about “political reasons”. In order to distract me, he dragged me over to our hostess’s husband, the famous plastic surgeon Professor Ian Hutchinson. Assange knew that I was working on a piece about plastic surgery and therefore wanted to introduce us. Months later this acquaintance would turn out to be of huge benefit to the piece I was working on. After saying goodbye to Assange, I asked his assistant Joseph Farrell if our meeting was in danger of not taking place. Joseph assured me that it would and that Julian had no idea about when his appointments were. I shouldn’t worry.

On the Tuesday I finally with met Joseph and Chris at a railway station in central London and we boarded a regional train headed for Kent, complete with camera gear. On arrival we took a taxi, and Joseph then made us get out long before we reached the hideout – so as not to be followed, he explained. Having taken many detours, he led us to the address. Slowly Chris and I started getting a little paranoid. We felt like we were in a spy movie, just without all the glamour. It was a fairly long journey on foot, lugging the equipment along with us in the humid weather. When we finally entered the house, I immediately recognized the ground floor surroundings, where Assange’s talk show “The World Tomorrow” was filmed. We met some WikiLeaks members, as well as Laura Poitras. The atmosphere was tense, and there was no sign of Assange. We were slowly getting impatient.

Suddenly things started happening. We were told that there was evidence that his hideout had been uncovered. Assange had to be brought to safety as a matter of urgency. Things got hectic. With his hair colored, wearing a false beard and a pebble in his shoe (to change the way he walked), Assange hopped into a car and drove off without our noticing. A few hours later we found out through the media that he had entered the Ecuadorian embassy to ask for political asylum. This was granted to him in August 2012.

By June 2015, Assange will have spent three years in the Ecuadorian embassy. Three years living in 20 square meters without sunlight. Within this time he has more than made up for that failed meeting. Since August 2012 he has granted me numerous interviews, and our conversations continue to this day. At the beginning of September 2012 my play Assassinate Assange premiered in Hamburg. During those rehearsals I spent three weekends in London. Usually our conversations went from eight in the evening until five or six the next morning. If ever I got tired during one of these marathon sittings, Julian would always think of something to pep me up again – at times we’d smoke a huge Shisha pipe (a present from the boss at Al Jazeera), other times he’d make me a cup of tea, even sometimes give me a shot of oxygen from a diving cylinder that was standing in the corner for “emergencies”. He was tireless and his enthusiasm was infectious. In the end I had hundreds of pages of material. The interviews were transcribed, translated and rehearsed under high pressure. We only had three weeks. By the time the premiere came around the project was nowhere near finished, it turned out to be a work in progress, I kept adding pieces, a new section each time, in Berlin, Vienna and finally at the Cologne Theater.

Angela Richter, Julian Assange. Photo: Oliver Abraham

The press usually depict Assange as a questionable character, especially comments made by former employees and journalists. Certainly it’s more interesting and far more profitable to show him as some kind of mad freak, brilliant but crazy and unrestrained, ultimately a narcissist. When all else fails they even accuse him of having poor table manners. None of this describes the Assange that I got to know. I’ve always experienced him as being a generous, warmhearted, humorous and loyal person. He is highly intelligent and committed, his bravery is astonishing. He shared his knowledge and his meals with me. Other artists I’ve met have been far more narcissistic, but I can completely understand why many journalists hate him: he makes them all look like opportunistic careerists and compliant collaborators.

I’ve said what I think about the accusations in Sweden many times already, so I just want to say this: I do not think that Julian Assange is a rapist and believe the whole case to be extremely flimsy. Without his help and the help of his employees, none of the interviews that I have conducted with countless whistleblowers and activists in the last few years would ever have happened – whether with Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Jesselyn Radack or Daniel Ellsberg.

Daniel Ellsberg’s house is in Kensington, on the hills above Berkeley, with a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was there that I visited Ellsberg – a great hero among whistleblowers, his publication of the Pentagon Papers decisively contributed towards ending the Vietnam War – on the 5 October 2014, in order to spend a few hours asking him some questions: It turned into three days. He’d make me an omelette in the mornings, and as he was telling me about his life would repeatedly jump out of his chair to act out the situations he was describing. This 83-year-old came across like a hyperactive, charismatic boy. We spoke about the Pentagon Papers, about treason and resistance, and at some stage he read me a sonnet by Albrecht Haushofer, who was involved in the July 20th conspiracy against Hitler and later executed by the SS. The last few sentences he read out in German: “Ich hab gewarnt – nicht hart genug und klar! / Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.” (I gave warning. Not strong and clear enough. / Today I know what I was guilty of.)

The most difficult challenge was getting to meet Edward Snowden – and I only managed this with the help of WikiLeaks, Sarah Harrison, and human rights lawyers Renata Avila and Ben Wizner. I wrote him a long letter, which ended with the words: “You surely don’t need theater and art, but art needs you”. Once again, the news that he had agreed to meet me came with short notice: On 24 February I was told that I could meet him on 27 February accompanied by Renata Avila. When I asked if there was anything I could bring him, I received his wish-list from Russia: American peanut butter and some other snacks. I packed as much as I could carry into my suitcase. In order not to endanger him, I can’t tell you much about the finer details of this meeting. Having waited for half an hour in the lobby of a hotel in Moscow, he suddenly showed up – a peaked cap pulled down over his face, and his jacket collar turned up. He nodded at me and we got into a car without exchanging a word. When we arrived at the room, he took his hat off and I was completely taken aback by his extremely youthful appearance. I didn’t expect that he would be so delicate, he looked like a 16-year-old. He noticed that I was surprised, we laughed and then gave each other a spontaneous hug. I gave him the things he requested, and he was really happy and explained that it was really hard to get peanut butter locally due to the economic sanctions imposed on Russia. We ordered some food and I turned on my dictaphone – I was given five hours for the interview. He spoke quietly and eloquently, suddenly seeming more grown-up. After the interview we talked about his current situation, and he often mentioned how much he would like asylum in Germany and to live in Berlin, where several people from the whistleblower and internet-activist world were already living in voluntary exile. Right at that moment I was ashamed about German and European hypocrisy, their cowardly subservience to the United States. If he was a Russian or Chinese dissident, they’d be rolling out the red carpet, of that I am certain.

Saying goodbye wasn’t easy. As I was walking around Red Square that same evening, still a little worked up about our meeting, Russian opposition member Boris Nemzov was shot dead only a few hundred meters away. It was an ominous night.

Two interviews that I had wanted to do face-to-face were not possible. It wasn’t that those concerned weren’t willing, it was rather due to obstacles placed in the way by the American prison system. Journalist Barrett Brown and hacker Jeremy Hammond are not whistleblowers in the classic sense, they are however inextricably intertwined with the issue. Their cases didn’t get much attention in Germany and it is my strong desire to make their voices heard. Finally I managed to contact them via a prison email system called CorrLinks, and we agreed that I would send them questions and they would give me written answers. Only a few hours after Barrett Brown had replied to me with a remarkable essay, I received the following email from the prison: “This is a system generated message informing you that the above mentioned federal inmate temporarily does not have access to messaging. You will receive notification when they become eligible for messaging.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald subsequently tweeted that he too had received the same message after he negotiated with Brown for a contribution he was to write for The Intercept over the coming months. A day later, a statement appeared on the internet, written by Brown himself. After they had initially told him that it was due to a technical fault, they went on to say that he had abused the email system due to excessive exchanges with journalists, whereupon the FBI prohibited him from all further contact for an entire year. After they had taken away his freedom, they also took away his freedom to express himself.

I received Jeremy Hammond’s answers right at the last minute. Even in prison this hacker and activist isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, mercilessly criticizing the ruling class and their intelligence apparatus. When asked how he would imagine the ending if his life were a movie, he answered: “Something like a modern day Bastille Day!” All that remains is to hope that he doesn’t meet the same fortune as Brown and lose his digital access to the outside world.

Over the last five years I have learned a lot. I have been to various internet and hacker conferences, including two trips to the biennial HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York and multiple visits to the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. I also attended the Telekom Cyber Security Summit, which is really a conference for the German establishment. Activists and hackers shared their knowledge with me. I met whistleblowers William Binney, Jesselyn Radack and Thomas Drake on several occasions. They were the ones who had tirelessly enlightened us about mass surveillance over the last few years, even long before Snowden appeared on the scene. Each of them had made huge professional and personal sacrifices in order to reveal the truth, without ever getting the public attention they deserved, which of course would also have meant getting protection. As I was doing the last of my interviews with them in the spring of 2015, it became obvious to me that they were the ones who cleared the way for Snowden. He told me that he had studied all of their cases precisely before deciding to become a whistleblower himself.

I am often asked how I distance myself from the people I interview; how I manage to remain objective. My answer is: I don’t. I don’t place any value on objectivity, I don’t even believe that it exists. It’s a mere allegation, which basically means a voluntary limitation, a reduction of the possibilities. I approached all whistleblowers and activists with undisguised sympathy, empathy and openness. I won’t make a secret of the fact that I admire their actions and their bravery. Why should I? I’m not a journalist, and I don’t want them to give me the same old prepared answers. Skepticism gives birth to skepticism. Distrust is reciprocated with distrust.

One important conversation is missing from this book. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to visit or interview Chelsea Manning in prison, thus making this book somewhat incomplete. Thanks to the material Manning handed over to WikiLeaks, we have not only learned about the horrors of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Collateral Murder, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs), but also gained a comprehensive insight into the global diplomatic and economic dealings of the USA (Cablegate).

Having met these people, my view of the world has been turned upside down. My attitude towards proven means of subversion has also changed. Irony, formerly a powerful tool of the artistic avant garde, has long since entered the mainstream. Whether in a theater piece, a soap-opera, an NPD* conference, an article in the Culture section of a newspaper or even Günther Jauch’s talk show – nowhere is there a format to be found that doesn’t rely on irony. Subversive power is gone, it is rather irony that now serves to maintain the status quo.

I still don’t think that as an artist one should refrain from using the valuable resources provided by humor and irony – but maybe more often one should have the courage to call things by their proper name without hiding what one really wants to say behind a subtle joke. At least, one would have to radically think through how to use irony subversively. When it came to choosing the subtitle for this book, I thought of two possible variants: The ironic “Conversations with Traitors” or “Conversations with Heroes.” I chose the latter.

Angela Richter

Berlin, April 2015

* NPD. The National Democratic Party of Germany, founded in 1964, a far-right political party with a nationalist, ethnic and revanchist ideology.

DANIEL ELLSBERG

was born on 7 April 1931 in Chicago. He studied economics at Harvard University and graduated in 1952 with a PhD. From 1954 until 1957 he served as an officer in the US Marines. In 1959 he started working as a strategic analyst for the military think-tank RAND Corporation, who advised the Ministry of Defense on all issues concerning the control and deployment of nuclear weapons. In 1964 he moved directly to the Ministry of Defense where he served on an advisory board that dealt with the Vietnam conflict. He participated in the elaboration of secret plans aimed towards an escalation in Vietnam as a war strategist and significantly contributed to the outbreak of the war in the spring of 1965. In 1967 he returned to the RAND Corporation, where he had access to secret documents, later called the Pentagon Papers, which he handed over to the press in 1971. The publication of the Pentagon Papers exposed years of deception of the American people concerning essential aspects of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg turned himself in to the FBI, and had to answer for his actions in court. He was charged under the Espionage Act and was facing 115 years in prison. The process was declared invalid in 1973, and Ellsberg was acquitted. The publication of the Pentagon Papers contributed significantly to the end of American engagement in Vietnam.

You and I, Cassandra

A conversation with Daniel Ellsberg

Richter I have interviewed many whistleblowers to date, and one thing is very interesting and strange to me: except for Julian Assange, they are all very engaged Americans, you know. This kind of “patriotism” is weird for Europeans. Especially for Germans, considering our history.

Ellsberg That’s surprising to hear. You know, we all take the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is not an oath to the President. It is not an oath to secrecy. And it’s not an oath to protect the country. It’s an oath to protect the Constitution. There’s no question that George W. Bush and Barack Obama – blatantly – have violated that oath, as did I and Snowden and Manning, before we became whistleblowers. If you observe a crime, it’s your duty to report it or to obstruct it. So we were upholding our oath in a way that these people never did. But you don’t get punished for breaking the oath to the Constitution. What you get punished for is not breaking your oath, for revealing the secrets of the crimes of your superiors, your agency, the executive branch, the Congress, the President. Most whistleblowers don’t foresee at the very beginning how serious the costs are going to be. Some do. Snowden clearly knew what he was in for. Chelsea Manning did impress me very much when she wrote to Adrian Lamo: I don’t care as much about going to prison for life or even being executed. I’m willing to do that. But I don’t want my picture plastered all over the world –

Richter As a boy.

Ellsberg As a boy. Which she got. Her worst nightmare was realized.

Richter Were you aware of the risks?

Ellsberg I was aware. I copied 7,000 pages of top secret documents. I assumed they’ll put me in prison for life.

Richter So you were very lucky in the end.

Ellsberg I was very lucky. It was, as you say, a miraculous set of circumstances that ended my trial, and helped to end the war. You know, nowadays I’m being described very positively. As a foil against Manning and Snowden, which I don’t accept at all. I identify with them totally. They’re no more traitors than I am, and I’m not. That’s only one of the things we all got called. I used to think “whistleblower” was a bad word.

Richter Like “traitor”? In this sense?

Ellsberg Let me tell you an interesting story: I got a whistleblower award in Berlin, from the Federation of German Scientists in association with IALANA (International Lawyers Against Nuclear Weapons). It was in the nineties, I think. So I’m waiting behind the stage about to be introduced to the German audience. And just before we went out I asked the main judge of the Administrative Supreme Court in Germany: what is the German word for whistleblower?

Richter There is no German word for that.

Ellsberg He says: we don’t have one. So I said: what’s the closest you would come to it in German? He thinks for just a second and says: Verraeter.

Richter Verraeter, yeah. A traitor.

Ellsberg Traitor … I asked him, whether he knows a better word. He says: “Petze.”

Richter Petze! Ja, genau*.

Ellsberg Tattletale, snitch! It has the same connotations in America. The problem is: there simply are no mythical heroes of truth-telling. I’ve asked people who know myth, and metaphor. I told them that I am looking for somebody you can refer to as a model. In history, or fiction or mythology – someone who did what we did, who told secrets of the tribe, the secrets of the elders, the secrets of the establishment, for the benefit of the people. There aren’t any.

Richter Isn’t that interesting? Except maybe for Prometheus and Cassandra.

Ellsberg But Cassandra did not reveal secrets, she told the future – you could say it’s a kind of secret. But the people don’t believe her.

Richter That’s her curse.

Ellsberg In that regard I associate myself with her, because I’m always telling these terrible things that we’ve got to do something about, and people don’t believe me.

Richter In Catholic belief, sometimes the Virgin Mary appears, like in Lourdes, and tells people secrets.

Ellsberg She foretells what’s going to happen?

Richter Yes. For example, in Bosnia-Herzegovina there is a place called Medjugorje. In the middle of the eighties, before the war, they say that Mother Mary appeared and predicted the Yugoslav War to six children. But it was a secret and they were not allowed to reveal it.

Ellsberg There is a poem, by Robinson Jeffers, called Cassandra. He was predicting the Second World War. Let me see if I can remember this:

The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers

Hooked in the stones of the wall,

The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter,

Cassandra,

Whether the people believe

Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they’d liefer

Meet a tiger on the road.

Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-

Vendors and political men

Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind

Wisdom. Poor bitch be wise.

No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men

And gods disgusting – you and I, Cassandra.

Richter You know what? It changed my life. WikiLeaks and everything. I became an activist. I was always somebody who was politically attentive. I demonstrated when I was young, against the Iraq War, the Gulf War. But there was a phase when I had the feeling that you cannot do anything. So I became an artist, because I thought: at least I can do art and express myself. And I was really happy in my private life, but I always felt some kind of void.

Ellsberg Well that’s a reason to be an activist.

Richter And then WikiLeaks happened. And the Manning revelations. And I thought: Something can be done after all.

Ellsberg I waited 40 years for Manning. That’s why I was so enthusiastic when she appeared. And then, three years later: Snowden.

Richter When I learned how many people had access to the same material as Manning I was shocked. There are millions! And she’s the only one who leaked?!

Ellsberg Humans will do anything to avoid being kicked out of a valued group. Even when they realize that it is no longer behaving respectably, or that it’s criminal or doing bad things. The idea of being thrown out of that group and ostracized by the society is unbearable. And hardly anyone will do it, for any reason. They just go along.

Richter You didn’t go along. You decided to expose the government, to publish the Pentagon Papers. Did you have any help?

Ellsberg A friend helped me a little, Anthony Russo. He had revealed torture in Vietnam and was very anti-war. And he had a girlfriend who had a small ad agency with a Xerox machine. He helped me copying six or seven times – but I went on far beyond that on my own, for over a year. When it all came out, he refused to testify against me. And so, to punish him, they made him part of the indictment. Later they dropped the charges.

Richter What impact did the publishing of the Pentagon Papers make?

Ellsberg First of all: what did turn out to have a big impact was Nixon’s well-founded fear that I had documents beyond the Pentagon Papers, documents on his administration and their plans for escalation in Vietnam. His secret plan to end the war in a way that would allow him to keep the pro-American regime in power by threatening the North to destroy them with nuclear weapons, if they did not remove all their troops from the South. Nixon had reason to believe that I had documents on these threats, although I did not. The crimes he took against me were actually in order to stop me from putting out more material.

Richter What crimes did he commit?

Ellsberg First he went to my psychoanalyst’s office, trying to get information to blackmail me with or to destroy my reputation. But he didn’t find what he wanted. He found the period when I was a swinger, but one of his men said: “That would just improve Ellsberg’s popularity.” So, they didn’t put that out. My psychoanalyst didn’t tell me his office had been broken in by the FBI until after the trial. He got an ulcer for not telling me. He felt guilty about it.

Richter So many people you conferred with about the Pentagon Papers revealed your name. Wasn’t there an agreement whereby you get to keep your anonymity?

Ellsberg Oh, all the people I’d dealt with, the senators and representatives and Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, they all promised me that nobody would know my name.

Richter They broke their promises.

Ellsberg Yes. All of them. So I revealed myself.

Richter Why?

Ellsberg For the same reason Snowden did. We knew that other people would be suspected, maybe even charged, with circumstantial evidence. I wanted to be able to say as clearly as I could, under a lie detector if necessary, “I did this alone.”

Richter You must have trust issues since then.

Ellsberg No.

Richter No?

Ellsberg No.

Richter What happened on 3 May 1972?

Ellsberg They tried to “incapacitate” me totally, to beat me up or kill me on the steps of the Capitol. They were also tapping me. When the same people who had done this for the White House were found to be connected to Watergate, Nixon was afraid that they would make a deal with the prosecutors and confess the crimes they committed against me. So Nixon bribed them to commit perjury and to deny that they had done anything for him earlier. It was a web of crimes and lies that eventually served to bring him down – and made the war “end-able”, which is the important thing. It also ended my trial.

Richter So the big effect of the Pentagon Papers wasn’t so much the content, the revelations by themselves, but in the crimes that were committed against you by the government?

Ellsberg In a way, yes. Of course, the Pentagon Papers affected public opinion, there was a lot of discussion. But Nixon wasn’t influenced by public opinion. The war continued, in fact, it got larger the next year. As far as I could tell, the Pentagon Papers had been a total failure. If Nixon’s only worry was that I had only copied the Pentagon Papers, it would have had no effect, because these crimes would not have been committed against me. I would have gone to prison for life. And the war would have gone on. So it’s like Manning hoped for a lot of discussion in this country. And she got a certain amount of discussion. But it didn’t affect our policies in any way. The war in Iraq went on undisturbed.

Richter In Europe what had the biggest impact on people was the Collateral Murder video. Much more so than the documents.

Ellsberg I have to say unfortunately, although it was very impressive, and a lot of people saw it, the effect in America has not been so great. And there may be a reason for that.

Richter What reason?

Ellsberg My explanation usually is: Manning – and Assange – are revealing stuff that we did to other people. And humans’ ability to be concerned about what their group and their nation is doing to other people is very limited. Snowden evoked a tremendous amount of discussion and debate, because he was showing what the NSA was doing to us at home, to US citizens. People got more excited about that. But I’m sure he actually wanted to change the process. And it might change. There are a lot of proposals for reform.

Richter Yes, there are.

Ellsberg But nothing has changed yet. The likelihood is that nothing will change. Surveillance will go on. The Congress will go along with it. Especially now, with ISIS. We have a system that wants permanent war. It looks for an enemy. And ISIS is providing a very plausible enemy. Except they are not threatening the United States, and won’t until we start to attack them. Then, presumably, they will. It’s not a war that’s going to be won.

Richter Are you an optimist?

Ellsberg I think there is a chance that we will avoid large nuclear war. And there’s a chance we’ll avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s a small chance. On the climate, it involves actions that are extremely unlikely to be taken. At least 80% of the assets, of the oil, gas and coal have to stay in the ground, if we’re to avoid ultimate catastrophe. But those assets are owned by the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. And their profits lie in extracting and selling that oil. What’s the chance that they will decide in the interest of future humanity to leave that stuff in the ground? Strictly speaking, even with the climate catastrophe, the Earth will recover in a matter of thousands of years. That’s a very short time, for the Earth. The dinosaurs left. We came along. We’re going to leave. And I’m not even crazy about the fact that some remnants will remain. I think humans have had their day.

Richter Maybe you know this, the WHO – the World Health Organization – run tests on people to check if they might be mentally ill. And they ran these tests on companies, because in America, companies are treated like people, with respect to their legal status. And guess what the result was?

Ellsberg Psychopath?

Richter Exactly. So what can you expect from psychopaths ruling the world? By the way, did you know that Assange started out with corporate whistleblowing?

Ellsberg I know, yes. And I am certain that within the energy corporations there are detailed scientific studies on what they’re doing to the climate. Just as the tobacco companies knew exactly what they were doing. They had all the analyses of cancer, of addiction. And two whistleblowers – two out of thousands who had the same information – exposed that and changed the tobacco trade in America significantly. Within the energy corporations, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into climate denial foundations and that sort of thing. If it came out that they knew the truth, that they manufactured false data, it would have a chance of mobilizing people. A big chance? No. These are very powerful corporations. You can expose them, but they’re not made of sugar, they don’t just dissolve and go away. But it would be helpful.

Richter That’s why WikiLeaks is such a good idea. It allows you to stay anonymous while being a whistleblower

Ellsberg That’s why WikiLeaks is important. There is no better way than to expose it from within, like Snowden or Manning did. But people aren’t encouraged to do that very much. Because it comes down to the question of: what are they prepared to risk? And those who see what’s happening don’t show a willingness to take any real risk at all. The costs are very high – personally. But the stakes are everything. Isn’t it worth taking a risk of one’s freedom, or maybe even life to prevent an ongoing war – as Manning did? Or to prevent a violation of the Constitution in the direction of a police state – as Snowden did? I think I invented the phrase: it’s a war worth of lives. We risked our lives, Snowden, Manning and I. And our freedom, which could be worse than your life.

Richter You yourself went to prison a lot over the last 40 years.

Ellsberg You know, the reason I do so much civil disobedience is because it worked for me. And I want to encourage other people to do it. I’ve gotten arrested about 85 times now. Most arrests got no publicity at all. But some did. Also you meet very good people, actually. I have to admit that I do it in part because I really enjoy it, because of the people you get arrested with and that you meet in jail.

Richter Do you have any role models from the past whose example you follow?

Ellsberg Of course. I read Thoreau, I read Martin Luther King Jr. and I read Gandhi, people who were living by the same principles as I do: that to cooperate with evil is to participate in it. And to be silent about it is complicity. Have you ever heard of Albrecht Haushofer?

Richter No.

Ellsberg He was a professor of political geography and geopolitics, and a playwright and poet, who secretly became involved in the July 20th plot against Hitler. He wasn’t in on the plotting, but he was a courier in the conspiracy. When the conspiracy failed, he fled to his mother’s house, somewhere in the Alps, hoping they wouldn’t find him. But eventually the SS got to him and he was imprisoned. But his trial kept getting postponed, because a British air raid destroyed the files of the courthouse. In fact, I think the judge who was going to try him was killed. He was in a prison camp in Moabit. Two weeks before the end of the war he and some others were released from the prison – but as soon as he got outside SS people picked them up, took them to a nearby field and shot them. His brother heard about it and went there, looking for his body. He found him in an overcoat, with his hand in one pocket, frozen. And inside his hand, he’s clutching sonnets. 80 sonnets that he had written in prison. They were later published as The Moabit Sonnets. Here is one. The title is “Schuld” (Guilt):

I bear lightly what the court calls my guilt.

To plot and to conspire.

I would have been a criminal,

had I not taken that as my duty for my people’s future.

Yet, I am guilty.

But not the way you think.

I should have recognized my duty sooner.

I should have more sharply named evil as “evil”.

I kept my judgment to myself far too long.

In my heart, I accuse myself. I have long betrayed my conscience.

I have lied to myself. And lied to others.

I knew early on the whole road of misery.

I gave warning. Not strong and clear enough.

Today I know what I was guilty of.

Richter It’s really beautiful.

Ellsberg Ich hab gewarnt – nicht hart genug und klar! / Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.

Richter Do you speak any German?

Ellsberg No, not at all.

This conversation took place in Kensington (San Francisco Bay Area), between 5 and 7 October 2014.

* German: Yes, exactly.

JULIAN PAUL ASSANGE

was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Australia. As a 16 year old, Assange gained his first experience as a computer hacker under the pseudonym Mendax. In 1992 he had to answer in court for some of the hacks he had conducted and was found guilty on 24 counts, which earned him a suspended sentence and fines. He terminated his mathematics and physics studies at the University of Melbourne out of protest against a partnership contract between the mathematics faculty and the military. In 2006 he founded the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, of which he is the editor, and published a manifesto-like attachment called Conspiracy as Governance. In 2010 WikiLeaks published the most volatile of documents so far: a video called Collateral Murder, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs and the diplomatic cables leak known as Cablegate. Since then the FBI have filed a case against Assange and the platform, accusing him, among other things, of espionage, theft, breach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and conspiracy – he is facing 45 years in prison. In the US several journalists and politicians publicly called for his death. After rape allegations against him had been raised in the autumn of 2010 in Sweden, his host country Great Britain was preparing for his extradition. As Assange was afraid of being extradited from Sweden to the US, he fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on 19 June 2012 and asked for political asylum, which he was granted. He hasn’t left the Embassy since.

The National Security Religion

A conversation with Julian Assange

Richter At the beginning I ask everyone the same question: where were you on 9/11? How did you experience this event?

Assange I was in Melbourne at the time. I didn’t see the first plane hit the World Trade Center, but I did see the second one. And at that point, it was clear to me that it was a terrorist attack. While I felt sad for the people in the building, my initial feeling was one of wonder. Because it had been quite some years since I was surprised, really surprised by anything. There were some things that happened, that I hadn’t predicted, but they were always fairly small. And this was something that I hadn’t predicted at all, something very unusual. It was a major event in the world that I hadn’t thought would happen. Somehow it was thrilling that there was a new reality that I had to adapt to.

Richter Did you anticipate what would follow, the consequences of this event?

Assange The general parameters, yes. Within a few minutes of the second plane going in, I realized this would lead to a major assault on civil liberties. And a strike back against possibly Iraq, possibly Afghanistan. At the time, I had already published some articles about the National Security Agency. Based on analyzing the patents that the NSA had been filing and looking at the technology I predicted that in a few years’ time communications will be stored and indexed in the bowels. So I had a reasonable understanding of what the National Security Agency was already doing. Not in every detail, but in general.

Richter What changed within the NSA?

Assange After ’75, when the Church Committee recommendations were made, there was a sort of inculcated mantra inside the NSA that you don’t spy on American citizens, unless there’s a FISA Court ruling. You can spy on the rest of the world, fuck their rights as much as you like. But you don’t spy on American citizens. September 11 changed that. Now you could also bulk spy on American citizens, instead of just targeted surveillance. But all the time they had no problem spying on everybody else.

Richter It’s just staggering how arrogant that is.

Assange It’s a first-world problem in a way. Over time WikiLeaks published a lot of stuff. The material that was alleged to have come from Chelsea Manning or associated sources was documentation of the US causing harm to people outside the United States, the Iraq War, Afghan War, Guantanamo, and US diplomatic activities around the world. It was about Americans robbing, occupying, killing and maiming brown people, backing nasty puppet regimes. Snowden’s revelations are different. First of all, it is about people inside the United States who were affected. Secondly, the class of people who are affected, inside and outside the United States included journalists, media workers and middle-class white people. Thirdly you could say they’ve become politicized in the meantime, in part due to the conflict over WikiLeaks. A massive supporter base had been generated through the conflict with WikiLeaks, who understood these issues over censorship and so on. There was a much larger matrix of people, and us as well, who went in to bat, if you like, to make sure these Snowden documents were taken seriously.

Richter One of the problems with surveillance is that it’s invisible. It’s very hard to get a grasp of what is happening and what the consequences might be …

Assange Mass surveillance is much like HIV. If you have a normal disease, your immune system is independent, it recognizes, understands and combats the disease. If you have Epstein-Barr or streptococcus or herpes or one of these viruses, your immune system is there, and it works out an approach. A bit of fever, some antibodies, some white blood cells, and it goes on the attack. With HIV, the virus attacks the T-cells, it attacks the immune system itself, it’s a virus that infects the very thing that gets rid of the virus. The internet and mass surveillance is like that, because it’s a type of reorganization or infection of humanity’s thought system, the way humanity talks to itself, the way a society thinks. It’s like everyone simultaneously is taking LSD. Everyone in the world. Because it affects the cognition of everyone, because it affects their communication.

Richter People are changing, their minds are changing … It’s very difficult to visualize this on stage. Even the internet, not to mention surveillance and the catastrophe it can cause. It’s not easy to find the right visualization, the right metaphor.

Assange Nietzsche is famous for saying that God is dead. But I think God is now alive. And the God is the National Security-Mass Surveillance-Internet God. In the United States, there is a new state religion: The National Security Religion. It’s a state within the state, there are about 5.5 million people who have active security clearances, and there’s a kind of extended periphery, maybe 2-3 times that. There are holy scriptures, which cannot be profaned: the classified documents. There are different orders that correspond to different classification levels. And you become indoctrinated, literally that is the word, you become indoctrinated with these various security classifications. People at each level can only talk about these holy documents with each other and people that are higher than them. There’s various elaborate rituals, like this flag-folding ritual people associate with the US government. And they have a class of holy warriors. It’s very much “us versus them“: The people who are devotees and who have sworn allegiance to the system, versus everyone that’s outside the system. And you have a God that is all-seeing, all-knowing. It’s omnipresent, it’s omnipotent. This corresponds to: Jesus is inside you. No matter where you go, he is in there. He is watching. You cannot evade him. This God, who was once just inside this National Security Cult, has now escaped, and it’s gone out to everyone else as well. From this sort of theological perspective – it’s just an analogy – I think the NSA revelations are a calamity, an absolute calamity. Because it made so many more people believing in this God, this particular kind of God. And the trick with these Abrahamic, omnipotent gods is: a priest is gaining power by pretending that he is in contact with “God”. And he’s saying that God knows everything, about everyone. If you do something that disagrees with what I told you God will know. So don’t fucking do it. It’s a pathetic psychological trick to say there’s a big powerful guy that I know and you don’t, and he’s going to know what you’re doing, and he’s going to tell me. So don’t try it.

Richter When Charlie Hebdo happened, all hell broke loose in Europe. It was very predictable that something like this would happen, but immediately everyone was saying: we need more surveillance. On the other hand the system hasn’t been able to prevent any terrorist attacks, so far …

Assange The actual number of terrorist attacks and the number of people killed is very small, compared to other causes of death. Numerically it’s insignificant. The various intelligence agencies and their contractors tap into the paranoia of the establishment and the general public. And they manage to divert resources to their own job positions and power. Terrorism is used to justify the geopolitical spying, the economic spying and so on. But if you look at what’s happening in Europe, I think a much more interesting perspective on this is how governments and Western establishments might be thinking about this. How will they think they can reduce the risk of “Islamic terrorism”? One way they might think of, is to stop the free movement of people. But this would drive up wages. Free movement of people is a reality only because it keeps wages low. And so corporate and economic power centers are going to oppose that. That option would have to be sacrificed. What else might they think of? Well, they could stop fucking about in Syria, smashing Libya, going after these oil states, stop engaging in wars and political destabilization. But war is a racket, a lot of people get rich from war. Don’t forget that American-backed allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are fueling a Sunni-Shia split, sending money and arms to “Islamic extremists” in Syria and Libya. Europe, France, Turkey, United States and the UK are furthering that business. And of course it stirs up hatred in the Muslim world because of this death and destruction. So obviously that’s one thing they could do – stop doing all that. But they’re not going to want to do that either. So either you’ve got to stem the free movement of cheap labor, or you’ve got to stop meddling, or maybe – you can keep your cheap labor, you can keep your meddling and just up the amount of surveillance. So we all have to lose our privacy. They see this as preferable to going against big corporations, or cutting back on imperialist adventures. And so that’s what we get.

Richter Speaking about war: is something like a “just war” even possible?

Assange No. Wars are never just. That’s the nature of war. The broad theme of a war might in some sense be just: to resist an invader, for example. If someone is trying to take over your house, land and neighbors by force, then it seems quite reasonable to resist it. But the process of resistance produces many unjust acts. So even a war that might otherwise seem to be just, they are always filled with squalor and death and barbarity. And people become barbarized as a result of being in war. Interestingly, in the last 100 years, it’s hard to find many cases of democracies entering into wars where they haven’t been misled. Where there hasn’t been a Gulf of Tonkin incident, or false weapons of mass destruction. I think that’s an extremely optimistic sign. That basically people don’t want to go into war. They have to be lied into it.

Richter So maybe they can be “truthed into peace”?

Assange Once the war started, it might be harder. But if the truth comes, to disable the lies that occurred before war, then they can be “truthed into peace”.

Richter So that’s the idea behind WikiLeaks? To truth society into peace?

Assange We engage in what I call scientific journalism. That means: we publish analysis. But we always publish our analysis at the same time as the primary source material that the analysis is derived from. We publish all the ingredients, so our analysis is recreate-able. If we look at civilization – I’m interested in the “civil” part of civilization. And the civilizing aspect of civilization is mostly based upon learning from our errors and the experiences of others and applying them to what exists now. So, I say that there is an ideal that exists, where each person has access to the full history of the world. History cannot be removed or redacted or destroyed. If we ever get to approach political or philosophical theories that are complete, then the knowledge on which they are based must first be completed. So this is an ideal about how to create ideals. Until we implement the ideals to create ideals then derived ideals are incomplete.

Richter Can you imagine a world where nobody could lie?

Assange Quite easily.

Richter Yeah?

Assange Yeah, sure. Well, to degrees. Even pigeons lie.

Richter How do they do that?

Assange When they find a scattering of seeds that’s particularly big, and they see that other pigeons are coming closer to eat their seeds, they’ll make a warning cry, like there’s a hawk in the sky. To trick them into going away.

Richter I didn’t know that.

Assange So even pigeons lie.

Richter Is the pigeon conscious?

Assange I doubt it. I don’t think it’s conscious.

Richter So, humans are the only conscious liars?

Assange Well, we had this muddle about this word “consciousness” for a long time now in Western philosophy. The development of philosophical canon on consciousness has been constrained by the medium which philosophers used to debate it: words. What we’re really talking about is something being verbal and verbally communicable.

Richter Do you believe in enlightenment? And do you believe in an enlightened state?

Assange I think you might have to define your terms to get a useful answer. But I believe in the light of understanding things. You can understand little things or big things. The spatial range and time range of the things that you understand can also be big, or it can be small. So you might understand something about your life, for example. Or some intrinsic thing, like what you’re like, something that doesn’t seem to change and therefore is with you for the rest of your life. Then with physics and philosophy, you can sometimes have a sense that you’re understanding even a larger time range and a much larger spatial range. This can fill you with this godlike feeling that your mind is somehow going into time, back in time and across the universe. This can give you a feeling that is like enlightenment. But whether it is actually … That’s another question.

Richter I sometimes think the humanistic premise might be wrong, the premise that people are good by themselves, when you look back at the twentieth century, and everything that happened …

Assange Humanism is a marketing tool. It’s like democracy. I can market democracy to everyone. Because, hey, you have the opportunity, you can vote. No one is denied. Everyone can buy. Humanism as a marketing tool has: everyone was born good, everyone has potential. So the only problem is the environment. We can change the environment. I don’t think that’s true at all. But even though it’s not true, it might be a good place to start: “Innocent until proven otherwise.” Even though they may not be.

Richter Somebody told me recently about the streetlights during the French Revolution. They were not invented to light the way, but mainly to see what people were up to at night, like surveillance cameras do today. And when the French Revolution started, the first thing they did was to turn off the lights. What thing could be done today in order to turn off the lights?

Assange There’s only one thing at the moment, which is encrypted anonymizing programs, like I2P, TOR, some VPNs. There’s actually quite a lot that have been developing quite quickly. That’s the only equivalent. It’s like an umbrella that you can hold above yourself as you walk down the street, so the light doesn’t get onto you. So maybe we can form our own international tendril that is able to protect itself, just a bit. So we will basically be the last free living people, immersed in this bed of the totalitarian apocalypse. That’s the “will” side of it. But intellectually, I’m not very optimistic.

Richter Why?

Assange I think it’s a very unnatural state for all the world to be wired to itself. This computerized and de-localized state leads to a similar situation as if everyone were in the one place. If everyone is in one place, then you’ve got one market, one city. And it means you’re going to have one power structure on the whole thing. That’s not something humanity is used to dealing with. It’s not like other things that seem to be a little bit destabilizing to society, like the invention of electricity, or the motor car or the telegraph or the TV. This is something that is happening everywhere at once. To everyone at once. It’s too different, so it is probably toxic to happy human life.

Richter Generally speaking: what do you think we are heading for?

Assange The optimistic scenario: some kind of civilizational collapse. The nearest analogy is: countries need militaries to defend them, and they need intelligence agencies. Just like a human body needs an immune system and it needs a liver. If your liver grows to eight times the size that it should normally be we call that liver cancer. What happens is that it starts to consume you. Your liver cells reproduce your liver cells everywhere, and they start consuming all the glucose from your blood, so all the protein gets sucked into the liver. It doesn’t leave enough for the heart, the lungs and the brain, and so the body dies. It kills off the body. So that’s happening a little bit now. If it happens very rapidly, it means the west will collapse on itself, economically collapse, because the productive labor is being diverted to security apparatus. If it happens a bit more slowly and this tendency of this trans-national security apparatus to link up across countries, China and the west, Russia and the rest, then the whole world will collapse, economically. That’s the optimistic scenario.

Richter What is the pessimistic scenario?

Assange That it doesn’t collapse. It just keeps pushing towards a totalitarian apocalypse, towards a post-modern version of North Korea: massive homogenization, total surveillance, total recording of what everyone has done.

Richter Do you sometimes get melancholic?

Assange Very rarely. About once a year. I was more melancholic in my twenties. But I have learned it is purely a physiological phenomenon. The amount of stress, how hospitable the surroundings are, the amount of sunlight, the type of food. Human beings are very similar to rats. There’s almost no difference, really.

Richter Even the laughing.

Assange Even the laughing. In order to properly understand ourselves, we should look outside of ourselves, and we should look outside the verbal sort of world that we live in, these verbal concepts and descriptions. If we imagine sort of going up 500 meters in the air and look down, what we see are little rats playing with each other and going into their little houses and fiddling around and so on. That they need certain things. They need to be happy, they need exercise, they need company, they need good food, but not too much all the time. It’s too monotonous, and there’s nothing to strive for. They need romance, they need excitement, they need adventure, they need to learn. So, if people have this, and they’re not the rare 1% of people that have some serious disease. Then they are happy enough. It’s not good to be too happy.

Richter What do you think the purpose of art is?

Assange The word “art” gave us the Medieval word “artifice”, from Latin “ars”, or skill, and “facere”, to make. Which is originally “workmanship” but nowadays, lying, or a deception. And that to me is definitive of the arts. All art is a type of deception. And sometimes it is necessary to deceive on a small detail to tell the truth in an efficient way on the whole. However, nearly all the time, art is not used that way. Nearly all the time, art is used to deceive about important matters and to help a group gain power. You can look at it in this way: when art is good, it leaves the viewer more powerful than before they had an interaction with the art. So when they walk out of that theater, the audience has more power, individually, than when they came in. They are stronger. More capable, more robust. Smarter, wittier. Perhaps I’m a bit Brechtian in that respect.

Richter Smarter and wittier I can understand.

Assange To make people worry about things that don’t exist, I think makes the audience weaker. Because there’s plenty to worry about that does exist. It’s not saying that fiction is bad, because you can give people visions of what to strive towards. What to strive towards or allegories that illustrate something with greater clarity. To leave the audience worse off is a betrayal of the audience. Maybe the question is: how far can you go in a particular direction? It’s always very interesting. If you want to understand a phenomenon, what are the extremes? You do this in mathematics, you try and say: some complex equation that you don’t understand. What if we make these parts go to infinity and these parts go to zero?

Richter If you had to shoot a movie about your life, how would it end from here?

Assange There are already several trashy productions from the BBC and Hollywood, supposedly about my work, but actually about the inane projected insecurities of various transatlantic establishments. The idea of another is not fun. The real movie of my life would probably end up as some kind of dark, surreal comedy. And I suppose given the way it’s gone so far that would end with 200-foot waves sweeping the earth and then a volcanic eruption splitting it apart and then some baby laughing from the sky.

Richter Finally, a very Proustian question: what do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Assange There are many obvious answers. Physical suffering or betrayal. But I think the most important and unrecognized form of misery is when people cannot even be proud of what they are. Bertrand Russell once wrote a book, purely for money, called The Conquest of Happiness. It’s a very early progenitor to the self-help book. And in that, he wrote about forcing children to be modest. And that this was incorrect. And that if the peacock had beautiful feathers, then it should be proud of them. And children must be proud, must be allowed to feel proud of themselves and their true abilities.

Excerpts taken from conversations conducted at the Ecuadorian Embassy, London between 2011 and 2015.

JESSELYN ALICIA RADACK

was born on 12 December 1970 in Washington D.C.. After studying at Brown University (American Studies, Women’s Studies, Political Science) she graduated from Yale Law School and then worked for the Ministry of Justice. In 2002 Radack became a whistleblower by handing over documents to the press proving ethical misconduct towards Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh. After his arrest, he had been interrogated without legal counsel, contrary to Radack’s recommendations, in which she had pointed out that such interrogation was not legitimized under current law. Since then Radack has been suffering limitations imposed on her professional life. There was even a criminal case brought against her which was only repealed in 2013. She elaborates on her experiences as a whistleblower in her book Traitor: The whistleblower & the “American Taliban”. She regularly publishes articles in the New York Times, The Guardian and The Nation. Currently she works for the Government Accountability Project, an organization which specializes in providing support for whistleblowers responsible for the National Security and Human Rights areas. Radack works as legal adviser for, among others, Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant

A conversation with Jesselyn Radack

Richter Where were you on 9/11, and how did you learn about what happened?

Radack I was at work, at the Justice Department. In fact, at the time the Pentagon was hit, I could see the plume of smoke behind the Washington Monument out of my office window. No one knew what to do. The Justice Department couldn’t decide whether it should allow employees to go home or not. Finally my boss said: “It’s up to you”. It sounds pretty stupid in hindsight, but I grabbed a bottle of water and my backpack and a whole handful of mints and M&M’s from the candy dish and started to head home. The metro wasn’t working, so I ended up hitchhiking. People were giving each other rides, people were sitting on top of cars. They just wanted to get home. Later in the day they started saying that this seems to have some of the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda. President Bush was soon on TV, within 24 to 48 hours, making a statement that our nation has been “attacked”. That whole mentality of “we’ve been attacked and therefore this is a war” came quickly into play.

Richter And how would you describe what you then thought would change in America, in the west generally? What were your hopes or fears? And in hindsight, were you right with your assumptions? Or is there a big difference?

Radack Huge difference. I didn’t expect that our September 10th world would disappear. I thought we would respond in an appropriate, targeted kind of way. I was a lawyer, I believed in the rule of law. I had no idea that this would become a wholesale, full-scale rollback of civil rights and liberties, on a number of the most central Amendments to our Constitution, like the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. And I would have never pictured entering this protracted war on whistleblowers and journalists and hacktivists. It is such an extreme overreaction.

Richter I think you were the first whistleblower after 9/11. Could you describe your case?

Radack I was an ethics attorney at the Justice Department and I was asked about the ethical propriety of interrogating the so-called “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, a man who had been caught fighting with the Taliban. He was the first prisoner that we captured in Afghanistan. And it was clear from a trophy photo that was going around the world, that he was being tortured. He was naked, his eyes were blindfolded and he was handcuffed to a stretcher. It looked very much like what we later saw at Abu Ghraib. On Friday I was asked whether he should be allowed to meet with a lawyer. And I said: “Yeah, absolutely”. But they did not let him meet with a lawyer and continued to torture him. When I came back on Monday they said: “We interrogated him over the weekend, without the attorney. What do we do now?” I suggested to seal off the interview and use it for national security and intelligence gathering, but not for criminal prosecution. But they ignored my suggestion and used it for criminal prosecution. During this criminal prosecution, the Judge ordered copies of all Justice Department correspondence related to the interrogation of Lindh. But the emails I had written, telling them not to do it, and the documentation that the FBI ignored my advice had been destroyed. Evidence was being withheld from the Court. For me, that was the moment of truth. I was completely shocked. I resigned that day.

Richter How did you decide to become a whistleblower?

Radack The criminal prosecution against Lindh proceeded. And over and over again, I kept hearing people, including the Attorney General, lie to the American public, saying his rights were carefully, scrupulously honored. Saying that if he had asked for a lawyer, he would have been provided one. I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t a particular sympathy for John Walker Lindh, but a human being could die because I kept my mouth shut. One morning, I heard a journalist on National Public Radio saying Lindh never had counsel. I picked up the phone, called the journalist and said: “I don’t know who’s feeding you this crock of shit, but it’s wrong. And I have the emails to prove it.” Because, before I left, I was able to recover the emails that had been destroyed, I took a copy home with me. It was my insurance policy. If the department tried to smear me to a future employer or something, I could show them the emails. I never planned on giving them to the media.

Richter Did you take precautions of some sort? Did you prepare for being a whistleblower?

Radack I didn’t tell my husband. A lot of people are like: “Oh my God, you didn’t tell your husband. You guys have trouble in the marriage?” But most whistleblowers do not tell their spouses, because they want to give them plausible deniability. You want them to be able to say “I had no idea”. Snowden did the same.

Richter Snowden was very much aware of what he was doing, wasn’t he?

Radack Because he had seen what happened to Chelsea Manning, to Thomas Drake, to William Binney. He has said many times that he followed these cases very closely in forming his decision. I think he avoided many of the pitfalls that a lot of us had fallen into.

Richter Were you aware of all the consequences that would follow?

Radack I had no idea. It was such an overkill, going after a minnow with a sledgehammer. I would never in a million years have thought that I would be put under a federal criminal investigation. Or be referred to the State Bars, where I’m licensed as an attorney. Or be put on the no-fly list, which is for terrorists. Or that the New York Times would call me a “traitor” and a “turncoat” and a “terrorist sympathizer”. Look at me! I’m harmless. Here I am: 31, married, mother of two kids, at that point – now I’ve got three.

Richter You were 31 at that time?

Radack I was 31, yeah. Nearly the same age Snowden was when he blew the whistle. I was referred to the Bar based on a secret report. The criminal case was based on access to information, but I had no access to whatever their basis was. It was very Kafkaesque. They won’t specify what you’re being accused of, or why, or what the evidence is. It was like trying to fight blindfolded with your arms tied behind your back. I could not have imagined that my government would treat me the way it has. I was the most loyal, flag-waving, patriotic Democrat, with a capital “D”, that there was. I planned on making a career as a civil servant. And then, you know – the Bar. Not being able to fly.

Richter What exactly does that mean?

Radack It meant that I was on the “selectee list” and my boarding pass would have the “four S”s. That means, you undergo secondary security screening. Often that ended up in missing the flight. I missed my grandfather’s funeral. It became impossible to travel. My family would get through security, and I would not. You had a lot of people who were just winging it. Being very rogue and making it up as they went along. They were holding me up for hours. Being told obnoxious things. Like to take a sip of my own breast milk.

Richter That is really obnoxious.

Radack The TSA agents were sending my breast pump back and forth through the security. And they’re like: “What is this?” I’m like: “Eh … Breast pump”. Because I had a baby and was nursing. And they’re like: “Where’s the baby?” I’m like: “That’s the whole point. I don’t have the baby with me. That’s why I have the breast pump. To keep it going”. Then they were saying: “What is that?” I’m like: “It’s a baby bottle with breast milk in it”. They’re like: “We can’t tell what it is, we’re going to throw it out.” And I’m like: “No, it’s like liquid gold. Believe me.” So they said: “Just take a sip of it.” I said: “First of all. No. That’s barbaric. I’m lactose intolerant. It will contaminate the bottle. Show me a policy where it says that nursing mothers have to take a sip of their own breast milk to prove that it’s not an explosive. If you really thought this was an explosive, you wouldn’t have me open the bottle. Because if this were perchloric acid, which is a watery white chemical, it would have blown a hole in the building.” Clearly, they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Finally they swabbed the bottle with an explosive detection cloth or whatever. Of course they didn’t find anything. But it was that kind of humiliation, over and over again. One indignity after another. It was a horrible, horrible time in my life.

Richter Did you ever have the feeling that your life was in danger? Or that of your kids and your husband?

Radack I gave a letter to my attorney saying that if anything happens to me, the first place people should look is the government. And I told my parents the same thing. With my kids and husband, I wasn’t worried that the government would try to harm them directly. It was more indirect. Being under surveillance, having a government vehicle outside my house, 24 hours a day.

Richter How long did the surveillance go on for?

Richter For a long time. It is one of the most horrible things, being under surveillance. My husband and I couldn’t send the kids outside to play. I had to walk them to school through the back alleys, because I didn’t want the government taking pictures of them, or trying to intimidate me in front of my children. We saw government agents going through our garbage, so we would drive our garbage to Virginia, where they immediately destroy it. Or I would make sure to put as many dirty diapers as I could at the top. Like a gentle rebellion. Doing whatever you can to sort of fight back.

Richter Is it even affordable to become a whistleblower?

Radack No, it’s definitely not affordable. Most whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted and bankrupt. We ended up owing about 100,000 dollars in legal fees and had to take out a second mortgage on our house. I was a coequal breadwinner in my family. I was now unemployed, so our income was cut in half. We had these two young babies. And I was racking up legal bills, because I had three attorneys at that point. So there were huge losses financially, professionally, personally. Though personally, I feel like the thing that kept me intact was my family. I had my family, my kids, and they just bring me back to this other world that exists. You go home, and you can’t be worried about all this stuff, because their whole world is there. And they need you. So my family kept me grounded.

Richter So there were a lot of sacrifices that you and your family had to make. Did you ever in a moment of weakness regret what you did?

Radack No, never. Even during my darkest hours, I never felt like I shouldn’t have done it. I did feel I should have done it differently. Not trying to blow the whistle anonymously. Because I gave the emails to the journalist and told him that I wanted to be anonymous. And he didn’t mention me in the article. But then he put all of the emails with my name on Newsweek’s website and completely burned me. Whether he did it intentionally or just didn’t think it through, I don’t know. But I thought often: I should have just called the media and held a press conference on my front porch and said: “You know what? This is who I am. And this is what I saw. And this is wrong”.

Richter Because then you have the control over your own narrative?

Radack Exactly. What most whistleblowers say is: “I should have gotten a lawyer, I should have gotten legal counsel, I should have ‘lawyered up’ ahead of time”. I am now the director of a whistleblower organization, and we rarely have people who come in and say: “I would like to blow the whistle”. Pretty much everybody comes in because they have blown the whistle already, and they are being retaliated against with the full force of the entire US government.

Richter Are you religious?

Radack I am a practicing Jew. I belong to a temple. I go very regularly, especially because I have three kids right now who are all around the Bar Mitzvah stage. Part of my Torah portion at my Bat Mitzvah read: “You shall not follow a multitude to do evil.” (Exodus 23:2) Those words made such an impression on me, they had been a guiding force in my life.

Richter So you found some consolation in it during the hard times?

Radack I did. Especially after I started confiding in the Rabi about what I had done. It was an area where I felt safe and supported. Because I was not being supported by legal associations, none of my natural allies in the legal community would help out. Human rights organizations, civil liberties organizations …

Richter Why is that? Isn’t that what they are supposed to do?

Radack It is. I think the charge of espionage is so radioactive, it is so incendiary, and it was so rare. They said: “The US is saying you’re a ‘terrorist sympathizer’, you’re on a terrorist watch-list. We don’t represent terrorists”.

Richter Many people in Germany are disappointed by Obama and his administration. He didn’t keep several promises. One of the promises was to protect whistleblowers.

Radack You know, I’m someone who campaigned for, and contributed to, and voted for Barack Obama. Because I believed in his pledges of openness and transparency. And part of his platform plank was to protect whistleblowers And not only has he failed to keep that promise, he’s done the opposite. He has embarked on a war on whistleblowers that’s unprecedented. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than any president of the United States, and then all previous presidents combined.

Richter There is another point which is fascinating for me as a European: I think the Americans have a very different definition of patriotism. Most of the whistleblowers I have spoken with so far say: “I did it because I believe in the Constitution”.

Radack The government said I was “unpatriotic” and I was a “traitor” and a “turncoat” and a “terrorist sympathizer”. Just like they tried to cast aspersions on every whistleblower’s patriotism. That’s always the first accusation, everybody gets painted that way. Drake, Binney, Snowden, Manning. And look what we did during other national security crises. We’ve done some pretty wretched things. We passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. During World War II, we interned Japanese Americans. Look at Daniel Ellsberg. What he did was seen by many as a traitorous act.

Richter Do you think what you did made a difference?

Radack Yeah. At first, I didn’t know if it would. But in 2004, the torture memos started to leak out. Torture memos written by a law school classmate of mine named John Yoo.

Richter I met him in San Francisco. I was a little scared of him, to be honest.

Radack He’s very charming, like most psychopaths. But when those memos started to come out, I was like: thank God! Not that we were torturing people. That’s horrible. But that this is finally coming out. And then Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Eric Lichtblau wrote books around 2007/2008 that talked about the John Walker Lindh case and my role in it. And explained what happened. So I felt vindicated by that too. I owe my life, and am grateful to investigative journalists who uncovered the truth about what happened. Now people are like: “Oh, Jesselyn Radack, well-regarded whistleblower pioneer”.

Richter Sometimes it seems there is even a profession in being a post-whistleblower-person, going and spreading the word – how big is this a part of your life?

Radack Huge! When I was going through that living hell, I said: if I am ever able to work again, I am dedicating my life to representing whistleblowers. And in 2006 Alan Grayson called me and said: “I want you to come work for me. I’m representing whistleblowers. It would be poetic justice for you”. And I said: “I would love to work for you, but I have to warn you: if you hire me, your malpractice liability insurance is going to go through the roof, because I’m under a Bar investigation, and my license is at risk”. And he said: “I’m richer than God. I don’t care”. So I went to work for Alan’s law firm for two years. When Alan was elected to Congress and the law firm was dissolved, a position opened at GAP (Government Accountability Project), and so for many years I represented regular government whistleblowers who were blowing the whistle on fraud and waste and abuse. And they were demoted and transferred and treated poorly. At worst they got fired. Until Thomas Drake’s case. That totally changed the landscape of all my future clients and the direction of my program, because Obama undertook what became a war on whistleblowers, and Thomas Drake was a test case for that.

Richter To come back to current events, to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. One has the feeling that mass surveillance is no help at all in preventing terrorist attacks.

Radack I think that surveillance has proven over and over again that it is not effective at all. It failed to detect or prevent the Boston Marathon bombings. It failed to detect or prevent what happened at Charlie Hebdo. I think surveillance is good for accident reconstruction. It’s good afterwards. But the justification for doing all this surveillance is to prevent these things from occurring. I think to truly detect and prevent terrorism, you need to go back to good old-fashioned gumshoe human intelligence gathering. The United States had been tipped off by Russia: “Look out for these Tsaranev brothers, because they’re coming here to study violent stuff. Be on the lookout.” Russia! Russia, of all places, tipped us off. And nobody did anything with that. Same with the Charlie Hebdo. These people were on the radar a long time ago, but they slipped through the cracks. Because you need human beings doing intelligence gathering and investigations, not computer algorithms doing mass data collection of hundreds of millions of innocent people. We have a military surveillance industrial complex that has grown in the digital age by an order of magnitude that few could have predicted.

Richter So what is it really about?

Radack It’s about governments controlling their populations and their people and people’s behavior. I adjust my behavior because of concerns about surveillance. I can’t practice law the way a normal lawyer would. I have to assume that I’m being surveilled, because of the category of people I represent, including Snowden. So I joke that I’m using my drug dealer tactics. Pay in cash. Throw away cell phones. Encrypt everything. Meet in person. I joke about it, but it’s really not a joke. Whether or not you’re being surveilled, if enough people believe they’re being surveilled or could be surveilled, you’re already changing people’s behavior, and that’s the real damage.

Richter The press sometimes plays an ugly role in all of that.

Radack Oh they do. I agree completely. In the US, the press is supposed to be the fourth branch of government. Half the time they’re behaving like lapdogs rather than watchdogs of the government. By not covering things and giving them due attention, they become complicit.

Richter What would you say to the normal population who always say “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide.”

Radack My response to the “I have nothing to hide” argument is: you know what? I have nothing to hide either. But I don’t want a camera in my bedroom or my bathroom. I think we all have certain zones of privacy. Even if you’re a completely law-abiding citizen, you draw the line somewhere. You know, if you have nothing to hide, then give me all your passwords. Give me your bank account number, give me your credit card number. There’s a reason most people aren’t going to turn that over. That’s because they don’t know me. It’s secret and belongs to them.

Richter What could normal people do, other than using encryption, which many are too lazy to do, because it’s a pain in the ass?

Radack I tell people that everybody can do something. You can play to your strengths. It doesn’t matter what background you’re from, what your profession is, your livelihood. If you’re an artist, paint about it. If you’re a writer, write about it. If you’re a regular citizen, be socially engaged. Write a letter to the editor, attend meetings of interest. Whatever your pet issue is. Quit being a bystander. Become involved. Everybody can do something. Even if you are confined to your home or stuck in the nursing home, or whatever your circumstances are, go to change.org. There are numerous petitions dealing with everything ranging from torture to warrantless searches to drones to war crimes. It will take two to five minutes out of your day, but still have an impact.

Richter Do you think there is hope? Will this madness be stopped somehow?

Radack I think the silver lining is the fact that this stuff is becoming clear. Sunshine is the best disinfectant*. And the fact that we have investigative journalists doing their job. And the fact that we have whistleblowers And the fact that we have technologists. I mean, in the last year in which I’ve been representing Snowden, encryption has made remarkable strides. It’s much easier to use and much more widely available. And to the extent that the government hasn’t taken care of this problem yet, legislatively, or judicially, I’m hopeful that technology will take care of this problem. Technology is ten steps ahead of what governments do. I’m hopeful that technology combined with activists are going to turn this around.

This conversation took place in Berlin, on 27 January 2015.

* Radack is quoting Louis Brandeis, former Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States.

JEREMY HAMMOND

was born on 8 January 1985. At the age of 8, Hammond programmed his first computer games, and at 13 developed his own databases. In the spring of 2004 he was expelled from the University of Illinois in Chicago, for hacking into the University’s network in order to highlight its security weaknesses, which he was prepared to repair for a fee. Because of his political activism and practiced civil disobedience at anti-fascist demonstrations and protests held by the Occupy movement, Hammond was arrested numerous times. After Hammond had stolen information from the Protest Warrior database, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2006. In 2011 Hammond, at the time an active member of Anonymous, stole five million email addresses and 60,000 credit card details from a server belonging to a consulting firm called Stratfor. He was encouraged to do this by Hector Xavier Monsegur, an FBI informant, who betrayed him afterwards. After 20 months in jail, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to ten years in prison.

A modern day Bastille Day!

An Interview with Jeremy Hammond

Richter You’ve been a political activist for quite some time. How did you become an activist? Was there a special event that politicized you? And did 9/11 have an impact on you?

Hammond Much of my political coming-of-age years came under the George W. Bush presidency: from the controversial 2000 election to taking advantage of 9/11 to launch imperialist wars in the Middle East and destroy civil liberties here in the US. I was frustrated by the nationalistic and racist rhetoric justifying their endless “war on terrorism” so I sought independent, non-corporate sources of news and information. Studying the history of US imperialism around the world, I started going to protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and realized the interconnectedness of different social movements, which shaped me as a revolutionary.

Richter I spoke with Daniel Ellsberg about the absence of role models for whistleblowers – we just came up with Cassandra and Prometheus. Do you have any role models? Are there any historical figures you relate to? And if yes, in what way?

Hammond Many whistleblowers have been highly placed figures of authority who realized the injustices they perpetuated and were willing to give up their position in society to expose it. This is definitely heroic and I hope it inspires others in similar positions to evaluate how they themselves can contribute to this chain reaction of turning on our masters. But most of the historical figures I have been inspired by have been outsiders with no political connections within the system: the dispossessed, those who have nothing to lose and everything to gain from revolution. Such as the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, who broke into FBI offices in Pennsylvania to steal and release classified documents about illegal counter-intelligence operations targeting the anti-war and civil rights movements. Or the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Haymarket Martyrs, etc. But I also think there are a lot of unsung heroes who have never been caught, arrested, imprisoned, or executed: their activities may be lesser known, but every day there are bank windows being smashed, websites being hacked, animals freed from testing labs. It is strategically advantageous to be anonymous and try to get away with it!

Richter Do you consider yourself an anarchist? What are your goals, politically? What should an ideal society look like?

Hammond Yes I am an anarchist: I envision a classless society free from politicians, presidents, prisons, police, and forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. The systems of capitalism and the state cannot be fixed through elections or superficial reforms: it must be abolished entirely. Alternatives could include free association, mutual aid, decentralization, community consensus – these approaches reward the best aspects of human nature, unlike hierarchy and power, which reward the worst.

Richter How would you describe Anonymous? What are the advantages or disadvantages of the absence of leaders or a structure in a revolutionary movement?

Hammond The decentralized, leaderless methods of Anonymous is a strength in that it is able to survive direct attacks from state actors such as raids, arrests, etc. Free from internal power struggles typical of hierarchical organization, it also provides for a diversity of campaigns and tactics, as anyone is free to get together and launch their own operations under the broad Anonymous banner. Prior to Anonymous, there was a lack of politically-motivated hacking, or hacktivism: I believe we have set the bar and changed the way many people perceive hackers in general, not simply as rogues or criminals, but with a highly developed sense of ethics and social obligation.

Richter Does the movement still exist?

Hammond I am not familiar with the day to day happenings within the Anonymous community but it is still very active and a force to be reckoned with.

Richter What was the content of the Stratfor hack? What were the implications of the materials you gained?

Hammond The Stratfor hack revealed private email correspondence about their worldwide network of informants and the espionage work they were doing on behalf of multinational corporations. Some examples include being hired by Dow Chemical to monitor the activities of Bhopal Medical Appeal and the Yes Men, and colluding with their hometown Austin Texas Police Department to spy on the local Occupy Wall Street. A lot of specific revelations about Stratfor’s manipulative and sinister work has been analyzed and published by WikiLeaks and are available online.

The hack also revealed the names and addresses of their private client list, which were also posted online – about 60,000 CCs and 850,000 email addresses and passwords. Many of whom were highly placed US government agents in the military, police, homeland security, Bank of America corporate security, World Bank, Former vice president Dan Quayle, the big-shot Wall Street lawyer husband of the federal judge who sentenced me, etc. The credit cards were used to make donations to human rights groups around the world, and the encrypted passwords, easily cracked, were useful in breaking into other accounts on the net.

The hack showed how an intelligence corporation with aspirations to become like a private for-hire CIA was engaged in sinister controversial operations with no public accountability. The only way we would have known about these activities is through hacking and leaking. But we took it one step beyond: Instead of merely exposing them, I chose to delete their servers, their backups, and abuse their information in a way that disrupted their ability to operate for months and also sabotaged any trust they may have had with their informants and clients.

Richter Governments and corporations operate in complete secrecy, whereas the life of citizens is becoming more and more transparent. What is the danger of this development?

Hammond The ruling classes and their intelligence apparatus routinely engage in warrantless searches and violating our freedom of speech while launching imperialist wars around the world. They shroud their activities in secrecy, citing “national security”, while telling us we have to get used to being watched, our phones tapped, the websites we visit monitored. In a free society, this would be flipped – the powerful would be transparent, the people would have privacy. Certainly they hope to catch some people and make examples of them, but the true intent is psychological. They put the police in our heads – a voice that tells us not to speak out or rise up – because they are watching – hoping to deter us from even thinking about rebelling because big brother is watching.

Richter What can we do to fight back?

Hammond We can turn the tables on them firstly by learning to protect ourselves: practicing security culture, getting off the grid, and becoming anonymous on the internet – and secondly, to forcefully expose their military industrial complex by hacking and leaking. But it is not enough to simply reveal the wrongs the governments commit – there is already plenty of dirt out there in the public that they basically got away with because there wasn’t an effective social movement to forcefully oust the oppressors. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed rampant criminal breaches of constitutional rights far exceeding that of the FBI counterintelligence programs of the 1960s – the government response from both political parties were either rabid defense or denials of their operations or vague promises of superficial reforms that we are supposed to assume took place.

Richter A friend told me that streetlights were not only invented to help people see where they were going but also to surveil and control them at night. Just before the French Revolution happened, they turned off all the streetlights. The Revolution happened in the dark. With regard to mass surveillance: What should we turn off today? Is it even possible?

Hammond They want us to channel our actions within legal, predictable, and controllable frameworks like elections, so that operations like the NSA can continue functioning. So it’s not enough to expose them: it is up to us to dismantle these agencies ourselves, to turn off the streetlights. You don’t need to be a master hacker or a high placed intelligence agent turned whistleblower: We just have to recognize the role we individually play in maintaining the status quo, consider our capabilities and opportunities, think of what the equivalent action to Snowden’s in our own lives could be to monkey-wrench the system.

Richter You’ve been convicted to ten years in prison. What do you do with your time? What does a typical day look like?

Hammond For a government that champions itself around the world purportedly spreading democracy and human rights, the prison situation here is a great injustice. It is an out of control situation that is difficult to fully understand without having friends or family members being incarcerated or having been through it for yourself. I’ve been locked up dozens of times on various charges ranging from petty misdemeanors from protests to my current ten year sentence for computer hacking. Here in medium security federal prison, most folks are doing long sentences for drug crimes under draconian mandatory minimum sentences, or felon in possession of a firearm. People of color are disproportionately targeted for prosecution, receive longer sentences, and are victims of police brutality. And upon release from prison, felons remain second class citizens for the rest of their lives, often denied the right to vote, right to live in public housing or receive benefits, cannot own a firearm, receive federal student aid, and are discriminated against when applying for jobs, all after having already in theory paid their debt to society. It’s never been about preventing crime or rehabilitation but profiting from warehousing those of us at the bottom of their pyramid scheme, forcing us to work in sweatshops paid less than minimum wage to produce products for the military or private companies, including many name brand fortune 500 corporations. we basically give up any illusions of having rights to privacy, right to free speech, and our most basic dignities: We are constantly bombarded with petty rules, having orders barked at us, having to jump through hoops and fight for any kind of respect. Many folks submit psychologically, become institutionalized, silenced, made compliant, or even made into their jailhouse snitches. “You can’t fight the administration”. It is a constant battle for dignity and respect in which they will write you shots, take away communication privileges, or throw you in solitary confinement, but you have two choices in life, you can fight on your feet or live on your knees*, so for me the struggle does not end behind bars. I spend most of my time training physically and mentally, working with other folks here, sharing books, exercising, and discussing world events, so that we can return to society as more effective freedom fighters.

Richter If your life was made into a movie and you were the director, how would it go on from here? How would it end?

Hammond Something like a modern day Bastille Day!

This interview was conducted in April 2015 with the help of the CorrLinks prison email system.

* Hammond is paraphrasing Emiliano Zapata: “Better die on your feet than live on your knees.”

THOMAS ANDREWS DRAKE

was born on 22 April 1957 in Louisiana. He served in the US Air Force between 1979 and 1989. During his stationing in Mildenhall (Great Britain) he was entrusted with the task of intercepting radio communications emitting from the Warsaw Pact whilst flying over the German Democratic Republic in a spy plane. After ten years of service in the US Air Force, he was transferred to the CIA and worked at the Pentagon as an analyst, and in 2001 he transferred to the Signals Intelligence Directorate of the NSA. Within a year he became technical director of the research department and was responsible for testing and evaluating software. In 2005 he contacted the press to make the public aware of the waste and mismanagement within the NSA and to draw attention to illegal surveillance practices carried out by the authorities. Primarily it concerned a program called Trailblazer, which analyzed data without any judicial authority, thus violating users’ privacy. This program was discontinued in 2006. Drake, against whom the FBI initiated investigations in 2007, was indicted under the Espionage Act for the betrayal of secrets. He was facing up to 35 years in jail. In May 2011 Drake was sentenced to a one year probation sentence for the abuse of a computer system. Today he works at an Apple Store in Washington D.C.

Just do it

A conversation with Thomas Drake

Richter Where were you on 9/11 and how did you experience this event?

Drake I had just begun at the NSA. Actually, that was my first day on the job – they hired me in after I answered an ad in the Washington Post. My title was Senior Change Leader. So, it was this crystal-clear morning and we were in the legislative affairs office in the middle of a briefing when the executive assistant came in, didn’t knock, just opened the door and said there was some freak accident. Some plane hit one of the World Trade Center towers. That’s the moment where the rest of my life changed. I still shudder when I think of the things I became aware of in those days and weeks afterwards.

Richter What were the changes you witnessed?

Drake Instead of looking at this as a law enforcement issue, it was perceived as the new existential threat. And instead of acknowledging the failure of the intelligence apparatus and their programs, the US government in the deepest of secrecy made a conscious choice to unchain itself from the Constitution and to engage programs that are violating everything this country stands for. It was an act of terror so egregious that we were given the license to do anything. Anything. There was no Fourth Amendment, there was no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there were no constraints on electronic surveillance at all. The NSA decided to treat the United States of America as a foreign nation and started surveilling what became effectively the entire population. So 9/11 is a turning point. It represents a fundamental tear in the foundational practices and principles of the United States.

Richter And all of this was set up so fast.

Drake Extremely fast. And it was all done under a program called Stellarwind, Which was a mass surveillance program, pure and simple. Later, the White House referred to it as The President’s Surveillance Program. In fact, on the 4th of October, Bush signed a secret directive authorizing the program. There were only a couple of people involved. A handful. Because it was violating the Constitution. In those early weeks they were already getting the phone numbers from the major telcos. Later it expanded into the internet. It was unleashed and it metastasized. I called it a cancer on the Constitution. When I confronted senior executives, even peers with my concerns, they said to me: “You don’t understand, Tom. We don’t know where the threat is. We need to have access to everything. We just need the data.” This was the mantra. Collect it all, because we can. There was never any real question about whether we should. It was like a Nike commercial: “Just do it“. We entered into the equivalent of martial law, because this was what was “best for the nation”. National security now trumped everything else. We started turning the US into a national security state, because that’s what’s “best” for the national interest. National security was the state religion. You did not question it. If you question it, there’s something wrong with you. If you question it, you’re not patriotic. If you question it, you’re ostracized.

Richter It’s blasphemy.

Drake Exactly. And remember: NSA is a military agency, it was formed in secret by the stroke of a Presidential pen in 1952, by Truman. It was not brought into existence by congressional legislation. It’s a military organization, and it’s always been headed by a 3-star, now 4-star general. We’re militarizing the space.

Richter What role did money play in all of this?

Drake Before 9/11 the NSA was having great difficulty explaining the benefits of what they were doing. For example they had put forward and approved a multi-billion dollar program called Trailblazer. It was supposed to be NSA’s answer to the digital age and had been launched with great fanfare in the spring of 2000 by then-general Michael V. Hayden. But the problem was, NSA was having great difficulty explaining what the nation would receive for upwards of four billion dollars? All of a sudden, they had their reason for being: a new existential threat, Al-Qaeda and the associated movements. The leadership said: “This is our opportunity to get all the money we want.” Maureen Baginski herself said a number of times: “9/11 was a gift to NSA.” A gift? But she was right, there were no limits. Congress was coming to NSA, asking: “How big a check do you want us to write for you? How many zeroes do you want us to put after it?” As if money was the answer. But it unleashed an incredible orgy of spending across the intelligence and defense communities. 9/11 became a profit center. The vast majority of that money went to contractors, and people were leaving NSA to become contractors. “You want to make a lot of money Tom? Join us. We’ll quadruple your salary.” We used to joke about the “Trailblazer bar”. People would just belly up to the bar, because there was plenty of money for everybody. So why would you rock the boat? Why would you ask questions? And why would you really want to solve this problem? Just let the money flow. There were seniors talking about “milking” this.

Richter How long did you participate in all of this?

Drake Within a couple of weeks I was confronting my boss, saying: “What are we doing? We are violating the Fourth Amendment.” Before 9/11 the prime directive at NSA was: you could not spy on Americans without a warrant. All that was just tossed overboard.

Richter Were there other people around who had doubts or were skeptical about it?

Drake William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis, Diane Roark. Others were troubled, but as I was told frequently: “I’m not the one who gave the orders.” “I’m not the one who authorized this.” “I just do my job.“

Richter The classical answer: “I’m just following orders”.

Drake Following orders is not an excuse. You’re not just a witness, you’re an accomplice to a crime. I was looking into the abyss those first few weeks of September, early October, realizing that this will have enormous implications for the future of the country, for the future of the rule of law, and for the future of democracy in the world. So I decided to fight it from within.

Richter How?

Drake Through internal channels. I exhausted them all. I went to my boss, I went to the Office of General Counsel, I spoke with the Inspector General’s office. Later I was called as a witness and whistleblower on a 9/11 investigation of the House Intel Committee, and for a larger congressional investigation. I invoked the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, because not only was I cooperating with the investigators, I was also providing information to others. I gave them thousands of pages, all censored and suppressed, documents about the secret surveillance programs and the billions and billions of dollars they wasted on them.

Richter How did the government react?

Drake They came after me. After the New York Times published an article about the NSA monitoring domestic and international telephone calls and email messages without warrants I was suspected of having leaked. They launched a massive leak investigation. In April of 2006, I was put on a target list. My life was under full electron microscope examination by the government. They put five full-time prosecutors and 25 full-time FBI agents on my case, including agents from what they call their “Mole Hunting Unit”. It was the crème de la crème of the FBI, agents who were specifically trained to find real spies.

Richter What does it feel like when the full power of the government is sitting on top of you?

Drake I knew that my life would never be the same. That whatever privacy I had would be completely gone. I knew that really bad things could happen. I knew that I could be charged with a violation of the Espionage Act – which happened in 2010. I was well aware of what had happened to Daniel Ellsberg. He had been declared “The Most Dangerous Man in America” for having leaked the Pentagon Papers. In my case we’re talking about an active mass surveillance program, that was the secret. The government would go to the ends of the earth to find anybody who may or might have leaked it. They spend years drilling to find everything there is, because you’ve been declared an “enemy of the state”, you’ve been declared a “threat to national security”. They’re going to do everything they can. I know from others, very close to Cheney, that he gave the order: “Find and fry whoever leaked. Burn them. Burn them.”

Richter How did the investigations affect your private life?

Drake It was difficult. I have an 11 and a 12-year-old son, and my spouse works at NSA, which obviously complicated things enormously. Still does, in many respects. And my social structure was largely – you know, I had spent a long time in the security world – Military, Air Force, CIA, Navy, NSA …

Richter If you could go back in time, would you do anything different?

Drake I would have gone to the press sooner.

Richter Really?

Drake In secret, anonymously.

Richter What was holding you back from going to the press in the first place?

Drake I wanted to exhaust all internal channels. I was cooperating with all these investigations, and some of them went on for several years.

Richter So you really believed in the system to give you the opportunity?

Drake I don’t know if it was a belief. Part of it was driven by the fact that we knew what the problem was: How do you make sense of massive streams of data? And that problem was solved, NSA actually solved it. They had a surveillance program prior to 9/11 that could have stopped the attacks. It’s called ThinThread. They had the technology, and they had the intelligence. But ThinThread was rejected out of hand by NSA and management. They saw it as an impediment, because it would hold them accountable and responsible. There has been a massive cover-up in terms of selectively deleting history. They went into a massive cover-up regarding what was actually known or could have been known.

Richter What do you think now that all of these surveillance activities have been exposed: was the government’s fear justified, considering the consequences? Have there been consequences? I have the feeling that a subtle immunization has been taking place since 9/11. Maybe they wouldn’t have accepted it ten years ago.

Drake Because “it doesn’t seem to affect me”, because “it’s to ‘protect’ us”. The invocation of national security covers all of this and justifies all of this. Hey, I don’t care if they’re listening in on my communications or reading my emails, because I don’t have anything to hide. I’m not a bad person, I’m not a threat, I’m not a terrorist. If it helps them figure out where the real threat is, so be it. They don’t realize that the real consequences of a mass surveillance regime is social control. To this day people that are incredibly sympathetic to my case say to me: “I would never do what you did. I would have said nothing to nobody. Because I’ve got a family, I’ve got a job.” In part that is what the Stasi did: you don’t trust your own citizens, and you count on your citizens to know that and to adjust their behavior. You want to be a contributing member of society? Just stay within those narrow confines. We’re going to always keep track, we’re going to always monitor, because we don’t trust anybody. This is why I still shudder.

Richter Would you consider yourself a patriot?

Drake I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies. The last thing I was going to do is violate that oath. I didn’t imagine that my own government would declare me the enemy. See that scapegoating and that projection? You dare hold up a mirror, we’re going to break the mirror. It becomes a criminal activity to expose the criminal behavior of the government. That completely flips the rule of law. Because executive rule is now saying what that is, that the acceptable behavior is defined by us. Not by law. And where law gets in the way: we’ll just change it after the fact. So you don’t have rights, you have privileges.

Richter What do you think we are heading for? Will the system collapse?

Drake Historical time-lines say it ultimately collapses … But I’m encouraged, even by German history. The long arc of history does bend toward justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. I realize I’m part of that.

Richter What role did your upbringing play in the way you acted?

Drake My father had been a military officer. He was a very challenging father, very strict. I learned early on to deal with absolute mistrust and to deal with abuse. Even in school when I saw what happened to those who were in the minority, those who were different. I remember a girl who was considered a witch, just in terms of physical characteristics. She was ostracized by students, very few people would even talk to her. I became aware from early on: you have to stand up. Because otherwise someone will abuse it. I experienced it myself. Severe abuse, on many levels. When you’re exposed to that, when you see power abused, when you see politics abusing others, then you realize that you have to stand up for the powerless, for those who don’t have the ability to protect themselves. It matters. It matters who we are. With each other. Our ability to associate. Our ability to love. Our ability to create. Those expressions are the essence, the heart of our own humanity.

Richter Did you ever consider leaving the country and living somewhere else? I mean I find it extraordinary that you’re even still in Washington.

Drake Yeah. I had an opportunity to stand up from inside my own country. But what’s at stake here is liberty and freedom for everybody. It’s not just US citizens, it’s citizens around the world. Even citizens that don’t know … You know, it’s “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union …”. I keep standing in a place in order to form a more perfect union, not just as who we are, but with each other. We have a responsibility to resist. We have the power to stand up for the sovereignty of who we are, with ourselves and with each other. That’s what matters. All the rest, for me, it’s Kabuki.

This conversation was conducted in Berlin, on 27 January 2015.

WILLIAM EDWARD BINNEY

was born in Pennsylvania. Having worked for the Army Security Agency (Military Intelligence) from 1965 to 1969 and then completing his mathematics studies at Pennsylvania State University in 1970, he started working as an analyst at the NSA. In 1997 he was made technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. He was in charge of approximately 6,000 technical analysts who were responsible for listening in on foreign countries. Binney is considered to be the best analyst to have ever worked for the NSA. During his last years at the NSA, he was focused mostly on the problem of data overload. He and his colleagues developed ThinThread, a program for the more efficient gathering and analysis of data, which was also supposed to protect US citizens’ privacy. However, the then presiding NSA chief Michael Hayden discontinued ThinThread in favor of Trailblazer. After 36 years of service, Binney quit his position at the NSA on 31 October 2001. He did not want to share the responsibility for the unconstitutional mass-monitoring of the US general public. His attempts to bring this to the attention of Congress and the Attorney General were unsuccessful.

We can kick all those idiots out of Washington

A Conversation with William Binney

Angela Richter Where were you on 9/11, how did you experience this moment and what were the consequences?

William Binney I was in Glen Burnie, Maryland, just south of Baltimore, about six miles from NSA. I took my father-in-law to the eye doctor. When the first plane hit the building I was watching TV in the waiting area while he was getting examined. And you know, it was a bright sunny day, and this was a big airplane, so it was just not feasible that this was an accident. I knew right away it was a terrorist attack. And immediately, I said: we failed.

Richter In terms of preventing this?

Binney Stopping it.

Richter So wherein exactly does the failure lie?

Binney It’s a data bulk failure. They collect too much data. There are about four billion people with a phone or an email account. But you can only assemble about 20,000 analysts worldwide. Which means each analyst has to look at 200,000 people. That’s an impossible job. By collecting this amount of data they’re making the entire intelligence process dysfunctional. That’s why we had Fort Hood, that’s why we had the Boston, that’s why we had the Paris, that’s why we had the Times Square Bomber. All these people were known. They had connections either physically or electronically with known terrorists or known terrorist organizations, or they were visiting jihadi-advocating sites. But because they don’t focus on their analytic efforts, they make everybody vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

Richter Do you think they want to rely on algorithms? There must be an automated way to do it.

Binney In 2012, they finally realized the predicament they were in: you cannot get through all the data that you can possibly collect. That’s when the White House issued a “big data” initiative to business and industry, to solicit algorithms that would go through all the data to find out what’s important to look at. That’s of course what I was all about from 30 years ago: to create some automated process to go through all the data. That was obvious 30 years ago.

Richter And now, coming back to 9/11, what was the next thing you did that day? Did you go to work?

Binney After I took my father-in-law home I tried to go in to NSA. But I couldn’t get in, because General Hayden sent everybody home. He was afraid something was going to hit the building. I was ready to take a gun, get on the roof and wait for the next plane! But they just closed everything down, and they kept the building closed for the next day too. So I dressed like I was on the cleaning crew, you know, and they let me in. But when I finally got inside I found they didn’t want to actually solve the problem. We had the problem of volume, velocity and variety solved in 1999. And they just didn’t want to implement it, because they had other big plans and big programs and a lot of contractors that wanted money to feed on.

Richter So a huge part of it is about finance?

Binney Absolutely. Finance was the primary driver. Since 9/11 they’ve spent close to a trillion dollars on the intelligence community. And look what we’ve gotten for it: they’ve made themselves dysfunctional.

Richter The more I know about the military-industrial-intelligence complex the more I have the feeling this is somehow out of control. It has its own dynamics. It’s sucking up incredible amounts of money, energy and resources – just to prevent terrorism?

Binney Well, that was the original justification. The real moving factor for it is law enforcement. If they think somebody is doing something wrong, they can go into the database and pull all their data and retroactively analyze it.

Richter So it’s about control?

Binney That’s what it is. Population control. Also, if you’re in a political office, like in the IRS or in the White House, and you want to cause your political enemies problems, this is the data you need. Now you can go after the Tea Party, you can go after the Occupy group, you can go after any political enemy that you have. NSA has the data to blackmail anyone in the world. Anybody in any parliament. Any head of state. Anybody.

Richter Were you skeptical about the collection of data before?

Binney We had very strict rules, and people followed them. The FISA law was passed in ’78 and then governed all the activity of the intelligence community, the agencies – how they could handle collection and analysis of data. There was a very strict process to go through. It was a focused collection of information. After the mid-nineties they started looking at the internet and all this digital stuff and they began taking in too much data, and right away that was making them dysfunctional. That’s why all the data that was necessary to stop 9/11 was in the NSA databases prior to 9/11, but they couldn’t get to it. And now of course they want to add more. So every failure means you can request more money. And you can add more data. It’s the same story over and over again, because they’re too stupid to understand what they’re doing. Unless their motive is just to assemble money and build an empire. It allows them to fear-monger. It’s what they’re going to be doing, fear-mongering with the cyber security. Just another path to get more money.

Richter There don’t seem to be any legal boundaries. At least since 9/11, one has the feeling no law can stop them. They just do whatever it takes.

Binney Well, you can pass a law but they won’t abide by it anyway. Even here, at the Bundestag, they’re having a hard time finding out what BND is doing, their own intelligence agency. That’s why I keep saying: no government in the world can trust their intelligence agency, because they’ll do their own thing and never tell you.

Richter There was a corruption of democracy after 9/11. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this development and how you experienced it, especially within the position you held at that time?

Binney Four days after 9/11, they decided that they wanted to pull in all the data of everyone on the planet. By the end of September, equipment started coming in. By the second week in October, they started taking data in. That’s when I found out about it and decided that I had to get out of there as fast as I can. Because it’s a violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth and even the Sixth Amendments of the Constitution, the Pen Register Law, the Electronic Privacy Act, the Electronic Security Act, all the FCC regulations, government telecommunications. Everything was being violated. I couldn’t be a party to all those crimes. And Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis went with me. We retired.

Richter And afterwards, you blew the whistle?

Binney Well, we went straight to the Intelligence Committee. They were the ones supposed to do the oversight. And this is how you coopt in people, this is how you corrupt democracy. What happened was: in the first week of October 2001, Bush and Cheney figure they have to involve a limited number of leaders in Congress, so that they become culpable and therefore will defend them. They briefed the Chair and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. That’s four people. They couldn’t bring any staff, they couldn’t consult any technicians or legal people, and they had to keep everything to themselves. They came in, they got this briefing, and they all agreed to it. That meant, George Bush could say: “If you’re going to impeach me, you have to impeach yourself. Because you agreed”. That’s how you co-opt in people and make them culpable, an accessory.

Richter Did you immediately turn into an activist?

Binney We all stayed within the government. We were trying to correct the government within government channels, the House and Senate Intelligence Committee, the Department of Defense Inspector General, to members of Congress. We even tried to see the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which we didn’t get to, but we tried. We also filed a complaint against the NSA in terms of corruption, fraud, waste and abuse.

Richter So did it lead to anything?

Binney Well, there was a rather large investigation of the DOD, they sent about 12 investigators in to look at NSA. They were there for about two and a half years. When they came out with a report, it immediately got suppressed by the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the White House. They released a copy of it on the web, but it’s 99% redacted. Blank page, blank page, blank page.

Richter Were you threatened? Did they try to make you shut up?

Binney Yeah sure, they sent the FBI at us. They raided us and pointed guns at me and my family.

Richter So were you frightened at some point?

Binney No. I’ve been in the military, so I’ve had guns pointed at me by foreigners. They just made me mad.

Richter Was your life in danger at any point?

Binney I don’t know. They started this war, I didn’t. They had a war against me. Now I have a war against them. I’m still fighting myself. They’re not. I was doing my duty. I took an oath of office, to “protect and defend” the Constitution.

Richter Would you say that we still have democracy?

Binney No, we don’t. We have a bastardized form of it that is really quickly drifting into a totalitarian state. They’re now attacking free speech and free press. With James Risen being under investigation, James Rosen, the Associated Press. That’s all a part of a totalitarian procedure to attack a free press. Chris Hedges, who’s an investigative reporter in New York, was saying: “All my sources are drying up. No one will talk to me anymore. They’re all afraid. It’s really killing investigative journalism.” That’s what the Stasi did, that’s what the KGB did, that’s what the Gestapo did. Create fear, so that people won’t speak up.

Richter But I think the difference is that, today, the individual freedom of people is so high, you don’t have a feeling of oppression. People are indifferent to it, because they have an illusion of freedom.

Binney Goethe put it this way: “No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who think they’re free”. That’s what they’re doing. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, we’re being slowly conditioned to accept these things.

Richter It’s rather chilling. I’m shocked by every new revelation, but many people just don’t seem to care. They are so swamped with everything that they cannot even tell, which information is really valid and which is just Kim Kardashian’s ass. I have the feeling there is such a bad dynamic, you cannot even count on people to rise up.

Binney In the United States we haven’t had a dictator for almost 240 years. We got rid of “George the 3rd” about 240 years ago. We have a hard time recognizing oppression and how it appears in your society and how it moves. Whereas, over here in Germany you have living memory of the Stasi and the KGB. So you understand a lot more how those processes work. That’s why I keep saying that people from Germany should go over there and say: “You people had better wake up!” An older couple came up to Thomas Drake when he was in Germany on one of his visits, and they said: “You know, we are a post-fascist state, but you’re a pre-fascist state and don’t even know it.” That’s the understanding when you have living memory of this kind of procedure.

Richter Would you describe yourself as pessimistic? Do you sometimes get desperate?

Binney Actually, I’m getting more optimistic.

Richter Really?!?! Tell me why!

Binney It’s because of one lawsuit, Jewell vs. NSA*, which is challenging the constitutionality of the NSA collecting all this data. They’re fighting like hell to keep out of court. So far, it’s getting up toward the Supreme Court. Snowden’s stuff was really timely because the government was always arguing: “You can’t show that we damaged you or that we have data on you.” Well, of course, it’s all secret. But the Snowden material is irrefutable evidence that they have that data on everybody. And they can’t claim “national security”, because it’s all out in the public. Secrecy is not an issue anymore. They’re left with facing the music. And you have to understand, in my country, once the Supreme Court rules, that’s it. And I’m still optimistic that the Court will say: yes it is unconstitutional. When that happens, everything they’ve done falls. All those databases they have must be destroyed.

Richter That sounds like utopia.

Binney All the laws they’ve passed to make it legal fall. Because no law can be passed that is unconstitutional. The supreme law is the Constitution, it overrules everything. Once that happens, all the people who are participating in this are vulnerable. Legally vulnerable.

Richter And accountable.

Binney Yeah. That’s why the Bush administration had to fight to give retroactive immunity to the telecoms in 2008. Because they were being sued in Court, by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and various other groups. And the penalty for those violations is up to 5,000 dollars – per violation – and five years in jail for each and every violation. And they were committing three billion violations a day. So by day two, they would have been bankrupt.

Richter So actually, the last hope lies in the American Constitution?

Binney Article 3, Constitution Court.

Richter For Americans, patriotism is directly related to the Constitution, right?

Binney It is. Those are the founding principles of our government. So when I’m asked: “What do you think should happen to Snowden?” I say: “I think he should be prosecuted.” But everything should follow equally, and the law should be applied. And it should be done in chronological order. So therefore, we need to first try Bush, Cheney, Hayden, Tenet, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, the FISA Court, the Department of Justice, Attorney General and all the assistants to him. Everybody participating. Everyone at NSA, at CIA, at FBI. And then we move to the Obama administration. And then we do Snowden.

Richter It seems very naive in retrospect, but in Europe everybody was so glad when Obama became president. People were like: Oh, the new “black Kennedy” or whatever. I mean, Kennedy was not an angel …

Binney They were hopeful. They were so hopeful that they gave him the peace award before he did anything!

Richter This was so embarrassing. He’s harshly going after whistleblowers, not to mention the drone disaster. Do you think it would have been the same if the Republicans were in charge?

Binney Bush started these, he’s a Republican. Went to a Democrat, and he’s doubled down on it. Bush used to capture them and torture them for information. Obama kills them with drones, and anybody who comes close to the victims with a double tap next. They kill the target, wait for people to come around, and kill everybody else. I call it “random slaughter”. If you’re a person walking on the street and you see somebody bleeding, you’re going to go try to help them. Why should you be killed? It’s un-American. That is not the Constitution.

What I’ve been proposing is this: under Article 5 of the Constitution, we can hold a States’ Constitutional Convention, without anybody from Washington participating. We can get all the states together and kick all those idiots out of Washington. We can lock them out. And we can modify the Constitution and ratify it at the same time so it becomes the Constitution. You have to have 75% of them agree to this, then it’s ratified. That way we get rid of the interference of our Attorney General and the Department of Justice. And we put the force behind it to be the State Police, the local police, the militia and the National Guard. All of which are under State control.

Richter Sounds like a plan!

This conversation was conducted in Berlin, on 28 January 2015.

* Civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation accused the NSA of spying on and collecting American citizens’ confidential electronic communications using a surveillance program without a warrant. The application states that the NSA forced US telecommunications company AT & T to allow them direct access to its fiber optic cables – in violation of wiretapping laws and the Constitution of the United States. (Editor)

BARRETT LANCASTER BROWN

was born in Dallas on the 14 August 1981. During his primary school years, he already produced his own newspaper using his computer. In 2000 he studied journalistic writing for two semesters at the University of Texas in Austin and has been working as a freelance journalist ever since. In the articles he wrote for The Guardian, the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair among others, Brown made people aware of a link between state and private security companies very early on. In 2010, he founded Project PM, an online research platform on which journalists and other supporters tried to develop a better system for the processing and analysis of large data sets, which had been published by Anonymous or WikiLeaks. As Brown was actively involved in Anonymous, the FBI soon became aware of him. In 2011, Brown posted a link on Project PM, leading to data stolen by Anonymous by hacking private information service company Stratfor. In 2012, Brown was arrested and charged on 12 counts. He was facing 105 years in prison. In 2015 he was sentenced to 63 months in prison on three charges. In addition to that, he has to pay 890,000 US Dollars compensation to Stratfor.

The day irony died

An Essay by Barrett Brown

I had just woken up and begun smoking my morning marijuana when I turned on the TV and learned of the collection of events that are now popularly abbreviated as “9/11.” Although my memories of the actual day are vague, the specifics of the actual attack never interested me as much as did the manner in which the major media, and thus the bulk of the American public, would process these events. What I do remember are the circumstances under which I first realized that they would not process them in an especially constructive or even sane manner, and that there was in fact clearly something very wrong with the American establishment as a whole: It was later that same month, when I saw it proposed – repeatedly, with all seriousness, and by respected national news commentators – that irony was perhaps now dead.

This psychotic idea that, after a century marked by mass slaughter and totalitarian slavery so extraordinary as to eclipse the greatest crimes of all prior human history, a far more limited disaster befalling the United States of America should be considered as potentially requiring that we actually suspend the practice of satire was a great revelation to me. It was then that I realized that the American establishment, which I suppose we may define as those who are generally comfortable with modern American political life and who also play some significant role in it, was not only unfit to rule, but was unfit even to pretend to rule. It had lost touch with both proportion and moral decency. Of course a ruling class can do without moral decency, and usually does, but it must always have a sense of proportion.

If I had to make the case against the American public of today relative to the American public of yesterday using only one example, I would hold up two copies of the nation’s most popular news magazine. In my right hand would be a copy of TIME from 1964 that I happened to find somewhere when I was a teenager, and which is thick with text-laden articles covering every facet of news and cultural goings-on. The second would be a copy of TIME from 2014 that I came across last year – a much thinner edition, composed mostly of pictures and info-graphics; the cover story is, in the magazine’s own words, “an inside look at airline flight cancellations.” Americans are in many ways a better people than they were at the middle of the last century, and America is likewise in many ways a better place to live than it has ever been, but there is no avoiding the conclusion that its most visible collective personality – its Geist, if I may borrow one of your most useful German terms – is marked in large part by self-indulgence.

But that’s not what concerned me after 9/11, nor does it concern me now. It is not the duty of the American people to be dignified or cultured or pleasant to be around or even moral. It is the duty of the American people to either properly administrate the vast and opaque machinery of sophisticated espionage and surveillance that it has allowed to be created in its name, or, if it is not capable of doing so, to demolish this machine. Instead, in the years since World War II, the citizenry has allowed this unprecedented organism to metastasize, behind the scenes and largely invisible even to those members of Congress who are supposed to be overseeing it.

Despite the best efforts of certain factions both within and outside the government, we actually know quite a few things about the more shadowy aspects of our Constitutional police state. For one thing, we know from such recent books as the Pulitzer-winning Legacy of Ashes that the CIA almost never achieves its foreign policy goals, even in a very narrow sense, despite having proven willing to engage in the most indecent and murderous behavior in violation of its own charter, up to and including the overthrowing of democratic governments and the shoring up of dictatorships. We also know that the FBI has spent much of its existence not only illegally spying on domestic dissidents whom its agents happened to consider politically undesirable, but even using fraud and force to discredit, disrupt, and intimidate such activist networks, focusing most especially on black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., with whom the FBI’s notorious longtime director J. Edgar Hoover had an unhealthy and even violent obsession. It’s well worth pointing out that we only know of these activities because a group of anti-war activists eventually broke into an FBI field office, stole documents, and mailed copies to major newspapers, thereby revealing the decades-old COINTELPRO program under which those crimes were perpetuated. Congress investigated and the program was shut down. But no one was punished. This was not for lack of trying; after all, the FBI spent a great deal of time and energy in an attempt to hunt down the activists who had revealed their widespread and officially-sanctioned criminal conspiracy to control the political life of the republic. And then you have the doings of the NSA, with which the German people are no doubt becoming familiar.

The American citizenry’s historic lack of serious interest in the secret proceedings of the sub-state that operates with its tax dollars would be a significant breach of civic duty even if we knew nothing about those proceedings. As it is, we know plenty about them, of which the above is merely a very brief selection of highlights. What must we think of such a citizenry as this? How much legal regard should we give to the dark and haphazard institutions that it allows to operate in its name, despite every new revelation of criminal conduct directed against the very democratic institutions that these institutions ostensibly protect?

There are many reasonable and well-meaning people who, though distressed at what one might term the excesses or the mistakes of a given representative government, would still insist that its laws be respected, and that any grievances be addressed solely via means established by those same laws. This is an admirable view in some ways, but to sincerely believe it leads one into extraordinary absurdities. I will here provide one of many possible examples. In the United States today, if all federal and state laws were to be completely and effectively enforced, at least 50 million US citizens would be in prison for consensual crimes involving drugs, prostitution, and gambling. It would be a gulag state beyond anything seen throughout the twentieth century, and obviously unsustainable except by resort to a sort of perpetual domestic war-footing – though we probably need not explore the specifics any further, as the scenario is obviously absurd. But it is merely the logical culmination of the doctrine of democratic infallibility. And there you have it: this is a republic that continues to survive above the level of a national concentration camp only to the extent that we do not actually enforce the laws that have been established by its people and their representatives.

From this, a person may come to one of two conclusions – that such a system must continue, or that it must end. I am of the opinion that it must end. Nonetheless, the mainstream of American thought holds that it must continue – again, because it has been established by the rule of law, which we must always respect because the alternative is arbitrary law. And so my second argument is that the rule of law is not established in a given polity simply by declaring it to exist and then creating some number of institutions by which it is allegedly pursued; on the whole, the rule of law is only established to the extent that it is enforced consistently and non-selectively. For instance, a powerful or well-connected party that breaks a major law in service to a cause beloved among the powerful must be, in general, about as likely to be prosecuted as would be, say, an activist who breaks a minor law in service to a cause that the powerful despise, or we do not have the rule of law. Moreover, if government agencies routinely break the law, or encourage the breaking of a law, and no one is prosecuted as a result, whereas those who break the law in order to reveal this are prosecuted with great vigor by the same agencies that began breaking the law to begin with, we do not have the rule of law. This is especially true if the government agencies that are breaking the law are the very ones that are responsible for enforcing that law. Under such a system, in which the state picks and chooses whom it will prosecute for the same conduct based on ideological preferences or even entirely pragmatic considerations, we do not have the rule of law, but rather the rule of law enforcement.

In 2008 I was asked to write a book on the failings of the national media. In the course of my research, I went through 15 years of newspaper columns by Pulitzer-winning newspaper columnists such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and discovered that both had been entirely and demonstrably wrong in many of their most important assessments, without having ever offset these failings with any particular insight. Krauthammer in particular had actually managed to wrongly predict the outcome of every major US military intervention at least since the 1998 Kosovo campaign, but was inexplicably still being touted as some sort of military expert and the nation’s preeminent conservative pundit. Friedman, meanwhile, had declared in 2000 that Vladimir Putin was a great democratic reformer who would liberalize Russian politics, and elsewhere explained that the Chinese state would not seek to censor its people’s access to the internet; our current president has nonetheless been spotted taking one of the fellow’s books with him on vacation. (Note that these are simply a few of the more amusing examples; elsewhere, I have detailed dozens of others.) Before this, I had been vaguely aware that our media was probably not up to the task of serving as the nervous system of a complex twenty-first century imperial republic; when the full extent of the problem began to dawn on me, I created an organization known as Project PM.

Initially, Project PM was intended to achieve a very limited task – to at least partially dislodge people like Friedman and Krauthammer from their key roles in public life by creating the negative feedback that had thus far been lacking within the media infrastructure. This was to be accomplished by organizing some of the more competent bloggers and commentators into a sort of ad hoc union which, on a given week, would all at once begin bringing attention to the actual performance of these respected pundits, thereby creating a situation in which the mainstream news media would be obliged to acknowledge the situation. At the very least, this would have perhaps helped to diminish the stature of such people while also bringing attention to the larger failings of a nation in which repeated and demonstrable failure is not a bar to achieving extraordinary influence over the national conversation. At the same time, it would serve as a productive experiment in crowd-sourced reform of the sort that will doubtless prove necessary as the century proceeds.

I began to recruit through articles I was writing at the time for US outlets like Vanity Fair and Skeptical Inquirer. In the course of setting this up, though, I received inquiries from people who didn’t work in the media but who were interested in getting involved in the broader issue I was championing – the ability of online collectives to use the internet in new ways in order to achieve some particular end. These people I organized into a separate experimental activist network intent on achieving other goals, which would use an organizational platform I had originally designed to facilitate better dissemination of news and opinion articles.

Meanwhile I had renewed my interest in Anonymous, which had until recently been known mostly as a sort of Dadaist online prank movement and subculture but which as of 2008 was veering increasingly into public affairs activism. I had written about their distributed campaign against Scientology, which had impressed me with its effectiveness. Now, in early 2010, as participants launched a new campaign against the Australian government, which utilized cyber-attacks against state websites as a means of drawing attention to proposed internet censorship legislation while also experimenting with other methods of information warfare, I was now certain that what we were seeing in the movement’s self-organizing nature was a potentially revolutionary new method by which to bring opposition to bear against powerful institutions. After I wrote an article to that effect, I was contacted by one of its key organizers and began discussions on what many of us began to see as an inevitable conflict between distributed civic entities and traditional nation-states. At the end of 2010, when several Tunisian nationals within the Anonymous movement encouraged other participants to provide technical and communicational assistance to their nation’s nascent uprising, I was invited to participate. As the protests spread across the region, I redirected Project PM to provide support for Anonymous’ work on this and other matters.

In February of 2011, a federal intelligence contractor named Aaron Barr who served as CEO of a firm called HBGary Federal announced that he had identified key Anonymous participants and was set to meet with the FBI about his findings. The next day, several Anonymous hackers broke into his company servers and seized 70,000 emails, which were immediately made public; a cursory examination of these revealed that the firm was also involved in a plan, encouraged by the Department of Justice, to launch cyber attacks and campaigns of intimidation and disinformation against WikiLeaks, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, and left-wing activist groups on behalf of Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce. Though Barr resigned in the wake of the revelations, other participants managed to escape any consequences whatsoever, and a proposed Congressional investigation into the conspiracy was successfully headed off by a Republican with ties to the intelligence contracting industry. It was now clear that DOJ-facilitated crimes directed at information and transparency activists were to go unpunished, even as Anonymous participants accused of engaging in minor statute violations like DDOS attacks against corporate websites in the course of protests were being raided by the dozens across the US in FBI dragnets. As such, I again narrowed down Project PM’s function to what I now believed to be its most productive possible function: to continue searching through the HBGary documents – which consisted of years of correspondence between that firm and dozens of other more prominent firms dealing in surveillance and espionage as well as the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA – and to make our findings available to the public at large on an ongoing basis as new sources of information became available. Soon we had set up a website, echelon2.org, through which we made public our discoveries.

Naturally, certain parties within the federal government and its partner corporations were unhappy with all of this; the DOJ in particular had good reason to be upset with the work I had been putting into publicizing its efforts to organize what mainstream media outlets and congressmen were now acknowledging to be a dangerous criminal conspiracy that Anonymous had foiled. Within a month, the FBI had received the first of the half-dozen secret search warrants it would eventually obtain in its investigation into my activities. A year later, when nothing had turned up, armed agents raided both my apartment and my mother’s home, seizing laptops, notes, phones, and hard drives; that particular search warrant listed echelon2.org and HBGary as topics of interest. Shortly afterwards, the lead agent on the case threatened to indict my mother on obstruction of justice in hopes of getting me to cooperate (charging female loved ones of a target is actually a very common tactic by the FBI, as can be seen through public records; usually, the target agrees to plea to a crime and the charges against the female are then dropped). A few months later, after additional emails were leaked showing that HBGary had secretly been paying an FBI informant to find something that could lead to my arrest, I posted a video on YouTube in which I detailed the plot, demanded that the threats to prosecute my mother be rescinded, and threatened to investigate the lead agent in return. The next day, I was subdued and arrested by a SWAT team and charged, bizarrely, with threatening to kill the agent in question.

A few months later I was charged with 11 counts of aggravated identify theft for an incident a year prior when I’d copied and pasted a link to a file that had been stolen from another government-linked corporate espionage firm, Stratfor. The documents in question, which turned out to include client credit card numbers, were already public, and had in fact been linked to by other journalists in the course of covering the story; I simply transferred the link from a chat room used by Anonymous to one used by my Project PM researchers so that they could begin analyzing the contents for further wrongdoing. It was also clear from the chat transcripts that I wasn’t aware that the file contained credit card numbers, and the government’s own forensics people would later admit that I never actually opened the file after downloading it, nor would the prosecution itself accuse me of actually using any of the credit cards myself. For this set of charges alone, I was facing a mandatory minimum of 22 years in prison, to be added to whatever sentence I might receive for possessing the document, as well as the bogus “threats” charges and an additional charge of obstruction of justice for hiding my laptops from the FBI. Altogether, I was facing 105 years.

As time went on, the absurdities multiplied to such an extent that even otherwise naive mainstream media outlets began to express suspicion about the intent of my prosecution. When supporters began raising money to pay for my defense, the government attempted to seize the funds. After I began talking to the press about the factual errors that the government had put forth, I was put under a gag order to prevent me from speaking further about my case (at that hearing, as shown in the court transcript, the prosecutor actually asked the judge to disallow me from criticizing the government in articles I was still writing from jail for The Guardian and other outlets. In their filings previous to that hearing, the government made a point of noting in support of their gag order request that I am both an atheist and an anarchist; in a later filing before the sentencing hearing, they would cite my anarchism as a reason why I should receive a lengthier sentence). They also sought to subpoena the IP addresses of everyone who had contributed to the echelon2.org wiki, despite never having managed to articulate exactly what this had to do with any of the actual charges against me. And in order to bolster their weak indictment for the “threats” charges, they ascribed to me the comment, “Dead man can’t leak … illegally shoot the son of a bitch,” implying that I had written this about the FBI agent on my Twitter account. In fact, I had actually been disapprovingly quoting a call for the murder of Julian Assange made on national television by a Fox News commentator named Bob Beckel – who, of course, was never indicted for saying this, which itself speaks volumes about the FBI’s habit of picking and choosing whom to indict on purely ideological grounds. Assange himself would later publicly express astonishment that the US government would try something so bizarre. Again, this is merely a sampling of the breaches of justice to be found in my case, which has been written about in greater detail elsewhere.

After two and half years of fighting my case from the jail units in which I was held without bond, I received a sentence of five years. I was also forced to pay restitution of more than $800,000 to Stratfor; this was for calling the firm after it was hacked and offering to arrange with the hackers who had taken their emails to redact any contents that could potentially endanger any of their correspondents living under dictatorships. The sentence, like the charges themselves, was universally denounced by the press, NGOs, and even members of foreign legislatures.

I’m writing this from a Texas prison. Naturally I’d rather be back on the outside, but at the same time, the situation serves as a very useful example by which to illustrate the most crucial single fact of American life, one that has long been ignored by the media at large even as it has become more obvious in the years since 9/11 – that the institutions of this republic are broken, and that they will not be fixed from within. As time goes on and more of the state’s potential victims at home and abroad come to understand this, solutions will begin to present themselves.

Written at the “Federal Correctional Institution, Seagoville” in Dallas, Texas in April 2014.

EDWARD JOSEPH SNOWDEN

was born on 21 June 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In 2006 Snowden started working for the CIA as an IT expert. In addition to numerous business trips, he spent two years in the US mission in Geneva working as a technician (Code-name: Dave M. Churchyard). In the spring of 2009 he moved to computer manufacturer Dell, who had taken over the maintenance of the NSA computer networks in Japan. Having at first worked in Tokyo, Dell transferred him to Hawaii in 2012, to work in a branch of the NSA on the Pacific island of Oahu. Here Snowden already began with the systematic gathering of data. In March 2013, he took a job as systems administrator at Booz Allen Hamilton, a technology consulting firm whose employees not only manage the NSA’s infrastructure, but are also involved in covert operations. Here Snowden had full access to the information which he handed over to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong. Starting from 6 June 2013, the first stories about the NSA documents emerged, among others revealing the Prism and Tempora snoop-software programs. The revelations, which continue to this day, of the global surveillance and espionage practices of intelligence agencies – particularly those of the United States and Great Britain – make Snowden the key figure of the greatest secret service affair since the end of the Cold War. Snowden is wanted by the FBI since 14 June 2013 under an international arrest warrant. Currently he lives in Russia, where he has been granted asylum.

The lesson of 9/11 is NOT to be afraid of terrorists

A Conversation with Edward Snowden

Richter Where were you on 9/11? And how did you learn of what had happened?

Snowden I was driving to work at Fort Meade, which was the NSA headquarters on 9/11. I wasn’t working for the NSA at the time, I was actually working at the home business of someone who worked and lived on Fort Meade. Back then, it was an open base, anybody could drive into it. I heard about the attacks on the radio. And I saw there was a higher state of alert when I got to the gates. There were more people, more police cars. When I got into the office, my boss told me I had to leave, because they were closing the base. I guess they assumed the NSA was a potential target.

Richter Were you aware of the things that would follow?

Snowden Well, no. My family was really concerned. Because it’s a federal family. My father is retired now, but then he worked for the military. My mother worked for the Courts. My grandfather was working at the FBI at the time. And we thought he was in the Pentagon that day. It turned out later he wasn’t. But we were all very concerned. The phone networks were working sporadically that day.

Richter How would you describe the impact 9/11 made? What changed?

Snowden It did have a profound and traumatic effect on a lot of Americans. Myself included. I was always willing to believe the government’s attestations as to what the truth of the world is and how things work. Just by virtue of growing up with all this connection to the federal government. Shortly thereafter, it was the ramp-up to the Iraq war. And so many people were skeptical. But I actually signed up for the military in 2003, because I believed what the government was saying was true. You know, why would the government lie to us? What possible benefit would there be to them misleading us? I was naive. And in many ways, I still am naive and idealistic. But I think that’s important. I think that we need to be willing to trust. We need to be willing to risk. We need to be willing to dare, in order to benefit our communities and our societies, if we’re ever going to make any progress. We can’t close off completely. But I’ve learned critically, that the most important thing is that we should always be willing to trust citizens, but we should never be willing to trust governments. If you trust some ordinary person in your life to do the right thing, and they do the wrong thing, there’s only so much damage they can do. But if you place faith in the government that is unwarranted, they have so much power that they can fundamentally change your country, your society, the future of your family, for the rest of your human experience. And they can fundamentally change the balance of power in the world, and the balance of freedom in our societies.

Richter So that is the lesson of 9/11?

Snowden Exactly. The lesson of 9/11 is not to be afraid of terrorists, because though there was a significant attack, and though it did claim a lot of lives, when we look at it over the fullness of time, we still lose more people to health hazards, to heart attacks, to car accidents, even to bathtub falls, lightning strikes, police officers, than we do to terrorists. We have lost more lives from our response to 9/11, from misguided wars, from invasions that never should have occurred, from the misappropriation of public resources. You know, on September 12th, America had the potential to lead the world into the next century, because everybody understood what a tragedy it was that had occurred the day before. America had the world’s sympathy. Even among its greatest critics. They could have asserted a moral authority that would have made everyone safer. You cannot kill your way out of a terrorist problem. You cannot kill your way out of a war. When you kill people who are driven by an ideology, you radicalize those around them, their loved ones, their associates, their neighbors.

Richter I learned a lot about the role money played in all of it. Thomas Drake told me that during his time at the NSA one could ask for any amount of money, it was just there. That’s also an extremely dangerous dynamic.

Snowden There’s a problem with tying political influence to fear. That happens in almost all western societies now. When we get so comfortable and our quality of life gets so high, that we never face any risk in our daily lives, it becomes very easy to scare us. We’re very sensitized to it. Politically that becomes this incredibly powerful weapon that special interests can use against the public. Whether that’s defense contractors trying to get money or whether it’s politicians and political parties themselves. Any politician who says they will protect us, any politician who says they will make us safe – not only are they being untruthful, not only are they putting us at risk through bad laws and bad policies, they’re making us vulnerable to manipulation. They’re making us vulnerable to fear, emotional manipulation, a kind of psychological blackmail. We need to back politicians who tell us the truth, which is the policy that defeats terrorism.

Richter Could you explain that?

Snowden We will be attacked. There will be bad people in the world. There will be criminals. And evil will exist, to some extent, even in the future. But we can produce more good than they can produce evil, by working together, by protecting each other. By collaborating and cooperating to create free and open societies that isolate terrorists. By virtue of the fact that no one wants to live with them, no one wants to cooperate with them, no one wants to collaborate or associate with violence when the only result is more violence. This is what politicians will not tell us, because it doesn’t come across in seven words. It doesn’t come across in a statement like: We don’t want this to happen again. But the reality is: politicians do not have the power to prevent it from happening again.

Richter So you suggest that we live with the threat of a terrorist attack instead of trying to prevent it by increasing surveillance?

Snowden We have put the entire world under surveillance. We have literally more than one million people on a watch list now (and that’s just one watch list). And yet, terrorism still occurs around the world. We invested so much money, so much political effort into passing laws and building programs of mass surveillance that we didn’t have the resources needed to provide the kind of targeted, traditional surveillance based on good old-fashioned police work, that has always been effective. The Australian Prime Minister said that before the hostage-taking in Sydney, within a span of three days they had received 18 different calls warning them about the same individual. But again, they’re so involved in collecting it all, they’re so deeply involved in watching everybody and monitoring all of us, that they didn’t see anything.

Richter So the system itself even seems to be stupid.

Snowden By watching everyone, we don’t understand anything. That’s the ultimate problem. I was in the NSA on the day the Boston Marathon bombings happened. I was sitting in the cafeteria, talking to one of my colleagues. We saw it breaking on the news, and I turned to him and I said: “I’m willing to bet we knew who these people were”. Later on, it turned out that we had specific warnings about these people. We knew they had to have been to regions that had traditional affiliations with extremism. We knew they had been meeting with known extremists, because foreign intelligence agencies had shared that information. We collect billions and billions of transactions about who grandma is calling on her cell phone and what text messages highschoolers are sending to each other, that the few threatening factors are lost in the noise. It’s a mis-allocation of resources. We apply these resources into a program that does not make us safe and keep them out of programs that do keep us safe.

Richter So the system is not working in the way it was designed to.

Snowden Exactly. The US White House appointed two different investigative panels with full access to classified information to review the programs. And they said: “Not only are they unnecessary, but they have never been shown to work at all”. They have never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack in the United States. Politicians sell these programs to us as being necessary to save lives. But these programs are not helpful for terrorism, we know that. They are helpful for intelligence gathering on a general basis, if they want to know what the funding relationships between banks or companies are. They are amazing for spying on Merkel, and Dilma Rousseff, and oil companies. And UNICEF! The UN Children’s Fund. They spy on the Children’s Fund … So these programs don’t provide safety, they provide power. I know where you are at every time. I know where you go. I know everything you’ve bought. I know everybody that you talked to. I know where you’re traveling. I know who you’re sleeping with. – I know that because I sat behind the desk. I read through these records. That was my job.

Richter People know it’s happening, but that it’s not really happening to them. I’m not important enough. This is why it’s so difficult to convince people of the dangers it poses to our society.

Snowden They’re divorcing the idea of the collection of data with the usage of it. And they’re right, that this information is not being used against them right now. Otherwise they would know it. They’d be in prison or on trial. But the reality is that these records are being collected, regardless of whether or not they’re being used. But you have to think about what you’ve allowed to happen. What you’ve done is you’ve given up your ability to self-direct and self-determine what your future is, because when you allow someone more powerful than you total visibility of your action, you allow them to decide what they’re going to do to you. They can thwart you, they can preempt you, they can contest you. If I want to accuse you of a crime you didn’t commit, do you think you could win the case against me? When the government has this superiority of information, that creates a pretty substantial imbalance which could easily be abused. There are about like 4.7 million people who have clearances in the United States. So there’s this whole community, this entire class of people that you know the government trusts. And this much larger class that they don’t trust. They’re sort of second-class citizens in the US.

Richter So they want to be able to retroactively investigate us and collect information that can be used against us, if we become dangerous to them somehow.

Snowden Yes. But I think the real threat of mass surveillance is the fact is that it provides pre-criminal investigation. They’re trying to stop activities before they occur. We can investigate pre-criminally, before any crime has occurred, we can identify them as criminals, before they’ve committed the crime, and we can arrest them, try them on some new law and put them in jail … Let’s say that works. Let’s say we can stop terrorism, we can stop murder, we can stop assault, we can stop property crimes, we can stop car thefts, we can stop any crime.

Richter Why would that be so bad?

Snowden When governments are preempting actions, even horrible actions, they’re undermining the basis of western liberal tradition. Our system of laws, our system of justice, is based on the idea that you must commit a crime to be tried for the crime. Also we have to understand that what is lawful is not the same as what is moral. You know, slavery was lawful. Everything that every dictator has done in the past was lawful. The right thing to do is not always the legal thing to do. We need to ask society, we need to ask citizens, we need to ask you: to what is your first loyalty? Are you loyal to the law, or are you loyal to what is right? Are you loyal to legality, or are you loyal to morality? Sometimes laws were made to be broken. Sometimes bad laws pass. And sometimes we have not just the right, but the duty to oppose laws.

Richter Do you consider yourself a traitor?

Snowden You know, people call me a traitor, and I’m like: Is this an insult?!?! You know, the people who founded our country were called that, we’re a country that was born out of treason. When we look back on the history of western civilization, almost every forward motion in the domain of rights, of “enlightened” government, of democracy, of civil society has been the product of outrageous law-breaking. When we think about social policies, when we think about voting rights for women, when we think about things like the civil rights movement, or racial equality, or the prohibition of gay marriage … Nobody says “gay marriage is OK” until one gay person stands up and says: “I deserve to be able to choose who I want to marry”. And that one person stands alone and they stand alone against the law. And if they can be identified in advance of that crime, we can never progress. Slavery would still be the policy today, if people who had been fighting against slavery – resisting slavery unlawfully – had been identified and persecuted in advance. The same things that might prevent some random crazy person from shooting-up a deli prevents us from creating a more free and open and egalitarian society.

Richter If this had been the case in the days of Galileo Galilei, we would still believe that the sun is circling the earth.

Snowden That’s right! Exactly. He was a heretic.

Richter So at some point it becomes control of thought. And free will. You know, I want to choose if I will rob a bank, or if I will invent a new system.

Snowden I would say more than thought control – they’re establishing norms. They’re saying what is normal behavior and what is abnormal behavior. And when they’re saying “normal” and “abnormal” behavior, they’re also saying “moral” and “immoral” behavior. That’s the problem when you shape your decisions, when you shape your life, your political thoughts, your understanding of what is right and wrong, in accordance with what is legal and illegal. A small collection of individuals are re-shaping the entire body of your life’s activities on the basis of nothing more substantial than what they write on a few pages of paper.

Richter One of the arguments governments made when they had to defend their programs was: it’s just meta-data. It’s not content. It’s not what you say on the call, it’s only stuff about the call.

Snowden When you have enough meta-data, you don’t need the content. We kill people based on meta-data. That’s what the Shenanigans program was for. They shoot missiles at cell phones based on unique cell phone identifiers. The problem is: they don’t know who’s holding the cell phone. This is why so many innocent people die in US drone strikes. The terrorist can be talking to his terrorist buddies, and at the end of the day give the cellphone to his nephew, or he can sell it at the local pawn shop. The terrorist doesn’t care, because if they drone a wedding party, that just means more people are joining Al-Qaeda.

Richter Going back to the issue of resources and resource distribution. What, in your opinion, would be the best way to go about it?

Snowden When we think of the question of resourcing, there’s another way of looking at it entirely. And I think Europeans will understand this argument more easily than Americans. The government in the United States spends 75 billion dollars a year on intelligence programs. How many lives has that 75 billion dollars every single year saved? How many people in the United States have died from terrorism in the worst year? When you look at September 11th, you’re talking about roughly 3,000 people. How many lives could that 75 billion dollars a year save, using measures that we know help people who are dying for want of food? People who are dying for want of medical care? Ultimately, it comes down to: what’s going to benefit society more? These are the arguments that we need from politicians. This is the level of sophistication. This is the next step in the game. And this is how this dark time of oppressive mass surveillance will eventually end. It’s still not popular yet, because fear is too effective. But what politicians are overlooking is the fact that people become fatigued from fear. Fear works very well, and fear works for a long time, but it does not work forever.

Richter Why aren’t there politicians saying what you’re saying?

Snowden Most politicians don’t really care about the best interests of the society – in the long term. They care about the short term, they care about what their name is going to be attached to. They care about what’s going to be on the news that night, that week, that month, that election. And so they will exploit any vulnerability, any weakness in the public, in the media, in society. Until we change that dynamic, unfortunately, we’re going to have a predatory politics.

Richter Do you think there is a chance that this dynamic will actually change?

Snowden I am optimistic. We have already seen the beginnings of the post-terror generation in politics. We see a few brave voices, who are beginning to think about the issues, develop the arguments. And I think these are issues that are not related to just terrorism. I think they apply to foreign policy. I think they apply to war. I think they apply to basic fairness and equality. Social justice. Economic justice. And when we start to think about not what government can do, but what it should do, within those powers of can and capability. We don’t focus on the legalism, we don’t focus on what is strictly lawful, we focus on what is moral. We focus on what is rightful. I think that’s the recipe for good governance. And I think we will see it. We’ll get there. Things seem dark now, but we’ve been through dark times before, and we are always progressing. It’s hard to see it sometimes, but life is getting better.

Richter Do you believe in God? Or did you ever?

Snowden You know, I don’t particularly believe or disbelieve. I’d say I’m agnostic. We can’t measure it, we don’t know. If there is a God, I think he could be a lot more compassionate. I think it’s sad that we have the level of suffering that we have in the world, if there is a supreme being. But I’m not going to tell people that their beliefs are worthless, or that they don’t know what they feel. But personally, I’d like to see some evidence. I’d like a sign. I’d like a message.

Richter If your life were a movie and you were the director, how would it continue from here?

Snowden I don’t think I want to write things forward. I don’t even like directing. I don’t want to put myself in the position of saying: This is the plan. This is how it’ll be. I like consensus, I like discussion, I like to talk to people and get their impression of how it should be. What do you think? How should it go? What should it look like? That’s always been more interesting to me. So if I were making a film, I’d be sitting in a meeting rather than writing it out.

This conversation was conducted in Moscow, on 27 February 2015.

CHELSEA ELIZABETH MANNING

Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was born on 17 December 1987 in Crescent, Oklahoma. In 2007 Manning joined the US Army and was trained as a news analyst. She was granted “Top Secret” classification status. During the time Manning was stationed in Iraq, she had access to classified information on the United States Foreign Affairs and Defense computer network. Between 2009 and 2010 she copied countless documents and subsequently gave them to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks published several tranches of this material under the titles Cablegate, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs and Collateral Murder. As a motive for her actions, Manning stated that she wanted to give the public the opportunity to be able to form an opinion about the war and Unites States foreign policy for themselves. On an internet chat which lasted several days, Manning told her chat partner Adrian Lamo, that she burned the data onto an audio CD labeled “Lady Gaga” and passed it on to WikiLeaks. Lamo thereafter informed the FBI. On 26 May 2010 Manning was arrested in Iraq, and as a consequence found herself confined to prison under degrading conditions. On 21 August 2013 Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, for among other things, betrayal of secrets, espionage, computer fraud and theft. In a public statement made on 22 August 2013, Manning declared herself to be a woman and desired to receive hormone replacement therapy. Since 23 April 2014 her name change has been legalized. She is known as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning ever since.

GLOSSARY

I2P – Invisible Internet Project. A free software project that aims to create an anonymous and pseudonymous network.

ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union. Founded in 1920, a nongovernmental organization based in New York City, which advocates for the preservation and defense of civil rights.

AFGHAN WAR DIARY – A compendium of reports written by soldiers and intelligence officers from the front-lines of war, published by WikiLeaks on 25 July 2010. It provides a comprehensive insight into NATO operations in Afghanistan and the precarious security situation on the ground. It also contains a detailed list of casualties. In addition, the documents prove the existence of a secret US special force known as Task Force 373, which seeks out to kill suspected Taliban leaders. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is considered to be the WikiLeaks informant.

ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS – Laws passed by Congress in 1798, which extended Presidential privileges over foreigners and made the publication of criticism against the state punishable. Three of the four laws were abolished in 1802, as they were considered unconstitutional. Only the Alien Enemy Act is still in force today. It allows the President to arrest and deport aliens, if they are citizens of a country with which the United States is at war.

AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION – A professional association established in 1878 to which lawyers, judges and law students belong. The central task is the accreditation of legal education in American universities. In most jurisdictions, graduation from an ABA accredited university in the US is a prerequisite and formal condition for taking the Bar examination and practicing law in another state.

ANONYMOUS – A loose collective that organizes itself on social networks and since 2008 has been carrying out increasingly politically motivated protests directed primarily at censorship and oppression. The group became famous, among others, for Project Chanology – a series of protests against Scientology – and for Operation Payback, a series of DDoS attacks on opponents of WikiLeaks.

BHOPAL MEDICAL APPEAL – An organization advocating for the survivors of a chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. On 3 December 1984, several tons of toxic substances leaked due to technical failures at the Union Carbide India Limited factory. Thousands of people died as a direct result of contact with the ensuing gas cloud and up to 500,000 were injured, some of whom to this day are still suffering from the consequences of the accident. Countless suffered brain damage, paralysis, pulmonary edema, heart-, stomach-, kidney- and liver disease and infertility. Later on, malformations in newborns and the stunted growth of children could be observed.

BIG DATA INITIATIVE – A national research and development initiative launched by the Obama administration in 2012. Its aim is to promote new technologies to ensure the management and analysis of large amounts of data.

BLACK PANTHER PARTY – A revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization founded in California in 1966. It was the only African American resistance organization to use violence as a means of achieving their goals.

BND – The Federal Intelligence Service is one of the three German federal intelligence services responsible for foreign intelligence.

BOSTON MARATHON BOMBINGS – A terrorist attack perpetrated on the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013. The detonation of bombs hidden in two backpacks killed three people and injured 264 others. Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Zarnajew are said to be the perpetrators.

CABLEGATE – American embassy classified cables covering the period December 1966 up until February 2010, published in 2010 by WikiLeaks. These classified cables offered a detailed insight into the daily operations of all 274 US-embassies worldwide. They contain numerous comments and assessments by individual diplomats on various aspects of their business, including: Armaments policy, secret service tasks, counter-terrorism, foreign relations, tensions in the Middle East, the lobbying of various companies and support of dictatorships. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is considered to be the WikiLeaks informant.

CESA – Cyberspace Electronic Security Act. Rejected bill from 1999, where the Clinton administration planned to enable security agencies access to encrypted files.

CFAA – Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. An enacted law passed in 1986 making non-authorized computer access punishable.

CHARLIE HEBDO – On 7 January 2015, brothers Saïd and Cherif Kouachi perpetrated an attack on the editorial board of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. They killed 11 people and another person trying to flee. On 8 January 2015, Amedy Coulibaly shot a policewoman in the south of Paris and the next day attacked a kosher supermarket. In the attack and subsequent hostage-taking four more people were killed. On his approach, Coulibaly made reference to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

CHURCH COMMITTEE – A US Senate select committee convened in 1975 to study government operations with respect to intelligence activities, named after Democratic Senator Frank Church, who headed the committee. It initially investigated news services and as a result of its investigations came across several cases of abuse: attempted and successfully carried out assassinations of foreign leaders, commissioned by the United States; human experiments using drugs and torture; and monitoring, manipulation and discrediting of leftist organizations by the FBI. In the wake of the Church Committee several committees were founded inside the US Senate and the House of Representatives to control the news and intelligence agencies. In addition, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed (see FISA).

COINTELPRO – Counterintelligence Program. A secret FBI program, launched in 1956 on the orders of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The program was initially directed against the Communist Party, later against students of civil rights and anti-war movements. FBI measures included illegal surveillance, systematic infiltration of organizations, the falsification of evidence, the presentation of false facts to the media and physical violence. In 1971, the media received documents that were stolen from an FBI office by activists. The ensuing publications not only stopped the program, but also led to far-reaching parliamentary restrictions on police and intelligence agency activities (see Church Committee).

COLLATERAL MURDER – In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a thermooptic video recording of a Baghdad air raid from 12 July 2007 under this title, in which 12 civilians were killed, including two employees of the Reuters news agency. The publication triggered global moral consternation to US military practices in Iraq. Especially the cynical pilot comments and the dubious basis on which the order to fire was made prompted the outrage. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is considered to be the WikiLeaks informant.

CONTACT CHAINING – An NSA procedure designed to analyze the environment of the target person, including not only direct contacts, but also secondary and third degree contacts. The corresponding communication is intercepted, stored, decoded and analyzed.

DDoS – Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. Targeted attack on a server or computer, which leads to the failure of websites or network infrastructure by overloading the bandwidth or resources of a server

DOD – United States Department of Defense. Headquartered at the Pentagon.

DOJ – United States Department of Justice. Supervisory authority over the FBI.

DOW CHEMICAL – The Dow Chemical Company is an international company headquartered in Midland (Michigan), in the United States. It is second to BASF as the largest chemical company in the world. During the Vietnam war Dow Chemical manufactured the dioxincontaining defoliant “Agent Orange“, the use of which caused serious health damage to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people as well as American soldiers.

ECPA – Electronic Communication Privacy Act. A Telecommunications Law passed in 1986, which governs data protection. It protects users of electronic communications from unauthorized recording and storage of telephone and data transmission.

EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation. A non-profit organization based in San Francisco founded in 1990, which campaigns for fundamental rights in the digital world, primarily by legal means. Its key objectives are to ensure the freedom of speech, privacy and consumer rights.

ESPIONAGE ACT – A law which was passed by Congress shortly after the United States entered the First World War in 1917, still in effect today. It makes sabotage and disclosure of secrets to the enemy punishable. Since the law does not distinguish between espionage by foreign agents and the revelation of secret information to the press, whistleblowers have repeatedly been charged under this law (including Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden).

FCC – Federal Communications Commission. An authority created by Congress in 1934 which supervises broadcasting, satellite and cable communication channels and is responsible for the approval of communication devices. It is also responsible for the imposition of penalties for transmitting content classified as obscene.

FIFTH AMENDMENT – The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and part of the Bill of Rights. It ensures, among other things, the defendant access to a jury trial and the right to due process.

FIRST AMENDMENT – The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits Congress from enforcing laws that restrict freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom of assembly and the right to petition.

FISA – Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A law passed in 1978, which regulates the conduct of foreign intelligence and United States counterintelligence and ensures a tighter handle on the surveillance of American citizens by their own services. For this purpose, the secretly convening FISA Court (see FISC) was established. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, there have been several legislative amendments that have granted the NSA extensive powers of interception.

FISC – A US federal court established in 1978, which consists of 11 federal judges and its meetings are generally subject to confidentiality. It decides whether to grant requests for surveillance warrants to law enforcement agencies with respect to the investigation of American citizens and foreign intelligence agents, as well as the issuing of domestic communication data by American communications companies. Since Edward Snowden’s revelations the court has been under heavy criticism because of its generous warrant approval rate.

FORT HOOD – One of the US Army’s largest military bases. During a rampage within the grounds on 5 November 2009, 13 people were killed and 32 others injured.

FOURTH AMENDMENT – The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

GAP – Government Accountability Project. A non-profit advocacy organization made up of lawyers concerned with the protection and defense of whistleblowers clients include, among others, Thomas Drake, William Binney and Edward Snowden.

GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters. British intelligence and security organization. Responsible for cryptography, data transmission methods and signals intelligence.

FIBER OPTICS – Optical connection technology that is used primarily for network cable, also used in transatlantic cables that can be monitored directly by the NSA and GCHQ.

GRAND JURY (secret) – A legal procedure that takes place without the participation of a judge or the public. A grand jury is not required to disclose what and against whom they are proceeding.

HAYMARKET RIOTS – A strike that lasted several days, organized by the Unions which began on 1 May 1886 in Chicago and then developed into a nationwide movement. The aim was to reduce the working day from 12 to eight hours. On 4 May, the situation escalated when a bomb went off right in the middle of the strikers in Chicago, which led to the police opening fire on the crowd and an unknown number of people being shot. Although the perpetrator was never caught, eight men who had helped organize the strike were indicted, convicted and sentenced to death. This ruling sparked outrage among international working groups and also led to protests around the world. The 1st of May became the labor movement’s international day.

HBGary Federal – US based security company, providing defense and espionage software for American security authorities. In early 2011 their computer system was targeted by Anonymous. One of their hacks resulted in gaining access to approximately 60,000 emails, which were subsequently published on WikiLeaks. The emails show that HBGary Federal developed in cooperation with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies a strategy for fighting WikiLeaks, using illegal techniques. In addition, the three companies have put massive pressure on journalists sympathizing with the whistleblower platform.

HPSCI – US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A committee of the US House of Representatives, founded in 1977 and charged with the oversight of the 17 US intelligence agencies.

HOUSE OF LORDS – Upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

ICWPA – Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. A bill passed in 1998 regulating the code of conduct for members of staff of intelligence agencies when reporting complaints or information to Congress about complaints and abuse involving intelligence activities.

IRAQ WAR LOGS – Also known as the “Iraq War Diary”. A collection of internal US military protocols on the war in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, published by WikiLeaks in October 2010. According to the US soldiers’ reports, the casualty count was much higher than originally estimated, particularly that of civilians. Additionally, the Iraq War Logs indicated that the US forces tolerated the torture of civilians and the killing of detainees by Iraqi security authorities. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is considered to be the WikiLeaks informant.

IRS – The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. It is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.

JEWEL VS. NSA – Law case between the EFF and the NSA. In 2008 the EFF filed a law suit on behalf of Carolyn Jewel, accusing the NSA of capturing and recording confidential digital communication of US citizens without judicial authority. It is suspected that the NSA made AT&T grant them direct access to their fiber optic channels – thus violating surveillance authorization legislation and the US Constitution. Although Edward Snowden’s revelations confirmed these claims the law suit was rejected in 2015.

LULZEC – A group of hackers, founded in 2011, who drew attention to themselves by means of a great number of high publicity attacks, among others against Sony Pictures, the CIA, the US-Senate and The Sun. Its members were betrayed to the investigating authorities by former LulzSec member Sabu (Hector Xavier Monsegur) and sentenced to prison terms in 2013.

METADATA – Related data within a specific communication, not the content itself (email addresses, names, IP addresses, telephone numbers, data rates).

MOLE HUNTING UNIT – Secret investigation team consisting of FBI and CIA agents, first deployed in 1994 to identify spies and double agents.

NATIONAL GUARD – US national guard, consisting of volunteer militia soldiers.

NDAA – National Defense Authorization Act. A United States federal law specifying the budget and expenditures of the United States Department of Defense and a prerequisite for the US armed forces. The army’s authority was extended as a result of this act in 2012, legalizing the detention of US and non-US citizens on mere suspicion for an unlimited amount of time. It also justifies the setting up of detention centers in foreign countries and the establishment of terrorist suspects without trial.

NSA – National Security Agency. Largest technically orientated foreign intelligence service of the United States, headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. NSA is responsible for global surveillance as well as decryption and analysis of electronic communication. Founded in 1952, its very existence was kept secret for a lengthy time.

OCCUPY MOVEMENT – Protest movement with origins in North America. Established by means of the erection of a tent camp by demonstrators on 17 September 2011 at Zuccotti Park in New York. On 5 October, the biggest demonstration took place with the support and participation of many unions. The number of participants was estimated to have been somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000. Using the slogans Occupy Wall Street and We are the 99 percent, the protesters demanded the abolition of social inequalities, speculative transactions by banks and the economy’s influence on politics.

USA PATRIOT ACT – A federal law passed on 25 of October 2001 intended to simplify federal investigations in cases of terrorist threats. It authorizes, among others, the following measures: surveillance of phone and email conversations (forcing phone and internet service providers to release requested data); investigation of public library lending records; access to financial data without evidence of crimes committed; house searches without the knowledge of its inhabitants; CIA investigations on national level; unlimited detention of suspects without trial.

PEN REGISTER AND TRAP AND TRACE DEVICES ACT – Legislation passed in 1989 for telephone surveillance, which illegitimates the use of dialed number recorders without judicial authority.

PENTAGON PAPERS – Secret 7,000-page report commissioned by then Defense Minister Robert McNamara in 1967 documenting the relationship between the USA and Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The report was leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg. It uncovered the deception of the US public and members of parliament with regard to facts about the Vietnam War. Contrary to US government claims, the war had long been premeditated and then been legitimized by the alleged feigning of a North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was revealed that securing of democracy in South Vietnam had never been the primary goal; the body count had been much higher then admitted by the government, and that victory over North Vietnam was seen as highly unlikely. The publication of the Pentagon Papers (in the New York Times, later in the Washington Post and others) was one of the driving forces in turning the US public against the war.

PRISM – An NSA surveillance program capable of analyzing the entire global online communication. The program accesses the data and services of at least nine of the biggest computer companies, among them Google, Facebook, Skype and Apple. It was brought to public attention by whistleblower Edward Snowden on 7 June 2013.

PROJECT PM – A research platform launched by Barrett Brown in 2009. It was designed to allow Brown and his supporters to collect and analyze data gathered by private security and technology companies.

SHENANIGANS – A project to collect electronic signals from WiFi-networks or directly from computers through drones.

SID – Signals Intelligence Directorate. Part of the NSA, responsible for communications intelligence.

SIXTH AMENDMENT – The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution and part of the Bill of Rights. It guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, the right to an impartial jury, and the right to know who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence against you.

STELLAR WIND – Code-name for an illegal surveillance program deployed immediately after the 9/11 incident. President George W. Bush authorized the program, which merged four existing programs, hence combining and extending their functionality. Stellar Wind provided extensive access to the internet and phone activities of all US citizens, gathering data directly from the communications centers of leading telecommunications companies, without a court order. Its use was continued by the Obama administration until 2011.

STRATFOR – A private US based think tank and information services provider based in Texas, offering analysis, reports and forecasts on Geopolitics, security issues and conflicts. In 2011 Stratfor was hacked by members of Anonymous. By the end of the year Anonymous published 75,000 names, email addresses, credit card numbers and passwords belonging to their customers as well as 50,000 email addresses belonging to US government representatives. In 2012 WikiLeaks began to publish internal company documents – mostly emails – which granted insight into their worldwide network of informants and their secret-service like methods. On 5 March 2012, activist and hacker Jeremy Hammond was arrested by the FBI. Hammond admitted that he had hacked Stratfor’s server, copied five million emails and passed them on to WikiLeaks and was sentenced to ten years in prison. In 2014 it was revealed that the information required to hack the server had been provided to him by an FBI agent.

SWAT – Tactical special unit within the US Police, specializing in high risk tasks (e.g. hostage situations, high risk arrests, sniper deployment).

TEA PARTY – American right-wing protest movement established in 2009, whose name refers to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

TEMPORA – Code-name for a surveillance program used by British intelligence and security organization GCHQ since 2011, which taps into and stores worldwide online communication traffic. Content is stored for three days while meta-data is stored for 30 days. The NSA also has access to this data pool.

THINTHREAD – A surveillance and analytic program developed by William Binney and his colleagues Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe. ThinThread is considered to be very efficient in its conception: the software detects and analyses the entire social network of any person, using the gathered data to establish connections between suspects (see Contact Chaining). ThinThread incorporated a function of data protection, isolating and rejecting any US citizen data. That time NSA Director General Hayden stopped further work on the project three weeks ahead of the 9/11 attacks in favor of the Trailblazer Project.

TIMES SQUARE BOMBER – Faisal Shahzad, who tried to detonate a car bomb on 1 May 2010 in New York’s Times Square. His attempt failed due to a detonator malfunction.

TONKIN INCIDENT – Unprovoked attack on two US warships by North Vietnamese speedboats on 2 and 4 of August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. This incident provided the US government a legal basis to intervene in the ongoing war in Vietnam. It is disputed, whether these attacks actually ever took place, with at least the second of the attacks being historically unverifiable. The Pentagon Papers published in 1971 suggest a deliberate distortion of events, the aim of which was to implement the government’s war plans already made back in 1963.

TOR – The Onion Router. Software tool that makes it possible for internet users to wipe away their digital footprints.

TRAILBLAZER – Failed NSA surveillance program, which was to be developed with the help of private companies, to gather and analyze communications data from the internet and mobile phones. In 2006 Trailblazer was discontinued due to high costs and poor results.

TSA – Transportation Security Administration. An American federal agency division of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for the maintenance of public traffic safety, which includes defense against terrorism.

VPN – A network technology which makes it possible to surf the web anonymously by tunneling traffic through a geographically untraceable IP address, thus hiding the surfer’s location.

WEATHER UNDERGROUND – A radical leftist militant underground organization in the United States whose members expressed solidarity with the fighters of the Vietcong and the Black Panther Party. They conducted bomb attacks on government buildings at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, without killing people. Psychologist Timothy Leary’s escape from prison in 1970 created quite a stir.

WIKILEAKS – An online platform founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, enabling the publication of political or economical documents which ordinarily would be subject to secrecy, confidentiality or censorship. Informants can upload their contributions without the risk of having their identities revealed.

WHISTLEBLOWER – To blow the whistle. A term that possibly originates either from the British policeman’s use of a whistle to indicate the presence of a criminal to other police, or from a soccer referee’s use of a whistle to indicate that a foul has been committed. Whistleblowers make secret and non-public information about illegal activities, threats to humankind and the environment or any other dangerous conduct available to the public. They often risk their own lives in doing so. They are a valuable – sometimes the only – source of information for investigative journalists when it comes to exposing political affairs, economic scandals, war crimes, violations of human rights and other topics that need to be brought to public attention.

THE YES MEN – A culture jamming activist duo from New York who conduct communications guerrilla warfare. Its two members, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, assume the roles of corporate leaders and politicians and caricature them by making ridiculous demands at conferences. They became world famous for the creation of a fake WTO website. J

LIST OF NAMES

AVILA, Renata – Advocate for Human Rights and Intellectual Property from Guatemala. She fights for freedom of expression, privacy, access to knowledge and the rights of indigenous people, is chairman of Creative Commons Guatemala and a close associate of WikiLeaks.

BAGINSKI, Maureen A. – Cryptologist. From 1979 to 2003 she held various management positions within the NSA and went on to work at, among others, the FBI.

BARR, Aaron – Former head of US security firm HBGary Federal. After the company was targeted for a cyber-attack by Anonymous, Barr announced his retirement.

BRITTAIN, Victoria – Journalist and writer. Contributes to The Guardian and various French-language magazines. She is also an adviser to the United Nations.

BUSH, George Walker (Born 6 July 1946 ) – 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009. As a direct response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, the Bush administration, under the heading War on Terror, initiated a number of political, military and legal measures, that restricted the fundamental rights to freedom and partially lifted the separation of powers in the US.

CHENEY, Richard Bruce “Dick” (Born 30 January 1941) – 46th Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush, and Secretary of Defense from 1989 to 1993 under his father George Bush. Cheney was instrumental in the massive increase of the security apparatus and the extension of powers granted to the NSA.

FARRELL, Joseph – WikiLeaks member and Julian Assange’s closest associate. He previously worked at the Center for Investigative Journalism in London.

FRIEDMANN, Thomas (Born 20 July 1953) – American journalist who writes as Middle East correspondent and commentator for the New York Times. Gained notoriety for The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), a controversial standard work on globalization.

GRAYSON, Alan (Born 13 March 1958) – Member of the Democratic Party. Represents the state of Florida as United States Representative for Florida’s 9th congressional district. Worked as a lawyer before his political career.

GREENWALD, Glenn (Born 6 March 1967) – American journalist, lawyer and blogger. Occupied since June 2013 with preparation and analysis of data given to him by Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. Publication of several NSA-whistleblower revelations in the British daily paper The Guardian. Chief Editor of online magazine The Intercept since February 2014, which continues on with revelations based on the Snowden documents and deals with other topics like corruption, judicial abuse, violation of civil liberties and social inequality.

HARRISON, Sarah (Born circa 1981/1982) – British journalist and member of WikiLeaks. She is regarded as Julian Assange’s closest adviser. In the summer of 2013 Harrison accompanied whistleblower Edward Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. She spent about 40 days with him in the Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport transit area, where she led the negotiations for Snowden’s asylum among other things. Harrison has lived in Berlin since November 2013.

HAYDEN, Michael Vincent (Born 17 March 1945) – Head of US military intelligence organization NSA from 1999 – 2005. Traditionally focused on foreign intelligence, the NSA experienced profound changes under Hayden. Between 2006 and 2009, Hayden was Director of the CIA.

HEDGES, Christopher (Born 18 September 1956) – American journalist, author, activist, Pulitzer Prize winner and senior fellow at the Nation Institute in New York City. Filed a law suit against the, in his opinion, unconstitutional National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was adopted by the Obama administration. Hedges at first won, but after the government appealed the ruling it was overturned. His petition for a hearing were rejected by the Supreme Court in November 2014.

HOOVER, John Edgar (Born 1 January 1895; Died 2 May 1972) – First Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 up until his death.

JAUCH, Günther (Born 13 July 1956) – German talk show host and producer.

KENNEDY, Helena Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Born 12 May 1950) – British lawyer, television journalist and Labour MP in the House of Lords.

KIRIAKOU, John (Born 9 August 1964) – Former CIA employee who was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after he confirmed to a reporter that the CIA regularly uses water-boarding. In February 2015 Kiriakou was released from prison.

KONDEK, Chris (Born 1962) – Video artist and director. He has worked with, amongst others, Robert Wilson, Michael Nyman, Laurie Anderson and Angela Richter.

KRAUTHAMMER, Charles (Born 13 March 1950) – American columnist and writer. Initially a member of the Democratic Party, Krauthammer changed political sides in 1978 and is now attributed to the neoconservatives. His columns appear in numerous newspapers and online publications (including The Washington Post, The National Interest and TIME Magazine).

LAMO, Adrian (Born 20 February 1981) – American hacker. His attacks on the New York Times, Yahoo! News, AOL and Microsoft networks earned him quite a reputation among his peers. After Chelsea Manning had confided in him for several days via a web chat, Lamo contacted the authorities, which led to Manning’s arrest.

LICHTBLAU, Eric (Born 1965) – American journalist. Has written for the New York Times since 2002. Together with his colleague James Risen, Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his research on the unconstitutional wiretapping practices of the NSA against the US population. His most recent publications are Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice and The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a safe haven for Hitler’s Men.

LINDH, John Walker (Born 9 February 1981) – American citizen who fought on the side of the Taliban and was captured during the invasion of Afghanistan. He is known as the “American Taliban”. During his trial it came out that during his detention Lindh had suffered sleep deprivation, food deprivation and lack of water, and was interrogated without legal counsel. On the 4 October 2002, he was sentenced to a prison term of 20 years without parole.

LOOMIS, Edward – Worked as a cryptologist at NSA from 1964 to 2001 and was a member of the William Binney and Kirk Wiebe team, who were devoted to the development of the ThinThread monitoring program. Just like Wiebe and Binney, Loomis also resigned from the NSA, because he did not want to share the responsibility for the mass and unconstitutional surveillance of the US population.

MAYER, Jane (Born 1955) – American investigative journalist. Writing for The New Yorker since 1995. In recent years, she mainly reported about corruption in politics, the persecution of whistleblowers and the Obama administration’s drone program. In her recent book The Dark Side: Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (2008) Mayer gave a panorama of the political, military and legal consequences of the Bush administration postulated “War on Terror”.

MERKEL, Angela Dorothea (Born 17 July 1954) – Chancellor of Germany. In October 2013 it was revealed that the NSA had been intercepting Merkel’s cell phone since 2002. It was also revealed that employees of the CIA and NSA stationed at the US Embassy at Pariser Platz were listening in on communications within the governmental district.

NEMZOV, Boris (Born 9 October 1959; Died 27 February 2015) – Russian politician. Has long been one of the leading forces of the liberal party “Union of Right Forces” and served as Leader of the Opposition. He was a sharp critic of Putin’s government. Nemzov was shot dead on the 27th of February 2015, in the center of Moscow, near the Kremlin.

OBAMA, Barack Hussein (Born 4 August 1961) – 44th President of the United States since the 20th of January 2009. As a presidential candidate, Obama had explicitly called for the protection of whistleblowers. After taking office, however, he began pursuing whistleblowers far more harshly than his predecessors. Within his first term there were six criminal proceedings for betrayal of secrets based on the Espionage Act of 1917.

POITRAS, Laura (Born 1964) – American documentary film director and producer. In June 2013 Poitras traveled to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald to meet Edward Snowden and take possession of the NSA documents. Poitras filmed the meeting and made a documentary called Citizenfour, which was awarded an Oscar in 2015.

PUTIN, Vladimir (Born 7 October 1952) – President of the Russian Federation since the 7 May 2012; he had already held the same office from 2000 to 2008. After Edward Snowden, whilst on the run, had spent five weeks in the transit area of the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, Putin granted him permanent asylum, under the condition that Snowden cease from any other activities as a whistleblower which could harm the US.

RISEN, James E. (Born 27 April 1955) – American journalist for the New York Times. In 2004 he was the first to report about water-boarding, a method of torture carried out by the CIA. In 2005 he and his colleague Eric Lichtblau revealed NSA surveillance programs being used domestically. In 2006 the book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration came out. In 2010 a case was brought against one of Risen’s alleged sources, ex-CIA worker Jeffrey Sterling. As Risen had refused to confirm Sterling as a source, he was threatened with coercive detention. Ultimately the Ministry of Justice refrained from calling Risen as a witness.

ROARK, Diane – Worked for the Republicans in the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and oversaw the NSA budget. Along with Thomas Drake and William Binney she filed a complaint to the Ministry of Defense and Security Committee against the secret NSA Trailblazer project. However, after then presiding NSA Director Michael Hayden had still approved working with Trailblazer, Roark voluntarily resigned from service.

ROSEN, James (Born 2 September 1968) – American journalist and television correspondent, for Fox News Channel among others. In 2013 The Washington Post reported that the Ministry of Justice was monitoring Rosen’s activities, phone calls and emails as well as his visits to the Foreign Ministry. The reason was a story about North Korea for which Rosen had obtained information leaked by an ex-employee of the Foreign Ministry.

ROUSSEFF, Dilma Vana (Born 14 December 1947) – President of Brazil since the 1st of January 2011. In 2013 Snowden revealed material showing that Rousseff’s telephone and email traffic had been spied on by the NSA.

RUSSEL, Bertrand Arthur William (Born 18 May 1872; Died 2 February 1970) – Mathematician, logician, writer, socialist, pacifist. He is considered to be the founder of analytical philosophy.

SABU (Born 13 October 1983) – Birth-name Hector Xavier Monsegur. Hacker and co-founder of LulzSec, a loose collective of hackers who drew attention to themselves by hacking, among others, Sony, Nintendo and InfraGard. After being arrested in 2011, Monsegur turned into an FBI informer. He gave the investigators not only information on more than 300 cyber-attacks, but orchestrated worldwide large-scale attacks on servers as a kind of Agent Provocateur. This co-operation resulted in a significant reduction of Monsegur’s sentence: instead of the threatened maximum penalty of 26 years, he was sentenced to only seven months in prison.

TATCHELL, Peter Gary (Born 25 January 1952) – British human rights activist within the LGBT movement (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) since the 1990s.

TENET, George John (Born 5 January 1953) – Former US government official. He was Director of the CIA from the 11 July 1997 to the 11 July 2004.

TOPIARY (Born 27 October 1992) – Birth-name Jake Leslie Davis. Hacktivist. Topiary was an active member of various groups, including Anonymous and LulzSec. He became famous when he hacked the website of the Westboro Baptist Church during a live interview.

WEINER, Tim (Born 20 June 1956) – American author and journalist (among others for the New York Times), who tackles the history and activities of the US intelligence community in his books. Namely: Enemies: Legacy of Ashes (2007) and A History of the FBI (2012).

WIEBE, Kirk J. – Worked as a senior analyst in the NSA from 1975 to 2001 and was a member of the William Binney and Ed Loomis team, who were devoted to the development of the ThinThread monitoring program. He also resigned from service at NSA, because he did not want to share responsibility for the mass unconstitutional monitoring of the US population.

WIZNER, Ben – Edward Snowden’s lawyer and head at ACLU, where he is director of the Speech, Privacy & Technology Project.

YOO, John – American lawyer, professor and author. He worked out the legal basis for the CIA torture methods during George W. Bush’s tenure. Herewith everything was legitimate, as long as it didn’t lead to to organ failure, loss of bodily functions or death (like water-boarding, for example).

ŽIŽEK, Slavoj (Born 21 March 1949) – Philosopher, cultural critic and non-practicing psychoanalyst. Žižek is, among other things, a professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities at the University of London.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, Renata Avila, Stefan Bachmann, Diani Barretto, Susan Benn, William Binney, Alexa O’Brien, Barrett Brown, Thomas Drake, Ecuador, Daniel Ellsberg, Yuri Englert, Ethan, Joseph Farrell, Gavin McFadyen, Grace Fire, Kevin Gallagher, Ahmed Ghappour, Kevin Gosztola, Gott, Jeremy Hammond, Sarah Harrison, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Chris Kondek, Malakoff Kowalski, Thomas Laue, Chelsea Manning, Andy Müller-Maguhn, Nina Müller, Nadine Nelken, Juan Passarelli, John Pilger, Laura Poitras, Jesselyn Radack, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Michael Ratner, David and Daniel Richter, Jennifer Robinson, Sarah Saunders, Schauspiel Köln, Wiebke Schlüter, Carey Shenkman, Edward Snowden, Stella, Malte Sundermann, Iva and Mihovil Udovicic, Alexander Wewerka, Ben Wizner, Jerémié Zimmermann.

»It’s a type of reorganization or infection of humanity’s thought system, the way humanity talks to itself, the way a society thinks. It’s like everyone simultaneously is taking LSD.« Julian Assange

»No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who think they’re free.« Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ever since Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures, the might of the secret services and the helplessness of everyday citizens are there all around us for everyone to see. But who is taking up the fight against global surveillance and the erosion of democracy?

Theater director Angela Richter has conducted in-depth interviews with a number of well-known whistleblowers and internet activists – the »Supernerds«.

Conversations with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack, William Binney, Jeremy Hammond and Thomas Drake, an Essay by Barrett Brown and drawings by Daniel Richter.

In collaboration with   

Alexander Verlag Berlin

www.alexander-verlag.com