Excerpt: "Whether it's a hundred people or a million people, individuals can
build audiences to speak with directly. This is actually one of the ways
that you've seen new media actors, and actually malicious actors, exploit
what are perceived as new vulnerabilities in media control of the narrative,
for example Donald Trump."
Edward Snowden. (photo: Wired)
Edward Snowden: The Media Isn't Doing Its Job
By Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review
11 May 16
The Tow Center for Digital Journalisms Emily Bell spoke to Edward Snowden
over a secure channel about his experiences working with journalists and his
perspective on the shifting media world. This is an excerpt of that
conversation, conducted in December 2015. It will appear in a forthcoming
book: Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the
Surveillance State, which will be released by Columbia University Press in
2016.
Emily Bell: Can you tell us about your interactions with journalists and
the press?
Edward Snowden: One of the most challenging things about the changing nature
of the publics relationship to media and the governments relationship to
media is that media has never been stronger than it is now. At the same
time, the press is less willing to use that sort of power and influence
because of its increasing commercialization. There was this tradition that
the media culture we had inherited from early broadcasts was intended to be
a public service. Increasingly weve lost that, not simply in fact, but in
ideal, particularly due to the 24-hour news cycle.
We see this routinely even at organizations like The New York Times. The
Intercept recently published The Drone Papers, which was an extraordinary
act of public service on the part of a whistleblower within the government
to get the public information thats absolutely vital about things that we
should have known more than a decade ago. These are things that we really
need to know to be able to analyze and assess policies. But this was denied
to us, so we get one journalistic institution that breaks the story, they
manage to get the information out there. But the majorsspecifically The New
York Timesdont actually run the story, they ignore it completely. This was
so extraordinary that the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, had to get
involved to investigate why they suppressed such a newsworthy story. Its a
credit to the Times that they have a public editor, but its frightening
that theres such a clear need for one.
In the UK, when The Guardian was breaking the NSA story, we saw that if
there is a competitive role in the media environment, if theres money on
the line, reputation, potential awards, anything that has material value
that would benefit the competition, even if it would simultaneously benefit
the public, the institutions are becoming less willing to serve the public
to the detriment of themselves. This is typically exercised through the
editors. This is something that maybe always existed, but we dont remember
it as always existing. Culturally, we dont like to think of it as having
always existed. There are things that we need to know, things that are
valuable for us, but we are not allowed to know, because The Telegraph or
the Times or any other paper in London decides that because this is somebody
elses exclusive, were not going to report it. Instead, well try to
counter-narrative it. Well simply go to the government and ask them to
make any statement at all, and we will unquestioningly write it down and
publish it, because thats content thats exclusive to us. Regardless of the
fact that its much less valuable, much less substantial than actual
documented facts that we can base policy discussions on. Weve seemingly
entered a world where editors are making decisions about what stories to run
based on if itll give oxygen to a competitor, rather than if its news.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, because while I do interact with
media, Im an outsider. You know media. As somebody who has worked in these
cultures, do you see the same thing? Sort of the Fox News effect, where
facts matter less?
Bell: Its a fascinating question. When you look at Donald Trump, theres a
problem when you have a press which finds it important to report what has
happened, without a prism of some sort of evaluation on it. Thats the Trump
problem, right? He says thousands of Muslims were celebrating in the streets
of New Jersey after 9/11 and its demonstrably not true. Its not even a
quantification issue, its just not true. Yet, it dominates the news cycle,
and he dominates the TV, and you see nothing changing in the pollsor,
rather, him becoming more popular.
There are two things I think here, one of which is not new. I completely
agree with you about how the economic dynamics have actually produced, bad
journalism. One of the interesting things which I think is hopeful about
American journalism is that within the last 10 years theres been a break
between this relationship, which is the free market, which says you cant do
good journalism unless you make a profit, into intellectually understanding
that really good journalism not only sometimes wont make a profit, but is
almost never going to be anything other than unprofitable.
I think your acts and disclosures are really interesting in that its a
really expensive story to do, and it is not the kind of story that
advertisers want to stand next to. Actually people didnt want to pay to
read them. Post hoc theyll say, we like The Guardian; were going to
support their work. So I agree with you that theres been a disjuncture
between facts and how they are projected. I would like to think its going
to get better.
Youre on Twitter now. Youre becoming a much more rounded out public
persona, and lots of people have seen Citizenfour. Youve gone from being
this source persona, to being more actively engaged with Freedom of the
Press Foundation, and also having your own publishing stream through a
social media company. The press no longer has to be the aperture for you.
How do you see that?
Snowden: Today, you have people directly reaching an audience through tools
like Twitter, and I have about 1.7 million followers right now (this number
reflects the number of Twitter followers Snowden had in December 2015).
These are people, theoretically, that you can reach, that you can send a
message to. Whether its a hundred people or a million people, individuals
can build audiences to speak with directly. This is actually one of the ways
that youve seen new media actors, and actually malicious actors, exploit
what are perceived as new vulnerabilities in media control of the narrative,
for example Donald Trump.
At the same time these strategies still dont work [
] for changing views
and persuading people on a larger scope. Now this same thing applies to me.
The director of the FBI can make a false statement, or some kind of
misleading claim in congressional testimony. I can fact-check and I can say
this is inaccurate. Unless some entity with a larger audience, for example,
an established institution of journalism, sees that themselves, the value of
these sorts of statements is still fairly minimal. They are following these
new streams of information, then reporting out on those streams. This is why
I think we see such a large interplay and valuable interactions that are
emerging from these new media self-publication Twitter-type services and the
generation of stories and the journalist user base of Twitter.
If you look at the membership of Twitter in terms of the influence and
impact that people have, there are a lot of celebrities out there on
Twitter, but really theyre just trying to maintain an image, promote a
band, be topical, remind people that they exist. Theyre not typically
effecting any change, or having any kind of influence, other than the
directly commercial one.
Bell: Lets think about it in terms of your role in changing the world,
which is presenting these new facts. There was a section of the technology
press and the intelligence press who, at the time of the leaks, said we
already know this, except its hidden in plain sight. Yet, a year after you
made the disclosures, there was a broad shift of public perception about
surveillance technologies. That may recede, and probably post-Paris, it is
receding a little bit. Are you frustrated that there isnt more long-term
impact? Do you feel the world has not changed quickly enough?
Snowden: I actually dont feel that. Im really optimistic about how things
have gone, and Im staggered by how much more impact theres been as a
result of these revelations than I initially presumed. Im famous for
telling Alan Rusbridger that it would be a three-day story. Youre sort of
alluding to this idea that people dont really care, or that nothing has
really changed. Weve heard this in a number of different ways, but I think
it actually has changed in a substantial way.
Now when we talk about the technical press, or the national security press,
and you say, this is nothing new, we knew about this, a lot of this comes
down to prestige, to the same kind of signaling where they have to indicate
we have expertise, we knew this was going on. In many cases they actually
did not. The difference is, they knew the capabilities existed.
This is, I think, what underlies why the leaks had such an impact. Some
people say stories about the mass collection of internet records and
metadata were published in 2006. There was a warrantless wiretapping story
in The New York Times as well. Why didnt they have the same sort of
transformative impact? This is because theres a fundamental difference when
it comes down to the actionability of information between knowledge of
capability, the allegation that the capability could be used, and the fact
that it is being used. Now what happened in 2013 is we transformed the
public debate from allegation to fact. The distance between allegation and
fact, at times, makes all the difference in the world.
That, for me, is what defines the best kind of journalism. This is one of
the things that is really underappreciated about what happened in 2013. A
lot of people laud me as the sole actor, like Im this amazing figure who
did this. I personally see myself as having a quite minor role. I was the
mechanism of revelation for a very narrow topic of governments. Its not
really about surveillance, its about what the public understandshow much
control the public has over the programs and policies of its governments. If
we dont know what our government really does, if we dont know the powers
that authorities are claiming for themselves, or arrogating to themselves,
in secret, we cant really be said to be holding the leash of government at
all.
One of the things thats really missed is the fact that as valuable and
important as the reporting that came out of the primary archive of material
has been, theres an extraordinarily large, and also very valuable amount of
disclosure that was actually forced from the government, because they were
so back-footed by the aggressive nature of the reporting. There were stories
being reported that showed how they had abused these capabilities, how
intrusive they were, the fact that they had broken the law in many cases, or
had violated the Constitution.
When the government is shown in a most public way, particularly for a
president who campaigned on the idea of curtailing this sort of activity, to
have continued those policies, in many cases expanded them in ways contrary
to what the public would expect, they have to come up with some defense. So
in the first weeks, we got rhetorical defenses where they went, nobodys
listening to your phone calls. That wasnt really compelling. Then they
went, Its just metadata. Actually that worked for quite some time, even
though its not true. By adding complexity, they reduced participation. It
is still difficult for the average person in the street to understand that
metadata, in many cases, is actually more revealing and more dangerous than
the content of your phone calls. But stories kept coming. Then they went,
well alright, even if it is just metadata, its still unconstitutional
activity, so how do we justify it? Then they gowell they are lawful in this
context, or that context.
They suddenly needed to make a case for lawfulness, and that meant the
government had to disclose court orders that the journalists themselves did
not have access to, that I did not have access to, that no one in the NSA at
all had access to, because they were bounded in a completely different
agency, in the Department of Justice.
This, again, is where youre moving from suspicion, from allegation, to
factualizing things. Now of course, because these are political responses,
each of them was intentionally misleading. The government wants to show
itself in the best possible light. But even self-interested disclosures can
still be valuable, so long as theyre based on facts. Theyre filling in a
piece of the puzzle, which may provide the final string that another
journalist, working independently somewhere else, may need. It unlocks that
page of the book, fills in the page they didnt have, and that completes the
story. I think that is something that has not been appreciated, and it was
driven entirely by journalists doing follow-up.
Theres another idea that you mentioned: that Im more engaged with the
press than I was previously. This is very true. I quite openly in 2013 took
the position that this is not about me, I dont want to be the face of the
argument. I said that I dont want to correct the record of government
officials, even though I could, even though I knew they were making
misleading statements. Were seeing in the current electoral circus that
whatever someone says becomes the story, becomes the claim, becomes the
allegation. It gets into credibility politics where theyre going, oh, you
know, well, Donald Trump said it, it cant be true. All of the terrible
things he says put aside, theres always the possibility that he does say
something that is true. But, because its coming from him, it will be
analyzed and assessed in a different light. Now thats not to say that it
shouldnt be, but it was my opinion that there was no question that I was
going to be subject to a demonization campaign. They actually recorded me on
camera saying this before I revealed my identity. I predicted they were
going to charge me under the Espionage Act, I predicted they were going to
say I helped terrorists, blood on my hands, all of that stuff. It did come
to pass. This was not a staggering work of genius on my part, its just
common sense, this is how it always works in the case of prominent
whistleblowers. It was because of this that we needed other voices, we
needed the media to make the argument.
Because of the nature of the abuse of classification authorities in the
United States, there is no one thats ever held a security clearance whos
actually able to make these arguments. Modern media institutions prefer
never to use their institutional voice to factualize a claim in a reported
story, they want to point to somebody else. They want to say this expert
said, or this official said, and keep themselves out of it. But in my mind,
journalism must recognize that sometimes it takes the institutional weight
to assess the claims that are publicly available, and to make a
determination on that basis, then put the argument forth to whoever the
person under suspicion is at the time, for example, the government in this
case, and golook, all of the evidence says you were doing this. You say
thats not the case, but why should we believe you? Is there any reason that
we should not say this?
This is something that institutions today are loath to do because its
regarded as advocacy. They dont want to be in the position of having to
referee what is and is not fact. Instead they want to play these both sides
games where they say, instead well just print allegations, well print
claims from both sides, well print their demonstrations of evidence, but we
wont actually involve ourselves in it.
Because of this, I went the first six months without giving an interview. It
wasnt until December 2013 that I gave my first interview to Barton Gellman
of The Washington Post. In this intervening period my hope was that some
other individual would come forth on the political side, and would become
the face of this movement. But more directly I thought it would inspire some
reflection in the media institutions to think about what their role was. I
think they did a fairly good job, particularly for it being unprecedented,
particularly for it being a segment in which the press has been, at least in
the last 15 years, extremely reluctant to express any kind of skepticism
regarding government claims at all. If it involved the word terrorism,
these were facts that wouldnt be challenged. If the government said, look,
this is secret for a reason, this is classified for a reason, journalists
would leave it at that. Again, this isnt to beat up on The New York Times,
but when we look at the warrantless wiretapping story that was ready to be
published in October of an election year, that [election] was decided by the
smallest margin in a presidential election, at least in modern history. Its
hard to believe that had that story been published, it would not have
changed the course of that election.
Bell: Former Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson has said her paper
definitely made mistakes, I wish we had not withheld stories. What youre
saying certainly resonates with what I know and understand of the recent
history of the US press, which is that national security concerns post-9/11
really did alter the relationship of reporting, particularly with
administration and authority in this country. What we know about drone
programs comes from reporting, some of it comes from the story which The
Intercept got hold of, and Jeremy Scahills reporting on it, which has been
incredibly important. But a great deal of it has also come from the ground
level. The fact that we were aware at all that drones were blowing up
villages, killing civilians, crossing borders where they were not supposed
to be really comes from people who would report from the ground.
Something interesting has definitely happened in the last three years, which
makes me think about what you are telling us about how the NSA operates.
Were seeing a much closer relationship now between journalism and
technology and mass communication technology than weve ever seen before.
People are now completely reliant on Facebook. Some of that is a commercial
movement in the US, but you also have activists and journalists being
regularly tortured or killed in, say, Bangladesh, where its really
impossible to operate a free press, but they are using these tools. It is
almost like the American public media now is Facebook. I wonder how you
think about this? Its such a recent development.
Snowden: One of the biggest issues is that we have many more publishers
competing for a finite, shrinking amount of attention span thats available.
This is why we have the rise of these sort of hybrid publications, like a
BuzzFeed, that create just an enormous amount of trash and cruft. Theyre
doing AB testing and using scientific principles. Their content is
specifically engineered to be more attention getting, even though they have
no public value at all. They have no news value at all. Like heres 10
pictures of kittens that are so adorable. But then they develop a news line
within the institution, and the idea is that they can drive traffic with
this one line of stories, theoretically, and then get people to go over onto
the other side.
Someones going to exploit this; if its not going to be BuzzFeed, its
going to be somebody else. This isnt a criticism of any particular model,
but the idea here is that the first click, that first link is actually
consuming attention. The more we read about a certain thing, thats actually
reshaping our brains. Everything that we interact with, it has an impact on
us, it has an influence, it leaves memories, ideas, sort of memetic
expressions that we then carry around with us that shape what we look for in
the future, and that are directing our development.
Bell: Yes, well thats the coming singularity between the creation of
journalism and large-scale technology platforms, which are not intrinsically
journalistic. In other words, they dont have a primary purpose.
Snowden: They dont have a journalistic role, its a reportorial role.
Bell: Well, its a commercial role, right? So when you came to Glenn and The
Guardian, there wasnt a hesitation in knowing the primary role of the
organization is to get that story to the outside world as securely and
quickly as possible, avoiding prior restraint, protecting a source.
Is source protection even possible now? You were extremely prescient in
thinking theres no point in protecting yourself.
Snowden: I have an unfair advantage.
Bell: You do, but still, thats a big change from 20 years ago.
Snowden: This is something that we saw contemporary examples of in the
public record in 2013. It was the James Rosen case where we saw the
Department of Justice, and government more broadly, was abusing its powers
to demand blanket records of email and call data, and the AP case where
phone records for calls that were made from the bureaus of journalism were
seized.
That by itself is suddenly chilling, because the traditional work of
journalism, the traditional culture, where the journalist would just call
their contact and say, hey, lets talk, suddenly becomes incriminating. But
more seriously, if the individual in question, the government employee who
is working with a journalist to report some issue of public interest, if
this individual has gone so far to commit an act of journalism, suddenly
they can be discovered trivially if theyre not aware of this.
I didnt have that insight at the time I was trying to come forward because
I had no relationship with journalists. I had never talked to a journalist
in any substantive capacity. So, instead I simply thought about the
adversarial relationship that I had inherited from my work as an
intelligence officer, working for the CIA and the NSA. Everything is a
secret and youve got two different kinds of cover. Youve got cover for
status, which is: Youre overseas, youre living as a diplomat because you
have to explain why youre there. You cant just say, oh, yeah, I work for
the CIA. But you also have a different kind of cover which is whats called
cover for action. Where youre not going to live in the region for a long
time, you may just be in a building and you have to explain why youre
walking through there, you need some kind of pretext. This kind of
trade-craft unfortunately is becoming more necessary in the reportorial
process. Journalists need to know this, sources need to know this. At any
given time, if you were pulled over by a police officer and they want to
search your phone or something like that, you might need to explain the
presence of an application. This is particularly true if youre in a country
like Bangladesh. I have heard that theyre now looking for the presence of
VPN [virtual private network software] for avoiding censorship locks and
being able to access uncontrolled news networks as evidence of opposition,
allegiance, that could get you in real trouble in these areas of the world.
At the time of the leaks I was simply thinking, alright the governmentand
this isnt a single government nowwere actually talking about the Five
Eyes intelligence alliance [the United States, the United Kingdom, New
Zealand, Australia, Canada] forming a pan-continental super-state in this
context of sharing, theyre going to lose their minds over this. Some
institutions in, for example, the UK, can levy D notices, they can say,
look, you cant publish that, or you should not publish that. In the United
States its not actually certain that the government would not try to
exercise prior restraint in slightly different ways, or that they wouldnt
charge journalists as accomplices in some kind of criminality to interfere
with the reporting without actually going after the institutions themselves,
single out individuals. We have seen this in court documents before. This
was the James Rosen case, where the DOJ had named him as sort of an
accessorythey said he was a co-conspirator. So the idea I thought about
here was that we need institutions working beyond borders in multiple
jurisdictions simply to complicate it legally to the point that the
journalists could play games, legally and journalistically more effectively
and more quickly than the government could play legalistic games to
interfere with them.
Bell: Right, but thats kind of what happened with the reporting of the
story.
Snowden: And in ways that I didnt even predict, because who could imagine
the way a story like that would actually get out of hand and go even
further: Glenn Greenwald living in Brazil, writing for a US institution for
that branch, but headquartered in the UK, The Washington Post providing the
institutional clout and saying, look, this is a real story, these arent
just crazy leftists arguing about this, and Der Spiegel in Germany with
Laura [Poitras]. It simply represented a system that I did not believe could
be overcome before the story could be put out. By the time the government
could get their ducks in a row and try to interfere with it, that would
itself become the story.
Bell: Youre actually giving a sophisticated analysis of much of whats
happened to both reporting practice and media structures. As you say, you
had no prior interactions with journalists. I think one of the reasons the
press warmed to you was because you put faith in journalists, weirdly. You
went in thinking I think I can trust these people, not just with your life,
but with a huge responsibility. Then you spent an enormous amount of time,
particularly with Glenn, Laura, and Ewen [MacAskill] in those hotel rooms.
What was that reverse frisking process like as you were getting to know
them? My experience is as people get closer to the press, they often like it
less. Why would you trust journalists?
Snowden: This gets into the larger questionhow did you feel about
journalists, what was the process of becoming acquainted with them? Theres
both a political response and a practical response. Specifically about
Glenn, I believe very strongly that theres no more important quality for a
journalist than independence. Thats independence of perspective, and
particularly skepticism of claims. The more powerful the institution, the
more skeptical one should be. Theres an argument that was put forth by an
earlier journalist, I.F. Stone: All governments are run by liars and
nothing they say should be believed. In my experience, this is absolutely a
fact. Ive met with Daniel Ellsberg and spoken about this, and it comports
with his experience as well. He would be briefing the Secretary of Defense
on the airplane, and then when the Secretary of Defense would disembark
right down the eight steps of the plane and shake hands with the press, he
would say something that he knew was absolutely false and was completely
contrary to what they had just said in the meeting [inside the place]
because that was his role. That was his job, his duty, his responsibility as
a member of that institution.
Now Glenn Greenwald, if we think about him as an archetype, really
represents the purest form of that. I would argue that despite the failings
of any journalist in one way or another, if they have that independence of
perspective, they have the greatest capacity for reporting that a journalist
can attain. Ultimately, no matter how brilliant you are, no matter how
charismatic you are, no matter how perfect or absolute your sourcing is, or
your access, if you simply take the claims of institutions that have the
most privilege that they must protect, at face value, and youre willing to
sort of repeat them, all of those other things that are working in your
favor in the final calculus amount to nothing because youre missing the
fundamentals.
There was the broader question of what its like working with these
journalists and going through that process. There is the argument that I was
naïve. In fact, thats one of the most common criticisms about me todaythat
I am too naïve, that I have too much faith in the government, that I have
too much faith in the press. I dont see that as a weakness. I am naïve, but
I think that idealism is critical to achieving change, ultimately not of
policy, but of culture, right? Because we can change this or that law, we
can change this or that policy or program, but at the end of the day, its
the values of the people in these institutions that are producing these
policies or programs. Its the values of the people who are sitting at the
desk with the blank page in Microsoft Office, or whatever journalists are
using now.
Bell: I hope theyre not using Microsoft Office, but you never know.
Snowden: They have the blank page
Bell: They have the blank page, exactly.
Snowden: In their content management system, or whatever. How is that
individual going to approach this collection of facts in the next week, in
the next month, in the next year, in the next decade? What will the
professor in the journalism school say in their lecture that will impart
these values, again, sort of memetically into the next cohort of reporters?
If we do not win on that, we have lost comprehensively. More fundamentally,
people say, why did you trust the press, given their failures? Given the
fact that I was, in fact, quite famous for criticizing the press.
Bell: If they had done their job, you would be at home now.
Snowden: Yeah, I would still be living quite comfortably in Hawaii.
Bell: Which is not so bad, when you put it that way.
Snowden: People ask how could you do this, why would you do this? How could
you trust a journalist that you knew had no training at all in operational
security to keep your identity safe because if they screw up, youre going
to jail. The answer was that that was actually what I was expecting. I never
expected to make it out of Hawaii. I was going to try my best, but my
ultimate goal was simply to get this information back in the hands of the
public. I felt that the only way that could be done meaningfully was through
the press. If we cant have faith in the press, if we cant sort of take
that leap of faith and either be served well by them, or underserved and
have the press fail, weve already lost. You cannot have an open society
without open communication. Ultimately, the test of open communication is a
free press. If they cant look for information, if they cant contest the
governments control of information, and ultimately print informationnot
just about government, but also about corporate interests, that has a
deleterious impact on the preferences of power, on the prerogatives of
power. You may have something, but I would argue its not the traditional
American democracy that I believed in.
So the idea here was that I could take these risks because I already
expected to bear the costs. I expected the end of the road was a cliff. This
is actually illustrated quite well in Citizenfour because it shows that
there was absolutely no plan at all for the day after.
The planning to get to the point of working with the journalists, of
transmitting this information, of explaining, contextualizingit was
obsessively detailed, because it had to be. Beyond that, the risks were my
own. They werent for the journalists. They could do everything else. That
was by design as well, because if the journalists had done anything
shadyfor example, if I had stayed in place at the NSA as a source and they
had asked me for this document, and that document, it could have undermined
the independence, the credibility of the process, and actually brought risks
upon them that could have led to new constraints upon journalism.
Bell: So nothing you experienced in the room with the team, or what happened
after, made you question or reevaluate journalism?
Snowden: I didnt say that. Actually working more closely with the
journalists has radically reshaped my understanding of journalism, and that
continues through to today. I think you would agree that anybody whos
worked in the news industry, either directly or even peripherally, has seen
journalistsor, more directly, editorswho are terrified, who hold back a
story, who dont want to publish a detail, who want to wait for the lawyers,
who are concerned with liability.
You also have journalists who go out on their own and they publish details
which actually are damaging, directly to personal safety. There were details
published by at least one of the journalists that were discussing
communication methods that I was still actively using, that previously had
been secret. But the journalists didnt even forewarn me, so suddenly I had
to change all of my methods on the fly. Which worked out OK because I had
the capabilities to do that, but dangerous.
Bell: When did that happen?
Snowden: This was at the height of public interest, basically. The idea here
is that a journalist ultimately, and particularly a certain class of
journalist, they dont owe any allegiance to their source, right? They dont
write the story in line with what the sources desires, they dont go about
their publication schedule to benefit, or to detriment, in theory, the
source at all. There are strong arguments that thats the way it should be:
public knowledge of the truth is more important than the risks that
knowledge creates for a few. But at the same time, when a journalist is
reporting on something like a classified program implicating one of the
governments sources, you see an incredibly high standard of care applied to
make sure they cant be blamed if something goes wrong down the road after
publication. The journalists will go, well well hold back this detail from
that story reporting on classified documents, because if we name this
government official it might expose them to some harm, or it might get this
program shut down, or even if it might cause them to have to rearrange the
deck chairs in the operations in some far away country.
Thats just being careful, right? But ask yourselfshould journalists be
just as careful when the one facing the blowback of a particular detail is
their own source? In my experience, the answer does not seem to be as
obvious as you might expect.
Bell: Do you foresee a world where someone wont have to be a whistleblower
in order to reveal the kinds of documents that you revealed? What kinds of
internal mechanisms would that require on behalf of the government? What
would that look like in the future?
Snowden: Thats a really interesting philosophical question. It doesnt come
down to technical mechanisms, that comes down to culture. Weve seen in the
EU a number of reports from parliamentary bodies, from the Council of
Europe, that said we need to protect whistleblowers, in particular national
security whistleblowers. In the national context no country really wants to
pass a law that allows individuals rightly, or wrongly, to embarrass the
government. But can we provide an international framework for this? One
would argue, particularly when espionage laws are being used to prosecute
people, they already exist. Thats why espionage, for example, is considered
a political offense, because its just a political crime, as they say.
Thats a fairly weak defense, or fairly weak justification, for not
reforming whistleblower laws. Particularly when, throughout Western Europe
theyre going, yeah, we like this guy, he did a good thing. But if he shows
up on the doorstep were going to ship him back immediately, regardless of
whether its unlawful, just because the US is going to retaliate against us.
Its extraordinary that the top members of German government have said this
on the recordthat its realpolitik; its about power, rather than
principle.
Now how we can fix this? I think a lot of it comes down to culture, and we
need a press thats more willing and actually eager to criticize government
than they are today. Even though weve got a number of good institutions
that do that, or that want to do that, it needs a uniform culture. The only
counterargument the government has made against national security
whistleblowing, and many other things that embarrassed them in the past, is
that well, it could cause some risk, we could go dark, they could have blood
on their hands.
Why do they have different ground rules in the context of national security
journalism?
We see that not just in the United States, but in France, Germany, the UK,
in every Western country, and of course, in every more authoritarian country
by comparison they are embracing the idea of state secrets, of
classifications, or saying, you cant know this, you cant know that.
We call ourselves private citizens, and we refer to elected representatives
as public officials, because were supposed to know everything about them
and their activities. At the same time, theyre supposed to know nothing
about us, because they wield all the power, and we hold all of the
vulnerability. Yet increasingly, thats becoming inverted, where they are
the private officials, and we are the public citizens. Were increasingly
monitored and tracked and reported, quantified and known and influenced, at
the same time that theyre getting themselves off and becoming less
reachable and also less accountable.
Bell: But Ed, when you talk about this in those terms, you make it sound as
though you see this as a progression. Certainly there was a sharp increase,
as you demonstrated, in overreach of oversight post-9/11. Is it a continuum?
It felt from the outside as though America, post-9/11, for understandable
reasons, it was almost like a sort of national psychosis. If you grew up in
Europe, there were regular terrorist acts in almost every country after the
Second World War, though not on the same scale, until there was a brief,
five-year period of respite, weirdly running up to about 2001. Then the
nature of the terrorism changed. To some extent, that narrative is
predictable. You talk about it as an ever increasing problem. With the
Freedom Act in 2015, the press identified this as a significant moment where
the temperature had changed. You dont sound like you really think that. You
sound as though you think that this public/private secrecy, spying, is an
increasing continuum. So how does that change? Particularly in the current
political climate where post-Paris and other terrorist attacks weve already
seen arguments for breaking encryption.
Snowden: I dont think they are actually contradictory views to hold. I
think what were talking about are the natural inclinations of power and
vice, what we can do to restrain it, to maintain a free society. So when we
think about where things have gone in the USA Freedom Act, and when we look
back at the 1970s, it was even worse in terms of the level of comfort that
the government had that it could engage in abuses and get away with them.
One of the most important legacies of 2013 is not anything that was
necessarily published, but it was the impact of the publication on the
culture of government. It was a confirmation coming quite quickly in the
wake of the WikiLeaks stories, which were equally important in this regard.
That said, secrecy will not hold forever. If you authorize a policy that is
clearly contrary to law, you will eventually have to explain that.
The question is, can you keep it under wraps long enough to get out of the
administration, and hopefully for it to be out of the egregious sort of
thing where youll lose an election as a result. We see the delta between
the periods of time that successive administrations can keep a secret is
actually diminishingthe secrets are becoming public at an accelerated pace.
This is a beneficial thing. This is the same in the context of terrorism.
There is an interesting ideawhen you were saying its sort of weird that
the US has what you described as a collective psychosis in the wake of 9/11
given that European countries have been facing terrorist attacks routinely.
The US had actually been facing the same thing, and actually one would
argue, experienced similarly high-impact attacks, for example, the Oklahoma
City bombing, where a Federal building was destroyed by a single individual
or one actor.
Bell: What do you think about the relationship between governments asking
Facebook and other communications platforms to help fight ISIS?
Snowden: Should we basically deputize companies to become the policy
enforcers of the world? When you put it in that context suddenly it becomes
clear that this is not really a good idea, particularly because terrorism
does not have a strong definition thats internationally recognized. If
Facebook says, we will take down any post from anybody who the government
says is a terrorist, as long as it comes from this government, suddenly they
have to do that for the other government. The Chinese allegations of who is
and who is not a terrorist are going to look radically different than what
the FBIs are going to be. But if the companies try to be selective about
them, say, well, were only going to do this for one government, they
immediately lose access to the markets of the other ones. So that doesnt
work, and thats not a position companies want to be in.
However, even if they could do this, there are already policies in place for
them to do that. If Facebook gets a notification that says this is a
terrorist thing, they take it down. Its not like this is a particularly
difficult or burdensome review when it comes to violence.
The distinction is the government is trying to say, now we want them to
start cracking down on radical speech. Should private companies be who we as
society are reliant upon to bound the limits of public conversations? And
this goes beyond borders now. I think thats an extraordinarily dangerous
precedent to be embracing, and, in turn, irresponsible for American leaders
to be championing.
The real solutions here are much more likely to be in terms of entirely new
institutions that bound the way law enforcement works, moving us away from
the point of military conflict, secret conflict, and into simply public
policing.
Theres no reason why we could not have an international counter-terrorism
force that actually has universal jurisdiction. I mean universal in terms of
fact, as opposed to actual law.
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Edward Snowden. (photo: Wired)
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Edward Snowden: The Media Isn't Doing Its Job
By Emily Bell, Columbia Journalism Review
11 May 16
The Tow Center for Digital Journalisms Emily Bell spoke to Edward Snowden
over a secure channel about his experiences working with journalists and his
perspective on the shifting media world. This is an excerpt of that
conversation, conducted in December 2015. It will appear in a forthcoming
book: Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the
Surveillance State, which will be released by Columbia University Press in
2016.
mily Bell: Can you tell us about your interactions with journalists and the
press?
Edward Snowden: One of the most challenging things about the changing nature
of the publics relationship to media and the governments relationship to
media is that media has never been stronger than it is now. At the same
time, the press is less willing to use that sort of power and influence
because of its increasing commercialization. There was this tradition that
the media culture we had inherited from early broadcasts was intended to be
a public service. Increasingly weve lost that, not simply in fact, but in
ideal, particularly due to the 24-hour news cycle.
We see this routinely even at organizations like The New York Times. The
Intercept recently published The Drone Papers, which was an extraordinary
act of public service on the part of a whistleblower within the government
to get the public information thats absolutely vital about things that we
should have known more than a decade ago. These are things that we really
need to know to be able to analyze and assess policies. But this was denied
to us, so we get one journalistic institution that breaks the story, they
manage to get the information out there. But the majorsspecifically The New
York Timesdont actually run the story, they ignore it completely. This was
so extraordinary that the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, had to get
involved to investigate why they suppressed such a newsworthy story. Its a
credit to the Times that they have a public editor, but its frightening
that theres such a clear need for one.
In the UK, when The Guardian was breaking the NSA story, we saw that if
there is a competitive role in the media environment, if theres money on
the line, reputation, potential awards, anything that has material value
that would benefit the competition, even if it would simultaneously benefit
the public, the institutions are becoming less willing to serve the public
to the detriment of themselves. This is typically exercised through the
editors. This is something that maybe always existed, but we dont remember
it as always existing. Culturally, we dont like to think of it as having
always existed. There are things that we need to know, things that are
valuable for us, but we are not allowed to know, because The Telegraph or
the Times or any other paper in London decides that because this is somebody
elses exclusive, were not going to report it. Instead, well try to
counter-narrative it. Well simply go to the government and ask them to
make any statement at all, and we will unquestioningly write it down and
publish it, because thats content thats exclusive to us. Regardless of the
fact that its much less valuable, much less substantial than actual
documented facts that we can base policy discussions on. Weve seemingly
entered a world where editors are making decisions about what stories to run
based on if itll give oxygen to a competitor, rather than if its news.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, because while I do interact with
media, Im an outsider. You know media. As somebody who has worked in these
cultures, do you see the same thing? Sort of the Fox News effect, where
facts matter less?
Bell: Its a fascinating question. When you look at Donald Trump, theres a
problem when you have a press which finds it important to report what has
happened, without a prism of some sort of evaluation on it. Thats the Trump
problem, right? He says thousands of Muslims were celebrating in the streets
of New Jersey after 9/11 and its demonstrably not true. Its not even a
quantification issue, its just not true. Yet, it dominates the news cycle,
and he dominates the TV, and you see nothing changing in the pollsor,
rather, him becoming more popular.
There are two things I think here, one of which is not new. I completely
agree with you about how the economic dynamics have actually produced, bad
journalism. One of the interesting things which I think is hopeful about
American journalism is that within the last 10 years theres been a break
between this relationship, which is the free market, which says you cant do
good journalism unless you make a profit, into intellectually understanding
that really good journalism not only sometimes wont make a profit, but is
almost never going to be anything other than unprofitable.
I think your acts and disclosures are really interesting in that its a
really expensive story to do, and it is not the kind of story that
advertisers want to stand next to. Actually people didnt want to pay to
read them. Post hoc theyll say, we like The Guardian; were going to
support their work. So I agree with you that theres been a disjuncture
between facts and how they are projected. I would like to think its going
to get better.
Youre on Twitter now. Youre becoming a much more rounded out public
persona, and lots of people have seen Citizenfour. Youve gone from being
this source persona, to being more actively engaged with Freedom of the
Press Foundation, and also having your own publishing stream through a
social media company. The press no longer has to be the aperture for you.
How do you see that?
Snowden: Today, you have people directly reaching an audience through tools
like Twitter, and I have about 1.7 million followers right now (this number
reflects the number of Twitter followers Snowden had in December 2015).
These are people, theoretically, that you can reach, that you can send a
message to. Whether its a hundred people or a million people, individuals
can build audiences to speak with directly. This is actually one of the ways
that youve seen new media actors, and actually malicious actors, exploit
what are perceived as new vulnerabilities in media control of the narrative,
for example Donald Trump.
At the same time these strategies still dont work [
] for changing views
and persuading people on a larger scope. Now this same thing applies to me.
The director of the FBI can make a false statement, or some kind of
misleading claim in congressional testimony. I can fact-check and I can say
this is inaccurate. Unless some entity with a larger audience, for example,
an established institution of journalism, sees that themselves, the value of
these sorts of statements is still fairly minimal. They are following these
new streams of information, then reporting out on those streams. This is why
I think we see such a large interplay and valuable interactions that are
emerging from these new media self-publication Twitter-type services and the
generation of stories and the journalist user base of Twitter.
If you look at the membership of Twitter in terms of the influence and
impact that people have, there are a lot of celebrities out there on
Twitter, but really theyre just trying to maintain an image, promote a
band, be topical, remind people that they exist. Theyre not typically
effecting any change, or having any kind of influence, other than the
directly commercial one.
Bell: Lets think about it in terms of your role in changing the world,
which is presenting these new facts. There was a section of the technology
press and the intelligence press who, at the time of the leaks, said we
already know this, except its hidden in plain sight. Yet, a year after you
made the disclosures, there was a broad shift of public perception about
surveillance technologies. That may recede, and probably post-Paris, it is
receding a little bit. Are you frustrated that there isnt more long-term
impact? Do you feel the world has not changed quickly enough?
Snowden: I actually dont feel that. Im really optimistic about how things
have gone, and Im staggered by how much more impact theres been as a
result of these revelations than I initially presumed. Im famous for
telling Alan Rusbridger that it would be a three-day story. Youre sort of
alluding to this idea that people dont really care, or that nothing has
really changed. Weve heard this in a number of different ways, but I think
it actually has changed in a substantial way.
Now when we talk about the technical press, or the national security press,
and you say, this is nothing new, we knew about this, a lot of this comes
down to prestige, to the same kind of signaling where they have to indicate
we have expertise, we knew this was going on. In many cases they actually
did not. The difference is, they knew the capabilities existed.
This is, I think, what underlies why the leaks had such an impact. Some
people say stories about the mass collection of internet records and
metadata were published in 2006. There was a warrantless wiretapping story
in The New York Times as well. Why didnt they have the same sort of
transformative impact? This is because theres a fundamental difference when
it comes down to the actionability of information between knowledge of
capability, the allegation that the capability could be used, and the fact
that it is being used. Now what happened in 2013 is we transformed the
public debate from allegation to fact. The distance between allegation and
fact, at times, makes all the difference in the world.
That, for me, is what defines the best kind of journalism. This is one of
the things that is really underappreciated about what happened in 2013. A
lot of people laud me as the sole actor, like Im this amazing figure who
did this. I personally see myself as having a quite minor role. I was the
mechanism of revelation for a very narrow topic of governments. Its not
really about surveillance, its about what the public understandshow much
control the public has over the programs and policies of its governments. If
we dont know what our government really does, if we dont know the powers
that authorities are claiming for themselves, or arrogating to themselves,
in secret, we cant really be said to be holding the leash of government at
all.
One of the things thats really missed is the fact that as valuable and
important as the reporting that came out of the primary archive of material
has been, theres an extraordinarily large, and also very valuable amount of
disclosure that was actually forced from the government, because they were
so back-footed by the aggressive nature of the reporting. There were stories
being reported that showed how they had abused these capabilities, how
intrusive they were, the fact that they had broken the law in many cases, or
had violated the Constitution.
When the government is shown in a most public way, particularly for a
president who campaigned on the idea of curtailing this sort of activity, to
have continued those policies, in many cases expanded them in ways contrary
to what the public would expect, they have to come up with some defense. So
in the first weeks, we got rhetorical defenses where they went, nobodys
listening to your phone calls. That wasnt really compelling. Then they
went, Its just metadata. Actually that worked for quite some time, even
though its not true. By adding complexity, they reduced participation. It
is still difficult for the average person in the street to understand that
metadata, in many cases, is actually more revealing and more dangerous than
the content of your phone calls. But stories kept coming. Then they went,
well alright, even if it is just metadata, its still unconstitutional
activity, so how do we justify it? Then they gowell they are lawful in this
context, or that context.
They suddenly needed to make a case for lawfulness, and that meant the
government had to disclose court orders that the journalists themselves did
not have access to, that I did not have access to, that no one in the NSA at
all had access to, because they were bounded in a completely different
agency, in the Department of Justice.
This, again, is where youre moving from suspicion, from allegation, to
factualizing things. Now of course, because these are political responses,
each of them was intentionally misleading. The government wants to show
itself in the best possible light. But even self-interested disclosures can
still be valuable, so long as theyre based on facts. Theyre filling in a
piece of the puzzle, which may provide the final string that another
journalist, working independently somewhere else, may need. It unlocks that
page of the book, fills in the page they didnt have, and that completes the
story. I think that is something that has not been appreciated, and it was
driven entirely by journalists doing follow-up.
Theres another idea that you mentioned: that Im more engaged with the
press than I was previously. This is very true. I quite openly in 2013 took
the position that this is not about me, I dont want to be the face of the
argument. I said that I dont want to correct the record of government
officials, even though I could, even though I knew they were making
misleading statements. Were seeing in the current electoral circus that
whatever someone says becomes the story, becomes the claim, becomes the
allegation. It gets into credibility politics where theyre going, oh, you
know, well, Donald Trump said it, it cant be true. All of the terrible
things he says put aside, theres always the possibility that he does say
something that is true. But, because its coming from him, it will be
analyzed and assessed in a different light. Now thats not to say that it
shouldnt be, but it was my opinion that there was no question that I was
going to be subject to a demonization campaign. They actually recorded me on
camera saying this before I revealed my identity. I predicted they were
going to charge me under the Espionage Act, I predicted they were going to
say I helped terrorists, blood on my hands, all of that stuff. It did come
to pass. This was not a staggering work of genius on my part, its just
common sense, this is how it always works in the case of prominent
whistleblowers. It was because of this that we needed other voices, we
needed the media to make the argument.
Because of the nature of the abuse of classification authorities in the
United States, there is no one thats ever held a security clearance whos
actually able to make these arguments. Modern media institutions prefer
never to use their institutional voice to factualize a claim in a reported
story, they want to point to somebody else. They want to say this expert
said, or this official said, and keep themselves out of it. But in my mind,
journalism must recognize that sometimes it takes the institutional weight
to assess the claims that are publicly available, and to make a
determination on that basis, then put the argument forth to whoever the
person under suspicion is at the time, for example, the government in this
case, and golook, all of the evidence says you were doing this. You say
thats not the case, but why should we believe you? Is there any reason that
we should not say this?
This is something that institutions today are loath to do because its
regarded as advocacy. They dont want to be in the position of having to
referee what is and is not fact. Instead they want to play these both sides
games where they say, instead well just print allegations, well print
claims from both sides, well print their demonstrations of evidence, but we
wont actually involve ourselves in it.
Because of this, I went the first six months without giving an interview. It
wasnt until December 2013 that I gave my first interview to Barton Gellman
of The Washington Post. In this intervening period my hope was that some
other individual would come forth on the political side, and would become
the face of this movement. But more directly I thought it would inspire some
reflection in the media institutions to think about what their role was. I
think they did a fairly good job, particularly for it being unprecedented,
particularly for it being a segment in which the press has been, at least in
the last 15 years, extremely reluctant to express any kind of skepticism
regarding government claims at all. If it involved the word terrorism,
these were facts that wouldnt be challenged. If the government said, look,
this is secret for a reason, this is classified for a reason, journalists
would leave it at that. Again, this isnt to beat up on The New York Times,
but when we look at the warrantless wiretapping story that was ready to be
published in October of an election year, that [election] was decided by the
smallest margin in a presidential election, at least in modern history. Its
hard to believe that had that story been published, it would not have
changed the course of that election.
Bell: Former Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson has said her paper
definitely made mistakes, I wish we had not withheld stories. What youre
saying certainly resonates with what I know and understand of the recent
history of the US press, which is that national security concerns post-9/11
really did alter the relationship of reporting, particularly with
administration and authority in this country. What we know about drone
programs comes from reporting, some of it comes from the story which The
Intercept got hold of, and Jeremy Scahills reporting on it, which has been
incredibly important. But a great deal of it has also come from the ground
level. The fact that we were aware at all that drones were blowing up
villages, killing civilians, crossing borders where they were not supposed
to be really comes from people who would report from the ground.
Something interesting has definitely happened in the last three years, which
makes me think about what you are telling us about how the NSA operates.
Were seeing a much closer relationship now between journalism and
technology and mass communication technology than weve ever seen before.
People are now completely reliant on Facebook. Some of that is a commercial
movement in the US, but you also have activists and journalists being
regularly tortured or killed in, say, Bangladesh, where its really
impossible to operate a free press, but they are using these tools. It is
almost like the American public media now is Facebook. I wonder how you
think about this? Its such a recent development.
Snowden: One of the biggest issues is that we have many more publishers
competing for a finite, shrinking amount of attention span thats available.
This is why we have the rise of these sort of hybrid publications, like a
BuzzFeed, that create just an enormous amount of trash and cruft. Theyre
doing AB testing and using scientific principles. Their content is
specifically engineered to be more attention getting, even though they have
no public value at all. They have no news value at all. Like heres 10
pictures of kittens that are so adorable. But then they develop a news line
within the institution, and the idea is that they can drive traffic with
this one line of stories, theoretically, and then get people to go over onto
the other side.
Someones going to exploit this; if its not going to be BuzzFeed, its
going to be somebody else. This isnt a criticism of any particular model,
but the idea here is that the first click, that first link is actually
consuming attention. The more we read about a certain thing, thats actually
reshaping our brains. Everything that we interact with, it has an impact on
us, it has an influence, it leaves memories, ideas, sort of memetic
expressions that we then carry around with us that shape what we look for in
the future, and that are directing our development.
Bell: Yes, well thats the coming singularity between the creation of
journalism and large-scale technology platforms, which are not intrinsically
journalistic. In other words, they dont have a primary purpose.
Snowden: They dont have a journalistic role, its a reportorial role.
Bell: Well, its a commercial role, right? So when you came to Glenn and The
Guardian, there wasnt a hesitation in knowing the primary role of the
organization is to get that story to the outside world as securely and
quickly as possible, avoiding prior restraint, protecting a source.
Is source protection even possible now? You were extremely prescient in
thinking theres no point in protecting yourself.
Snowden: I have an unfair advantage.
Bell: You do, but still, thats a big change from 20 years ago.
Snowden: This is something that we saw contemporary examples of in the
public record in 2013. It was the James Rosen case where we saw the
Department of Justice, and government more broadly, was abusing its powers
to demand blanket records of email and call data, and the AP case where
phone records for calls that were made from the bureaus of journalism were
seized.
That by itself is suddenly chilling, because the traditional work of
journalism, the traditional culture, where the journalist would just call
their contact and say, hey, lets talk, suddenly becomes incriminating. But
more seriously, if the individual in question, the government employee who
is working with a journalist to report some issue of public interest, if
this individual has gone so far to commit an act of journalism, suddenly
they can be discovered trivially if theyre not aware of this.
I didnt have that insight at the time I was trying to come forward because
I had no relationship with journalists. I had never talked to a journalist
in any substantive capacity. So, instead I simply thought about the
adversarial relationship that I had inherited from my work as an
intelligence officer, working for the CIA and the NSA. Everything is a
secret and youve got two different kinds of cover. Youve got cover for
status, which is: Youre overseas, youre living as a diplomat because you
have to explain why youre there. You cant just say, oh, yeah, I work for
the CIA. But you also have a different kind of cover which is whats called
cover for action. Where youre not going to live in the region for a long
time, you may just be in a building and you have to explain why youre
walking through there, you need some kind of pretext. This kind of
trade-craft unfortunately is becoming more necessary in the reportorial
process. Journalists need to know this, sources need to know this. At any
given time, if you were pulled over by a police officer and they want to
search your phone or something like that, you might need to explain the
presence of an application. This is particularly true if youre in a country
like Bangladesh. I have heard that theyre now looking for the presence of
VPN [virtual private network software] for avoiding censorship locks and
being able to access uncontrolled news networks as evidence of opposition,
allegiance, that could get you in real trouble in these areas of the world.
At the time of the leaks I was simply thinking, alright the governmentand
this isnt a single government nowwere actually talking about the Five
Eyes intelligence alliance [the United States, the United Kingdom, New
Zealand, Australia, Canada] forming a pan-continental super-state in this
context of sharing, theyre going to lose their minds over this. Some
institutions in, for example, the UK, can levy D notices, they can say,
look, you cant publish that, or you should not publish that. In the United
States its not actually certain that the government would not try to
exercise prior restraint in slightly different ways, or that they wouldnt
charge journalists as accomplices in some kind of criminality to interfere
with the reporting without actually going after the institutions themselves,
single out individuals. We have seen this in court documents before. This
was the James Rosen case, where the DOJ had named him as sort of an
accessorythey said he was a co-conspirator. So the idea I thought about
here was that we need institutions working beyond borders in multiple
jurisdictions simply to complicate it legally to the point that the
journalists could play games, legally and journalistically more effectively
and more quickly than the government could play legalistic games to
interfere with them.
Bell: Right, but thats kind of what happened with the reporting of the
story.
Snowden: And in ways that I didnt even predict, because who could imagine
the way a story like that would actually get out of hand and go even
further: Glenn Greenwald living in Brazil, writing for a US institution for
that branch, but headquartered in the UK, The Washington Post providing the
institutional clout and saying, look, this is a real story, these arent
just crazy leftists arguing about this, and Der Spiegel in Germany with
Laura [Poitras]. It simply represented a system that I did not believe could
be overcome before the story could be put out. By the time the government
could get their ducks in a row and try to interfere with it, that would
itself become the story.
Bell: Youre actually giving a sophisticated analysis of much of whats
happened to both reporting practice and media structures. As you say, you
had no prior interactions with journalists. I think one of the reasons the
press warmed to you was because you put faith in journalists, weirdly. You
went in thinking I think I can trust these people, not just with your life,
but with a huge responsibility. Then you spent an enormous amount of time,
particularly with Glenn, Laura, and Ewen [MacAskill] in those hotel rooms.
What was that reverse frisking process like as you were getting to know
them? My experience is as people get closer to the press, they often like it
less. Why would you trust journalists?
Snowden: This gets into the larger questionhow did you feel about
journalists, what was the process of becoming acquainted with them? Theres
both a political response and a practical response. Specifically about
Glenn, I believe very strongly that theres no more important quality for a
journalist than independence. Thats independence of perspective, and
particularly skepticism of claims. The more powerful the institution, the
more skeptical one should be. Theres an argument that was put forth by an
earlier journalist, I.F. Stone: All governments are run by liars and
nothing they say should be believed. In my experience, this is absolutely a
fact. Ive met with Daniel Ellsberg and spoken about this, and it comports
with his experience as well. He would be briefing the Secretary of Defense
on the airplane, and then when the Secretary of Defense would disembark
right down the eight steps of the plane and shake hands with the press, he
would say something that he knew was absolutely false and was completely
contrary to what they had just said in the meeting [inside the place]
because that was his role. That was his job, his duty, his responsibility as
a member of that institution.
Now Glenn Greenwald, if we think about him as an archetype, really
represents the purest form of that. I would argue that despite the failings
of any journalist in one way or another, if they have that independence of
perspective, they have the greatest capacity for reporting that a journalist
can attain. Ultimately, no matter how brilliant you are, no matter how
charismatic you are, no matter how perfect or absolute your sourcing is, or
your access, if you simply take the claims of institutions that have the
most privilege that they must protect, at face value, and youre willing to
sort of repeat them, all of those other things that are working in your
favor in the final calculus amount to nothing because youre missing the
fundamentals.
There was the broader question of what its like working with these
journalists and going through that process. There is the argument that I was
naïve. In fact, thats one of the most common criticisms about me todaythat
I am too naïve, that I have too much faith in the government, that I have
too much faith in the press. I dont see that as a weakness. I am naïve, but
I think that idealism is critical to achieving change, ultimately not of
policy, but of culture, right? Because we can change this or that law, we
can change this or that policy or program, but at the end of the day, its
the values of the people in these institutions that are producing these
policies or programs. Its the values of the people who are sitting at the
desk with the blank page in Microsoft Office, or whatever journalists are
using now.
Bell: I hope theyre not using Microsoft Office, but you never know.
Snowden: They have the blank page
Bell: They have the blank page, exactly.
Snowden: In their content management system, or whatever. How is that
individual going to approach this collection of facts in the next week, in
the next month, in the next year, in the next decade? What will the
professor in the journalism school say in their lecture that will impart
these values, again, sort of memetically into the next cohort of reporters?
If we do not win on that, we have lost comprehensively. More fundamentally,
people say, why did you trust the press, given their failures? Given the
fact that I was, in fact, quite famous for criticizing the press.
Bell: If they had done their job, you would be at home now.
Snowden: Yeah, I would still be living quite comfortably in Hawaii.
Bell: Which is not so bad, when you put it that way.
Snowden: People ask how could you do this, why would you do this? How could
you trust a journalist that you knew had no training at all in operational
security to keep your identity safe because if they screw up, youre going
to jail. The answer was that that was actually what I was expecting. I never
expected to make it out of Hawaii. I was going to try my best, but my
ultimate goal was simply to get this information back in the hands of the
public. I felt that the only way that could be done meaningfully was through
the press. If we cant have faith in the press, if we cant sort of take
that leap of faith and either be served well by them, or underserved and
have the press fail, weve already lost. You cannot have an open society
without open communication. Ultimately, the test of open communication is a
free press. If they cant look for information, if they cant contest the
governments control of information, and ultimately print informationnot
just about government, but also about corporate interests, that has a
deleterious impact on the preferences of power, on the prerogatives of
power. You may have something, but I would argue its not the traditional
American democracy that I believed in.
So the idea here was that I could take these risks because I already
expected to bear the costs. I expected the end of the road was a cliff. This
is actually illustrated quite well in Citizenfour because it shows that
there was absolutely no plan at all for the day after.
The planning to get to the point of working with the journalists, of
transmitting this information, of explaining, contextualizingit was
obsessively detailed, because it had to be. Beyond that, the risks were my
own. They werent for the journalists. They could do everything else. That
was by design as well, because if the journalists had done anything
shadyfor example, if I had stayed in place at the NSA as a source and they
had asked me for this document, and that document, it could have undermined
the independence, the credibility of the process, and actually brought risks
upon them that could have led to new constraints upon journalism.
Bell: So nothing you experienced in the room with the team, or what happened
after, made you question or reevaluate journalism?
Snowden: I didnt say that. Actually working more closely with the
journalists has radically reshaped my understanding of journalism, and that
continues through to today. I think you would agree that anybody whos
worked in the news industry, either directly or even peripherally, has seen
journalistsor, more directly, editorswho are terrified, who hold back a
story, who dont want to publish a detail, who want to wait for the lawyers,
who are concerned with liability.
You also have journalists who go out on their own and they publish details
which actually are damaging, directly to personal safety. There were details
published by at least one of the journalists that were discussing
communication methods that I was still actively using, that previously had
been secret. But the journalists didnt even forewarn me, so suddenly I had
to change all of my methods on the fly. Which worked out OK because I had
the capabilities to do that, but dangerous.
Bell: When did that happen?
Snowden: This was at the height of public interest, basically. The idea here
is that a journalist ultimately, and particularly a certain class of
journalist, they dont owe any allegiance to their source, right? They dont
write the story in line with what the sources desires, they dont go about
their publication schedule to benefit, or to detriment, in theory, the
source at all. There are strong arguments that thats the way it should be:
public knowledge of the truth is more important than the risks that
knowledge creates for a few. But at the same time, when a journalist is
reporting on something like a classified program implicating one of the
governments sources, you see an incredibly high standard of care applied to
make sure they cant be blamed if something goes wrong down the road after
publication. The journalists will go, well well hold back this detail from
that story reporting on classified documents, because if we name this
government official it might expose them to some harm, or it might get this
program shut down, or even if it might cause them to have to rearrange the
deck chairs in the operations in some far away country.
Thats just being careful, right? But ask yourselfshould journalists be
just as careful when the one facing the blowback of a particular detail is
their own source? In my experience, the answer does not seem to be as
obvious as you might expect.
Bell: Do you foresee a world where someone wont have to be a whistleblower
in order to reveal the kinds of documents that you revealed? What kinds of
internal mechanisms would that require on behalf of the government? What
would that look like in the future?
Snowden: Thats a really interesting philosophical question. It doesnt come
down to technical mechanisms, that comes down to culture. Weve seen in the
EU a number of reports from parliamentary bodies, from the Council of
Europe, that said we need to protect whistleblowers, in particular national
security whistleblowers. In the national context no country really wants to
pass a law that allows individuals rightly, or wrongly, to embarrass the
government. But can we provide an international framework for this? One
would argue, particularly when espionage laws are being used to prosecute
people, they already exist. Thats why espionage, for example, is considered
a political offense, because its just a political crime, as they say.
Thats a fairly weak defense, or fairly weak justification, for not
reforming whistleblower laws. Particularly when, throughout Western Europe
theyre going, yeah, we like this guy, he did a good thing. But if he shows
up on the doorstep were going to ship him back immediately, regardless of
whether its unlawful, just because the US is going to retaliate against us.
Its extraordinary that the top members of German government have said this
on the recordthat its realpolitik; its about power, rather than
principle.
Now how we can fix this? I think a lot of it comes down to culture, and we
need a press thats more willing and actually eager to criticize government
than they are today. Even though weve got a number of good institutions
that do that, or that want to do that, it needs a uniform culture. The only
counterargument the government has made against national security
whistleblowing, and many other things that embarrassed them in the past, is
that well, it could cause some risk, we could go dark, they could have blood
on their hands.
Why do they have different ground rules in the context of national security
journalism?
We see that not just in the United States, but in France, Germany, the UK,
in every Western country, and of course, in every more authoritarian country
by comparison they are embracing the idea of state secrets, of
classifications, or saying, you cant know this, you cant know that.
We call ourselves private citizens, and we refer to elected representatives
as public officials, because were supposed to know everything about them
and their activities. At the same time, theyre supposed to know nothing
about us, because they wield all the power, and we hold all of the
vulnerability. Yet increasingly, thats becoming inverted, where they are
the private officials, and we are the public citizens. Were increasingly
monitored and tracked and reported, quantified and known and influenced, at
the same time that theyre getting themselves off and becoming less
reachable and also less accountable.
Bell: But Ed, when you talk about this in those terms, you make it sound as
though you see this as a progression. Certainly there was a sharp increase,
as you demonstrated, in overreach of oversight post-9/11. Is it a continuum?
It felt from the outside as though America, post-9/11, for understandable
reasons, it was almost like a sort of national psychosis. If you grew up in
Europe, there were regular terrorist acts in almost every country after the
Second World War, though not on the same scale, until there was a brief,
five-year period of respite, weirdly running up to about 2001. Then the
nature of the terrorism changed. To some extent, that narrative is
predictable. You talk about it as an ever increasing problem. With the
Freedom Act in 2015, the press identified this as a significant moment where
the temperature had changed. You dont sound like you really think that. You
sound as though you think that this public/private secrecy, spying, is an
increasing continuum. So how does that change? Particularly in the current
political climate where post-Paris and other terrorist attacks weve already
seen arguments for breaking encryption.
Snowden: I dont think they are actually contradictory views to hold. I
think what were talking about are the natural inclinations of power and
vice, what we can do to restrain it, to maintain a free society. So when we
think about where things have gone in the USA Freedom Act, and when we look
back at the 1970s, it was even worse in terms of the level of comfort that
the government had that it could engage in abuses and get away with them.
One of the most important legacies of 2013 is not anything that was
necessarily published, but it was the impact of the publication on the
culture of government. It was a confirmation coming quite quickly in the
wake of the WikiLeaks stories, which were equally important in this regard.
That said, secrecy will not hold forever. If you authorize a policy that is
clearly contrary to law, you will eventually have to explain that.
The question is, can you keep it under wraps long enough to get out of the
administration, and hopefully for it to be out of the egregious sort of
thing where youll lose an election as a result. We see the delta between
the periods of time that successive administrations can keep a secret is
actually diminishingthe secrets are becoming public at an accelerated pace.
This is a beneficial thing. This is the same in the context of terrorism.
There is an interesting ideawhen you were saying its sort of weird that
the US has what you described as a collective psychosis in the wake of 9/11
given that European countries have been facing terrorist attacks routinely.
The US had actually been facing the same thing, and actually one would
argue, experienced similarly high-impact attacks, for example, the Oklahoma
City bombing, where a Federal building was destroyed by a single individual
or one actor.
Bell: What do you think about the relationship between governments asking
Facebook and other communications platforms to help fight ISIS?
Snowden: Should we basically deputize companies to become the policy
enforcers of the world? When you put it in that context suddenly it becomes
clear that this is not really a good idea, particularly because terrorism
does not have a strong definition thats internationally recognized. If
Facebook says, we will take down any post from anybody who the government
says is a terrorist, as long as it comes from this government, suddenly they
have to do that for the other government. The Chinese allegations of who is
and who is not a terrorist are going to look radically different than what
the FBIs are going to be. But if the companies try to be selective about
them, say, well, were only going to do this for one government, they
immediately lose access to the markets of the other ones. So that doesnt
work, and thats not a position companies want to be in.
However, even if they could do this, there are already policies in place for
them to do that. If Facebook gets a notification that says this is a
terrorist thing, they take it down. Its not like this is a particularly
difficult or burdensome review when it comes to violence.
The distinction is the government is trying to say, now we want them to
start cracking down on radical speech. Should private companies be who we as
society are reliant upon to bound the limits of public conversations? And
this goes beyond borders now. I think thats an extraordinarily dangerous
precedent to be embracing, and, in turn, irresponsible for American leaders
to be championing.
The real solutions here are much more likely to be in terms of entirely new
institutions that bound the way law enforcement works, moving us away from
the point of military conflict, secret conflict, and into simply public
policing.
Theres no reason why we could not have an international counter-terrorism
force that actually has universal jurisdiction. I mean universal in terms of
fact, as opposed to actual law.
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