it has been over just over a year now since i went to hong kong is james was just describing and met with one of the most significant sources in journalism in american history edward snowden and the last year has been a bit intense and it has been intense not only for me personally but for a lot of other people as well including for the very fine men and women of the national security agency as well as for people like james clapper president obama's senior national security official who got caught red handed by these revelations of lying to the american people through the senate which is a felony although like every other senior national security official over the last decade that committed agree just crimes he was able to do that without any legal accountability at all but his reputation certainly was damaged he hasn't had a very good year it has been an intense year for president obama as he sought to tamp down all of the implications and the fallout from the disclosures it's been a intense year for u s diplomatic relations with a whole variety of countries it's been an intense year for a lot of media outlets and journalist in the world whose conduct over the past decade has really been called into serious question by the disclosures and it has been a truly intense year for numerous populations in multiple countries on many continents around the world who discover that the massive surveillance system that has been built that we all vaguely knew had existed was directed not at a handful of terrorists or people engaged in serious violence but was in fact directed at them and i think one of the remarkable aspects of the last year has been how sustained the intensity is surrounding these issues is really not all that obvious that a year after the revelations began i could go all over the world which is what i've been doing in the last month in south america in europe on the east coast of the u s last month and now on the west coast of the u s and have rooms like this fill up with people interested in talking about these issues it's really kind of an extraordinary event and i think one of the reasons that has happened maybe the main one is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the last year which is that the debate that has been triggered by the reporting that we were able to do is not just a debate about surveillance in fact i would say it's not even primarily a debate about surveillance there are a wide array of equally profound issues if not more profound issues that have been seriously examined by many countries around the world this is been a global debate not a domestic one it has involved an examination of the role of individual privacy in the digital age probably the first time that as a planet as we put more and more of our communications on the line electronically we are considering what the value of individual privacy is it has entailed  debate about the dangers of vesting power in government entities and allowing them to exercise that power in the dark it is triggered a debate about the role that the united states plays in the world and the vast difference between the branding and marketing campaign that defined who president obama was and his reality it has triggered a truly i thing profound to be about the role of journalism and the proper role of journalist visa v the state so there have been all of these profound issues that have been debated over the last year not just surveillance and i think that's one of the reasons why the intensity has remained so high in this issue and part of what has been great for me about being able to go around to events like this and being able to talk to people in person is that when you're doing this reporting and you have the obligation which i've had for the last year to work as hard as possible to get as many stories out as i possibly could in this seemingly endless archive of government secrets is that you tend to focus on story after individual story and focus really intensely on what the specific programs are that you're reporting and what the capabilities are that you're exposing and the broader implications of the reporting can sometimes get obscured and one of the things i was able to do that i'm able to do by going around and having these kinds of discussions is it gives me a moment for the first time to take a step back and to think about how all of these issues really connect why this will really be an enduring set of revelations and it's also one of the things that most motivated me to write this book was to engage in this similar kind of analytical assessment about why these issues have resonated so much and what the ultimate implications are going to be and there were other reasons that i wanted to write this book and you know i think one of the things too that is important understand about writing a book is that writing a book is a really miserable process i mean i think every single person who has ever written a book will agree with that and i think one of the things i've learned this is my fifth book is that there's really no point in writing a book unless you have extreme amounts of passion behind the book and really clear reasons why you want to write it as opposed to just writing it for the sake of writing it and so i think one of the best ways to think about what i was trying to convey in writing the book and about going around and talking about these issues is to talk about the reasons why i wanted to write the book and one reason was to connect all these dots but there were other reasons as well one primary reason is that there has been so much said over the last year about all of these events about what edward snowden did about the reporting that we did about the documents that he gave us about what those documents reveal so much said the american media in particular so much of weight is just wrong this is completely false and you know it's funny if you are somebody who loves to bash the american media and talk about how awful they are and i am somebody who completely loves to do that it's one of my favorite things to do i've been doing it for many years now you know it doesn't come as a surprise to learn that so much of what is conveyed and represented in the american media and there's a really authoritative objective tone that they like to use is actually completely false that probably doesn't come as a surprise to anybody certainly not people who were of adult age in the run up to the iraq war i mean that lesson is a lesson that has been well learned by most of us but when you're in the middle of one of the stories that's being talked about by the media to such an extent and you actually have firsthand knowledge of what's happening your appreciation for the u s media is ability and willingness to spout absolute falso hoods escalates dramatically i mean i am somebody who's been incredibly cynical of the media and yet i was shocked by the things i saw over the past year just in terms of pure falsity getting passed off as truth and so one of the things i wanted to do in writing this book and then taking the opportunity to go around in talking about the book is to be able to really kind of just set the record straight and to set forth the evidence that i actually have seen and i know myself firsthand to create a historical account about what actually happened and the miss that got disseminated are sometimes so explain and yet the indoor to this day in a way that's kind of remarkable one of the most remarkable miss to me that has gotten repeated over and over by defenders of the us government and defenders of the n s a is the idea that edward snowden has always been or at least continues now to be a russian spy i know it is hilarious and yet if you listen to c n n or m s n b c or certainly fox or any of the major network news shows on sunday this is something that gets stated over and over with a great deal of seriousness how people maintain a straight based on they say it is a mystery to me and yet they do and one of the things that is remarkable to me that i discovered in the course of writing this book was that i went back and i looked at the things that were being said in june of last year when i was in hong kong i was in i was blissfully ignorant of the things the american media was saying about edward snowden the reporting we were doing because i was focused on the articles but i went back and i looked at a lot of this and the thing that's most amazing is that the people who now say that edward snowden is a russian spy and they say it was such conviction and  certainty in june of two thousand and thirteen when he was in hong kong before he had left to moscow those very same people were going on the very same shows and saying oh there's no doubt that he is a chinese spy mean this is just obvious and then the minute he left on kong and went to moscow seamlessly the whole narrative shifted without any recognition of what they were saying just weeks earlier and i'm convinced that if he somehow managed to morrow to travel from moscow to i don't know lima these same people would be saying obviously he was a peruvian spy the entire time they'll just say anything and you know my the my favorite instance of this occurred really recently there was an op ed in the wall street journal by edward jay epstein who frequently writes op eds in places like the wall street journal it was on may tenth of two thousand and fourteen in you know i'm going to read the quote as my favorite quote ever this is what he said he said he had spoken to a senior obama cabinet minister who off the record assured him and this is a quote there are only three possibilities for this note in the heist the heist there are only three possibilities one it was a russian espionage operation two it was a chinese espionage operation or three it was a joint sino russian operation i love that so much you know and it really what that really means of course is we have absolutely no idea what happened here but we need to malign and demean him and demonize him as much as we can so we will just say anything and the whole time there were so much evidence so much obvious evidence that negated this beginning with the fact that when he was in hong kong he was forced to leave by the government in hong kong and in beijing not really the treatment typically extended to chinese spies and when he arrived in moscow he was forced to wait for five weeks in the international transit zone of the moscow airport as the putin government negotiated with the u s government about what the russians could get in exchange for handing him over not exactly the treatment that the russian government typically expend extends to valuable russian spies but more importantly than that was the fact that he actually never chose to be in russia in the first place it was a purely accident that he ended up there he was trying to transit through on his way to have and which had promised him safe passage and then go to ecuador where he intended to seek asylum and the reason he ended up in moscow was because on the flight to moscow the u s government unilaterally without any due process revoked his passport just  his passport invalid do you know the government can do that just one day decide that they're going to declare your passport invalid that's what they did and then they believe the cubans interest sending their offer a safe passage the reason he was in moscow was because he got trapped there by the u s government which then turned around and used their apologists in the media to use the fact that he was forced to be in moscow as proof that he was a russian spy on top of which if edward snowden were a russian spy or a spy of any kind  think about all the things that he could have done with the material that he had he could have sold it for tens of millions of dollars to multiple intelligence agencies around the world and be extraordinarily rich for the rest of his life or he could've pass secretly to american adversaries that he had malignant intent he did none of that he came to journalists and asked journalists with well regarded media institutions to carefully vet the material to inform his fellow citizens about the kind of debate that he thought we ought to be having the very antithesis of what a spy does let alone a spy for oppressive regimes and i ultimately realized because you know you can look at media behavior and be shocked that they allowed this accusation to be aired over and over again not just because there were so much evidence negating it but because there was no evidence ever supporting it there's never been a shred of evidence that he has cooperated in any way with any other government there has been these sorts of reasons why we should have known facially that the accusation was false to the point where it was not even something that should be aired by responsible media outlets but the reason it gets aired the reason those kinds of accusations get aired i think is actually important and interesting which is that it really says so much more about the people voicing the accusations and the people who give it credence than it does the target of the accusation which is edward snowden the reality is that edward snowden did what he did because as an act of conscience he was so disturbed by what he perceived to be this extremely dangerous and unjust system of surveillance that he had no choice but to come forward and do what he could to stop it even if it meant sacrificing his liberty and everything else that he valued in his life but in order to believe that that was the really the reason you have to believe that people are capable of acting out of conscience and out of conviction and in defense of political values and the people who insist that he is a russian spy and the media elites who propagate these m don't believe that about him because they don't believe that about themselves because they know that they never act out of conjuncts that they don't have any political convictions that they never take steps to sacrifice their own interests in defense of political ideals and therefore they don't believe that anybody else can do that either and so they search for other hidden motives that prove that the person is actually doing this for all sorts of corrupted and it's a reflection of their own emptiness  corruption not of the people who they're condemning then there was this other thing that got said about him over and over and still get said about him that i find even more interesting and more amazing which is that edward snowden did what he did because he is a fame seeking narcissus and you know the thing that really amazed me about this was when i went back and looked at the discourse in the united states during those weeks after we began our reporting i wasn't aware of this of the time but the thing that amazed me was this phrase fame seeking narcissist got repeated over and over by so many different american pundits people like bob schieffer the host of face the nation and david brooks the new york times columnist and richard cohen the washington post columnist and jeffrey toobin the legal analyst for c n n all somehow came up with this phrase instantaneously literally within forty eight hours of our unveiling edward snowden we unveiled him on june tenth that was when we posted the video and wrote about who our source was with in forty eight hours i mean this literally you can go google it as i did for my book all of these american pundits had simultaneously decided that they were capable of psychologically assessing this person about whom they knew absolutely nothing and had never met in their entire life and not only did they all decide that they were going to psychologically assess him diagnose him from a distance as a fame seeking narcissist they all did it instantaneously i mean i'm somebody who if that you had told me three years ago or four years ago that media leads get together and coordinate their messaging i would have said no i don't actually think that's true i think they just and up saying the same thing because they're herd animals who just parrot what one another is saying just kind of without any coordination but the degree to which they all latched onto the same phrase in the same psychological doing diagnosis in such a short period of time was really striking to me almost enough to make me believe that they were getting some kind of like secret messages from some underground lair or somewhere about the script f which they were supposed to be reading and the reason why first of all just as is true for the idea that he was a russian spy this idea that edward snowden is some sort of fame seeking narcissist is literally the exact opposite of reality the very first conversation that i ever had was that was snowden before i even met him before i knew his name before i knew what he looked like it was over the internet when i was in brazil and he was in hong kong he said to me i am determined to unveil myself to the world as the source of these documents even though i know that doing so will likely to send me to prison for the rest of my life and the reason for that is that i believe i have the obligation to account to the world for what i did and since i don't think that what i'm doing is wrong i'm not going to hide in shame i'm going to come out and proudly identify myself as the source but he said once i do that i am going to disappear from the site of the media i'm going to disappear completely and the reason he said he was going to do that was because he knew that the goal of the media instinct would be to try and personalize the focus on to him instead of where he wanted the focus to remain which was on the substance of what these revelations showed and so he said i don't want any attention from myself i want to disappear from the media site and literally for the next six months after we unveiled him i had every single big t v star all of those t v actors who play the role of journalist on television they were all calling me policing with me to arrange for an interview with snowden and he rejected every single one of those he literally could have been the most famous person in the world on prime time every single night and yet he categorically refused to do any interviews the one he just did with n b c and moscow was the first ever interview he did after that interview that we did back in hong kong a year later and the reason was was because he wanted no attention on himself really kind of a weird behavior for fame seeking arse's i think but be complete lack of evidence for this claim and the all the evidence that negates it is probably the least interesting part about what about this this labeling of him in this way and i thought about this a lot this is probably one of the things that i thought about the most as i as i wrote the book and and also as i've gone around and talking about it which is in every single instance literally when a whistleblower emerges or not even just a whistleblower any actual dissident they get attacked almost invariably as being mentally ill as suffering some kind of psychological affliction as having attributes personality attributes that make you want to run as far away from them as you possibly can i when i was a child one of my childhood heroes was daniel ellsberg and i have had the honor of becoming friends with him he's a colleague of mine and we sit on the board together of the freedom of the press foundation which we jointly created with several other people and i asked him you know one of the things that always confounded me about the daniel ellsberg case was that the nixon administration in response to the revelations of the pentagon paper decided to break into the office of a psycho analyst to try and discover his psychosexual secrets and this never made any sense to me it just seemed like the ultimate non sequitur doesn't it like the headlines are the pentagon papers reveal that the us government has been systematically lying to the american people for a decade about the vietnam war and the nixon administration's response was going to be daniel ellsberg as a swinger or like had some weird attraction to his sister when he was seven that he's trying to resolve in therapy i never made any sense to me how they thought that would be an effective tactic and i actually asked him about this several years ago and he told me and i realize now that he's been absolutely correct and said you're being way too rational about this if you can take somebody and publicly demean them and humiliate them and create and an image of them that is extremely unattractive on a personal level to essentially depict them as somebody who is sick mentally sick you not only distract attention from the message that they're communicating but you make them so radioactive that everybody wants to have nothing to do with them just even thinking about what it is they're showing you seems shameful or wrong you want to distance yourself not only from them as people but from every thing that they represent and so if you could make people so uncomfortable with daniel ellsberg to make people think that he was mentally unstable or psycho sexually disturbed you would make people not want to talk about the pentagon papers anymore because it was associated with something grotesque somebody's mentally imbalanced and sick and if you look at how whistleblowers have been treated are people who bring uncomfortable revelations are treated or people who meaningfully dissent i don't mean people who stand up and say i'm a democrat i don't like the republicans or i'm a republican i don't like democrats that's the kind of dissent that we're allowed to do i'm talking about real dissent when you decide that you're going to go so far as to break all laws in protest and in defiance of fundamental injustices that kind of dissent anybody who'd use that does that is maligned is being mentally unstable if you look for example one of the most fascinating examples to me is there was this incident in this instance in two thousand and eleven when wiki leaks leaked first multiple documents about the war in afghanistan and then many more about the war in iraq and the documents about the war in iraq were much more significant than the ones in afghanistan because they documented extreme or crimes that the u s government and its partners in the iraqi military were committing deliberately and that there were huge numbers of civilian deaths that people didn't know about atrocities just atrocities of the worst kind that these documents revealed and the new york times which partnered with wiki leaks to report on these materials the day that those documents were released had a nice front page headline that said documents reveal u s atrocities in iraq and then right next to it almost as prominent if not as prominent was an article about julian a n and it was written by the war correspondent for the new york times john burns and the article dissected all of juliana songes personality traits and depicted him as this bizarre paranoid free who didn't his clothes and slept on his friends couches and looked around the corner thinking weirdly that somebody might be after him even though he was in the middle of the biggest national security leak in american history so maybe that was a pretty rational fear but the idea was to make him be viewed as so personally unappealing that you actually wanted to turn away from the very serious revelations of what those documents showed i mean it literally got equal billing in the same thing happen with chelsea manning and her revelations where if you read what she actually was saying it's the model of rationality she was saying that she joined the army because she believed in the cause of the war in iraq and slowly and gradually discovered the extreme levels of corruption and abuse that was taking place as part of this war and decided that she not only didn't want to be part of it anymore but one the world to know about all of the secret in atrocities that were taking place and therefore leaked these documents in order to trigger reform whatever else you think about what it is that she did that is the model of rational thinking and yet instantly the us media decided that the reason she did what she did was because of her struggles with her gender disorder as they called it or because of childhood conflicts with her father this is the tactic over and over that gets in vote and it isn't just about trying to distract attention away from the revelations or make you so uncomfortable with the disclosures that these whistleblowers and dissidents bring that is an important part of it but there's something more pernicious going on more subtle but more pernicious and that is this if somebody steps out that extremely love with his sister that edward snowden is a narcissist the implicit premise there is that if you descend in that way then it automatically means that there's some kind of disturbance psychological undercurrent that has caused you to do that that it can only be explained by a psychological affliction the premise there is that the status quo is so fundamentally good that the american political system is so at its core designed to give us freedom and choice that only someone mentally disturbed would think that it was unjust enough to merit that level of protest and objection it's really a way of implicitly teaching and indoctrinating that the only mentally stable and healthy choice is to comply or submit or acquiesce to the prevailing order and that anyone who doesn't do that by definition is demonstrating some kind of psychological affliction that's a really subtle yet powerful message to convey and the fallacy of it is that while of course it's possible that people who dissent in a radical or meaningful way namely breaking laws to do it are motivated in some cases by some kind of psychological drive as opposed to political beliefs it's also the case that often times in fact many times people who don't to say it who instead choose to acquiesce are doing so because of psychological afflictions as well perhaps it's authoritarianism perhaps it cowardice perhaps it's excessive group think but this idea that the only people whose psychological psychological motives we assess are those who dissent but we never psychologically the psychologically disturbed person chelsea manning who comes forward and wants to reveal to the world the atrocities that the u s is committing in iraq or all of the people who decide that those atrocities are enough to make them object meaningful way or who is it who's really psychologically disturbed julian assange who decides that this massive secrecy regime is dangerous and menacing are those who work within it the tens of thousands of people who work within it every day who do nothing about it or who is psychologically disturbed edward snowden for deciding that all of us should know about the extreme invasions of our privacy to which we're being subjected in secret on a daily basis or the tens of thousands of people who knew about it and did nothing and the officials who perpetrated it that's a really important debate to have but this idea that this idea that you are mentally ill if you dissent that is the debate that that tactic is designed to to suppress so you want to talk about one last myth that has been really a remarkable to me and that i wrote the book in large part to debunk and that is the idea that the only reason this surveillance state has been constructed is because our government officials have this really deep and abiding desire to keep us safe and this is really just about finding and monitoring the communications of people who are engaged in terrorism or other kinds of violent potts now it is genuinely shocking to me that anybody can stand up in public and say that after the last year without having their reputation instantly obliterated i mean so much of the spying that we've revealed over the last year or so plainly has nothing to do with any of that whether it's spying on democratic allies like the president of brazil dilma rousseff or the chancellor of germany germany angela merkel or spying on oil companies throughout latin america or economic summits or all sorts of populations around the world in mass you plainly have nothing to do with terrorism there's so much of that that has been revealed that just has no connection to that claim at all but even more compelling are the n s a s own documents a lot of which i publish in the book and we posted online as well simultaneously with the book that really lays bare exactly what they're institutional mandate and objective is in really clear language these are the things they said when they thought nobody was listening communications of terrorists or collect some of it or collect a lot of it it's called act it all and there are documents that we play and i publish in the book that even add to that there is one document that says and i mean i think the n s a is actually owed a lot of thanks  certainly of my gratitude for producing documents that are this clear and easy to understand it says at the top our new collection posture and then there's a little circle and it has six phrases that define what their collection posture is about the top it says collect it all and then it says exploited all process it all sniff it all export partner it all and know it all they are called acting every single day billions of e mails and telephone calls they have entire populations under surveillance on a daily basis including our own it is the largest system of suspicion list surveillance ever created in human history the idea that they can still stand up in public and say this is about terrorism and have the us media and all sorts of other people take that seriously is one of the most powerful indictment of just how rotten our political discourse really so i just want to leave idea of these myths behind for a minute and talk about a couple of the other things that i was hoping to achieve in writing the book all the myths pretty much permeate every single discussion political discussion that we have in the united states you never really leave that issue but i want to just talk about things from a slightly different approach one of the most important parts of the debate we've had over the last year is about the notion of privacy and what privacy means to the individual to individual freedom and this is actually not an easy argument to have it's a hard case to make why privacy matters so much people have a really easy time understanding for obvious reasons and for good reasons why feeding their children or having health care or having a job is this immediate question of survival they have a harder time understanding why privacy deserves the same level of protection because it tends to be a more abstract and if you're real and seemingly remote value and so it's really not uncommon i hear it all the time for people even in good faith people in good faith reasonable people to say you know i just i'm not one of those people who's doing bad things and therefore i don't really have anything done and i don't really mind if people read my emails because i have nothing to hide in the c e o of google actually put this in the mosed in the pur most disgusting manner he said you know he was asked an interview about google systematic invasions of privacy and he said you know if you want to hide something if you're so worried about somebody knowing what it is that you're doing you're saying that's probably a really good sign that you shouldn't be doing it the idea the premise being that the only people who have something to hide are people who are doing something evil something wrong something criminal and one of the fascinating parts about this claim is that the people who say that who say i don't really have anything to hide because i'm not doing anything wrong they don't actually mean it and the way that you know that they don't actually mean it is that the same people put passwords on their email and social media accounts and they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors and there are all sorts of things that they say and do and that they would only say and do and they think that nobody is watching or listening but they would never in a million years say if they thought other people were knowing what it was that they were doing there are all sorts of things that we have to hide as individuals that have nothing to do with violence or criminality and the fact is that people instinctively seek out to the point that every single time literally over the last year when somebody has said to me you know i really don't have anything to hide i don't actually care if people know what i'm doing because i'm not one of those people who have done something wrong i've said the same thing every single time and you should try this and you'll see the same result i've said ok well here's my e mail and i give them my e mail account and i say what i'd like you to do is e mail me all of the passwords to your e mail and social media accounts so that i can just troll through everything that you're doing and writing and just publish out well whatever it is i feel like publishing under your name you're not doing anything wrong you should have nothing to hide and not a single person not one has taken me up on this offer and there is there was this remarkable bed early on after we had published the article revealing that the n s a was collecting the what they call the metadata for every single american meaning metadata seems really technical when you call it that what it actually is are the list of every single person with whom we're communicating who's calling us who are we calling how long are we speaking for where are we when we speak who is e mailing us and who are we emailing and dianne feinstein the chairwoman of the senate intelligence committee who is the n s a s best friend in congress by far wrote an op ed in the usa today saying i don't even understand why people are so upset by this in fact i don't even understand why they're calling this spying i mean it's not really spying on somebody if you're not reading the content of the e mail if you're not listening to the contineu your phone all you're doing is collecting the list of all the people with whom they're communicating now the reason why that is absurd to the point of being offensive i think is obvious think about how much somebody can learn about you how intimate they can get in terms of their understanding of what you're doing just by having what they call the metadata if you're a woman who calls an abortion clinic or you're somebody who calls a physician who's an hiv specialist or you call a drug or alcohol addiction hotline or you call a suicide hotline or you speak with somebody who is in your spouse late at night collecting all that information will enable people to know some of the most intimate information about you in fact sometimes more probing and more invasive and more intimate than that they were listening to the content itself but one of the things about dianne feinstein's claim was that there grew this sort of online movement instantly after her ed that called for dianne feinstein to be true to her words that if spying isn't really collecting all this information that every single day at the end of her work day she or one of her eight thousand assistants should post online the list of all the people with whom she e mailed in and telephone that day and all the people she met in person and spoken of course she would never do that because we all instinctively understand why privacy is so fundamental to human freedom it's something that we all seek out instinctively and as human beings always have we are social animals we do need other people to know what we're saying and doing and to hear what it is that we're doing and saying that's why people voluntarily post things about themselves online and why they've always sought out human interaction but just as essential to what it means to be human is having places we can go where we can think and read and be and choose and act without judge mental is being cast upon us and there's all kinds of social science research but i think our own personal experiences are even more compelling that demonstrate that when we think or believe that other people are watching what we're doing or monitoring us or judging us our range of options shrinks considerably when we think other people are watching our behavior becomes more conformist and more compliant we do the things that we think other people want us to do and will judge us well for because as human beings we all try and avoid shame and being condemned and being denounced it is only when we have a realm that we can go to where nobody else is watching or judging us that is the realm where creativity and dissent and exploration about who we are as people exclusively resides it world in which there is no private realm is a world that becomes much less interesting much less creative much more submissive and compliant and obedient which is why governments love surveillance because it instills those behavioral values in people you add not a physical prison that you get put into but a prison that enters your mind that is what the true purpose and the true outcome of a surveillance state is and i think we all instinctively understand that but i think the ability to sit back and think about why privacy is so important is a really crucial part of the debate that we've had over the last year so i just want to spend a little bit of time talking about the motive for this system because that is typically a question that that i get asked out a lot all the time i think people by now are convinced that the a and that its and its partner governments and other agencies in the u s national security state are truly devoted to the elimination of privacy in the digital age and that is not hyperbole that i mean by that that they want cake and store and when they want analyze and monitor every single communication event that takes place by and between human beings on the planet electronically on the internet and by the telephone and you don't need to take my word for that their own documents as i said earlier demonstrate that that's their goal but that then leads to the question of why would the u s government want to create a system that does that what is the core motive that has driven in this system to be created and motives can sometimes be really difficult to ascertain so i think we have a hard time understanding our own motives let alone other people's and when you're talking about an institution this large it becomes a very difficult question to ask it's like asking why did the united states invade iraq it's almost impossible to answer that because different factions responsible for that invasion had very differing motives and sometimes they had mixed motives and complex motives and it's a hard question to answer but one thing i can tell you for sure about the motive of the system is that it has nothing to do with the motive they claim it has nothing to do with stopping terrorism or keeping the population safe and this is one way that i know that if you read what the nine eleven commission said which was designed to investigate why the u s government with all of its surveillance capabilities even back then failed to the tap a pot of this magnitude what it concluded was that the problem was not that the u s government had failed to gather all of the information it needed to know this plot was coming in fact the opposite was true they had in their possession all of the intelligence necessary to piece together what it is that they had to know that the nine eleven attack was coming the reason that they failed to detect the pot was because they had collected so much information that they were incapable of understanding the significance and the meaning of what it was that they had and so the response to this diagnosis was for them to say you know what let's go now and collect even more which is like being told that you have lung cancer and walking out of the office and saying i'm now going to smoke five packs of cigarettes more a day than i was before it makes no sense it clearly is not the purpose when you are collecting every single communication event that takes place in the world and storing it it becomes impossible to find the people who are talking about attacking the boston marathon or blowing up trains in madrid or london or detonating a plane above detroit or a bomb in the middle of times square it is impossible to find what it is that you claim you're looking for in constructing the system which is why they don't find those things so if that isn't the motive the question then becomes what is the motive why has this system expanded to the point that it has and i think one significant reason is that in the wake of nine eleven we just decided to drown the national security state with the normal amounts of money and when you drown bureaucracies with money they will rapidly expand without limit every day they wake up and thing how is it that we can expand our own power and our own authority but have more important part is that when you drown agencies of all that money it creates this immense profit motive seventy five percent of the intelligence budget of the n s a goes into the coffers of private corporations which means every time the surveillance state expands every time there's a new capability every time there's a new target that is warranting of a new system the corporations that run the national security state make more and more money but the key reason that i think should never be overlooked is that surveillance that governments that wield it with amounts of power if you can know everything that is citizenry is doing especially at a time when you are creating higher and higher walls of secrecy behind which you're operating the power imbalance becomes immense it becomes virtually impossible for that citizenry to challenge in any meaningful way the people who are wielding power and i think the surveillance state is part of a wildly under appreciated trend which is that we have allowed all of these very radical powers and extremist policies to take root and the name of the war on terror and what has happened over the last four or five years as the war on terror has wound down is that these policies began to be imported onto american soil aimed at americans instead of existing on foreign soil aimed at foreigners which is why you see the use of drones now coming away from iraq and somalia and pakistan and yemen into the united states or why you see the paramilitary police forces that once patrolled the streets of baghdad now visible in all american cities that were used to crush for example the occupy movement or you see the extreme levels of government secrecy that justify war secrecy being used domestically as well where you see the idea that the u s government can assassinate foreigners without due process now being aimed at americans this system of surveillance which was pioneered in iraq under the collected all banner by keith alexander who was in iraq at the time before he became an sh he also has been now imported onto american soil and i think there's a real question about why that what happened what explains this trend of importing these increasingly extreme policies that were once used to justify winning a war and now used to aim at the american population and i think it's really important not to underestimate the extent to which people who wield power in the united states fear political and social instability largely as a result of huge amounts of economic inequality in previously stable westerns places like spain or london or greece or italy there have been sustained riots in the street even in the united states there were two political movements one from the right one from the left that got successfully co opted in crush the aki movement the tea party movement that signal that there was such severe discontent in the united states that genuine instability even some kind of a rebellion outside of the ballot box was possible and there is a real fear about this instability worsening because the economic inequality that has come from the two thousand and eight financial crisis is not going anywhere and when you have a fear of instability social instability and political instability elites can respond in two ways they can either think about how to placate the anger that causes the instability by reforming and by redress ing those problems and i don't think our elites are even remotely interested in doing that or the second way is you can say how is it that we can empower ourselves and shield ourselves so that we can prevent that anger and instability from truly undermining our power and one way to do that is by consolidating the instruments and weapons use for population control all of these weapons that were once used against foreign populations now being imported onto american soil with this surveillance they being one of the most potent means of control and i think it's easy to think about that as some kind of conspiratorial thinking but the reality is is that states have always craved potent surveillance because of the way that it does breed compliance and submission in populations that know that they're being watched so the last point i want to make is the one that i get asked about the most which is well you've talked about all these interesting things have happened the last year and there's been all these fantastic debates but you know what is really changed about this about anything i mean the n s a is still spying and the u s national security state is still as powerful as ever so what kind of changes really have taken place and one of the things i think that's important to think about is the way that change happens it's i think really easy to give in to this idea that change happens overnight and there's this sort of instant gratification desire that i want to see the building of the a call apps and if it's not collapse and if it's still standing that i may conclude that there's not really been any changes and you know the u s national security state is the most powerful part of the united states government which is the most powerful government on earth the n s a is not going to collapse because we publish some of their documents and there's a bunch of anger around the world and i think it's really important not to look to the united states government as the source that's going to impose real limits on the power of the united states government because that is not how power gets exercised people don't walk around thinking about how to you know laterally limit their own power but there are some really promising s there are countries around the world influential significant countries that are genuinely furious by what they have learned and who are working together to undermine american hegemony of the internet i think even more significant is the fact that u s technology companies like face book and google and yahoo and microsoft are genuinely petrified in a really pleasing way about the impact that this surveillance system is going to have on their future business interests they don't care at all about your privacy or about the privacy of their users and the proof of that is that when nobody knew what was happening they very eagerly cooperated with the n s a well beyond what the law required them to do because of all the benefits that they were getting and the lack of cost because nobody knew that was happening but now they're extremely worried that all of you aware of what they're doing to your privacy and especially what fourteen year olds and twelve year olds and ten year olds will think is that you are no longer willing to use the companies that you know are turning your data over to the n s a and are collaborating with the n s a that you will be vulnerable to appeals by brazilian and german korean companies that you should use our products and not theirs because we won't violate your privacy and the u s government doesn't care at all about public opinion polls or about public anger over surveillance but they definitely care about what silicon valley billionaires think and the silicon valley tycoons are imposing genuine pressure now on the s government to limit that surveillance and also creating ways to convince the public that their systems are safe but i think the most optimistic the cause of opt greatest optimism for me about the changes that have taken place is that when people understand the extent to which their privacy is being compromised they start taking matters into their own hands there really are all sorts of technological programs of encryption and other means of rendering you online activities anonymous that are effective that keep the n s a and other governments out of what it is that you're doing on the internet the problem is right now there are maybe ten thousand people in the world to use in corruption and  work mind if you use encryption which means that you're trying to hide from them what you're saying and doing it probably means that you're somebody suspicious because only bad people would want to hide what they're doing and saying from the n s a and so they're able to target people now using corruption but if ten million people using christian instead of ten thousand they'll no longer be able to do that that will create meaningful walls around our communications that the n s a and other governments can invade and that's one of the reasons why even though there aren't these genuine reform bills coming out of congress and won't be i'm very optimistic about the prospects for change and i just want to leave you with this one last point relating to that the idea of change which is the i would say the biggest reason why i wrote this book i talked about some of the main reasons i wrote a book probably the biggest reason i wrote this book is because i wanted to communicate to people the what i think is the really profound lesson that i learned over the last year in the work that i've done with edward snowden and on these materials i think it's really easy if you are a citizen who believes that there are serious injustices in your country to give in to this kind of  defeatism this idea that these forces are so formidable and so powerful and so entrenched that there's just really nothing that i can do about them i mean i can vote for this party or that party and none of that seems to change the same factions continue to rain and so i really don't feel like there's much that i can do i just feel like this is kind of helpless and a lot of people turn away from political injustice because of that temptation of defeatism which is very compelling and powerful for all of us and it's one of the things the government actually wants to instill in us this learned helplessness this idea that there's actually nothing that we can do and one of the lessons i think the most profound lesson that i learned in the last year from working with edward snow and something that will i think really shape how i view the world for the rest of my life is the lesson that we can learn from what he did he is someone who is twenty nine years old he grew up in a house that was lower middle class to poor his father was in the coast guard for thirty years he had no position or power or procedure of any kind he was an obscure employee working for a large corporation and through nothing more than an act of conscience an act of fearlessness a choice in defense of political convictions acting a moral last on his own he really did change the world he changed how hundreds of millions of people around the planet think about that wide array of topic topics i began by enumerating and there are all sorts of lessons throughout history of powerless obscure individuals through acts of conscience changing the world whether it be rosa parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus or a street vendor in tunisia lighting himself on fire a rebellion across a major region against the world's most entrenched dictators there are all kinds of lessons that should for ever negate our succumbing to this temptation of defeatism but for me watching this twenty nine year old give up his entire life out of the knowledge that he didn't want to have on his conscience for the rest of his life the idea that he could have done something about an injustice but failed to do so and sparked this massive ripple of fact around the world where all kinds of other people including me got infected with the courage that he displayed where huge numbers of journalists and media outlets that previously would never have touched material like this were eager to prove that they were willing to publish aggressively to all news sources that are now coming forward to copy the template that he created to the consciousness changes that he has engendered i think really does underscore that all of us as individuals really always do have the power within us if we summon the right will and will that unleashed be unleashed are the right amount of passion that we all have that ability to find within ourselves how we can change the world there's probably different ways that we can contribute there's different skills and resources that we have but the one thing that this should always teach us is that defeatism is always deceitful it's always unwarranted it's always bas so with that i thank you all very very much for