first of all i was wanting if maybe you could tell us a little bit about the history of you in this book and how it came to be sure well for those who are not familiar with my work because there are no newspapers anymore i  as a political cartoonist first and foremost and i've done books on a lot of different in a lot of different formats i've done political polemics i've done trot travelogues including from afghanistan and central asia war correspondents see cartoon collections just lots and lots of subjects very few of whom have sold very well and there was a few about i guess about a year and a half ago my publisher at seven stories press came to me and said hey how about a graphic biography of edward snowden and my first reaction was like no because someone else is obviously got to be working on a biography of snowden so who's going to want my comic book version of it but as it turned out no one was working on a biography of snowden after the story broke in the summer of two thousand and thirteen there just wasn't much the story kind of almost died by two thousand and fourteen by the end of it  least in the mainstream media and for whatever reason there just wasn't a bio so i got i did what all writers do in these situations i put it off as long as i possibly could and and then i ended up just  being a total pain in the ass to everyone i knew and just going underground and i will not say for how long but for kind of a shorter time than you would think and drawing this thing all at once and so that to me the the idea of this book was initially shust do a bio but as i got into it i realized that it needed to show what the n s a was doing and to put it into a political social and cultural context when i was talking to i would meet people on the plane or whatever and they'd say you know what your next project i'd say i'm writing a book about edward snowden most people didn't even know who he was and i mean this was in the united states i'm saying i mean people did not know they did not know his name and  did know who he was the name just had the vague outline like you know oh isn't he that guy who i don't know he's a spy or something and they didn't know and the so i realized that when i was doing the research for this book why that was the case there was a blizzard of detail that came out all throughout the summer of two thousand and thirteen and it's been followed up by the intercept in the work of a crank on greenwald and other people over there doing and so it's almost too much information and people just kind of shut down and so i wanted to almost take a why a approach a young adult approach and put this into a into a context where even if you weren't following the story you could pick it up in one or two readings one or two sessions of reading pretty much get your snowden brain dump so there it is what sort of what sort of research did you do as you were as you were putting the book together did you did you sift through all of that information all at once again a second time yeah i mean like i think like any biographer and i love biography this is my first biography but it's all biographies and history or almost all i read so i was kind of i've always wanted to do one and i just read everything every magazine story every news article everything i could find on line everything that i could find in english or french the only two languages i can read and i originally intended to have this be an authorized biography i approached snowden and he refused to participate so i was just very unhappy about that it initially and i was just very disappointed and i just i figured ok well this is book is going to kind of suck because it's going to shit all it's going to really do is pull everything together and compile it but that's not really bringing something new to the table culturally or politically and and so when the book was finished my publisher sent a f to snowden via the his lawyer at the a c l u and happily we got a bunch of edits back via the a c l u from edward so it's kind of now i feel really good about the book because it's both independent and not an authorized biography which is still allows me some credibility but at the same so there's i can address criticisms of him for example that probably wouldn't be in the book if i had worked with him from the start but it also kind of corrected a lot of the mistakes that were in the mainstream media and there were quite a few pretty serious and errors about his life and about his escape from hong kong and so on that have been that are fixed here so i can only guess maybe he's thinking of working on his own biography at some point i don't know ok and do you have any any sort of specific examples of corrections that offer anything that yes sure well like there's been a lot of speculation about how he got out  of it how he got stuck in russia and and what happened there and what happened was that i mean that you know you know you have if you have if you get a passport you know that little bug microchip logo on the front of your new passport well you might say that that's for your convenience so you can zip through the security line faster whatever so what that's really for is for turning off your citizenship if you steal government secrets so what happened was that snowden had a permit to board how to visa to go to ecuador via moscow and then havana cuba and then on to ecuador kind of a kind of a long precarious lot of transfers and the u s accused the chinese government that administers hong kong of deliberately allowing him to escape without a permit but that wasn't true he had that permit any had a valid passport when he boarded that aeroflot flight to moscow but while he was in the air on the way to moscow hillary clinton's secretary of state at the time turned off his passport so when he arrived at sheremetyevo two and went to the transfer counter to say that he wanted to go onward to have bene someone told him i am so very sore you have a problem with pulse port not networking and so he was not he was stuck in moscow which just parent that  in incredibly stupid move on the part of the u s government you really want to get your guy stuck in moscow of all places like wouldn't you rather let him believe moscow and then arrest him or bring down his plane as they did with the president of ecuador later as it travels over american allies in western europe so anyway but that's that's one example of a lot of people said well you know the chinese let this happen actually hillary clinton made this happen i wanted to ask you a little bit about tone because in that in that in that anecdote when you were talking about microchips and passports and you said but what they really do it sounds like you know unraveled conspiracy theory that is not true but we know it's true but did you have to tone police yourself to keep from sounding like you were you know one of the people with the signs all over the you know with connecting yarns and things like that like absolutely yeah no i mean i always have to tone check myself even in my most outrageous cartoons because it's america the land of flat ethics and you know you're you're not all you know i mean i want to live in like you know england to where steve bell at the guardian the editorial cartoonist the can draw the president like eating is own shit and with his head up his ass and it's awesome and you know in here it's like you hear there's no like bomb throwing you really want to always pull back i found that my most successful work here  successful both in terms of sales and in terms of reaching a broader wider audience is always from pulling back restraining myself and kind of having that dry jon stewart type delivery and people just like that i mean this is the country that i live in and so this is what i have to communicate but i really restrained myself as a lot when writing this book in particular and it is a biography and i kind of also felt that with snowden this isn't like climate change you know where there's really only one point of view that's legitimate and then there's the assholes it's like this is this is like the you know this is like there are there are it is the criticisms of snowden are legitimate and worthy of consideration and ought to be treated with respect and i felt that it was important to do that what about your history with edward snowden do you remember when you first heard about him yeah i do i was i was at home in my house in east hampton new york when i got a text message from matt bors who is the who is a brilliant young cartoonist based in portland and he's just a guy when ever i get a text message like this from boris i know i have to pay i have to immediately turn on the t v but it was like holy for prism like so i'm like m s n b c or c n n and it's and then it was like we were just talking to each other and we're like oh my god oh my god on the phone like this is unbelievable this is the biggest story of our lives this is huge this is bigger than nine eleven this is in this is so important and we were like literally this is how we were we're like everything's going to change now oh my got word this guy issues this video and i watched it online and i members just thinking like god this is just amazing that that that is this young guy how on earth was he in a position to get these secrets and one of the one of the programs outlined in the book is captivated audience in which the n s a can spy on people through phones like this one which are turned off and your should be turned  they can they can actually surveil through through devices that are turned off and there was another program in the book that you talked about that i was unaware of and varus to learn about where the u s p s postal service scans every piece of mail billions of pieces of mail a year as you were looking through did you did you did you have any surveillance fears that didn't come true no were you that were you surprised to learn this or a lot of people said that they weren't really surprised when they when they found out about what's now i will is i mean i was prepared to say to a probably bigger extent than the average person intelligence between foreign sources and foreign sources and between foreign sources and american sources so they've ever since the one nine hundred eighty s they've been wanting to collect everything and at the time the n s a was very open particularly in the about this and how they were at the time worked with twenty six other major nations and they were really engaged in all sorts of incredibly strange methods of doing this like they had they had divers u s navy divers go miles beneath the atlantic ocean to the bottom of the atlantic ocean and they drilled cables into the transatlantic cables that carry digital fiber optic communications between europe and the united states  they drilled into nodes they had special satellites so i knew that the n s a wanted to do this and that they were that they certainly this was a huge institution with unlimited budget but when i started researching the snowden book and all the revelations the detail of the not only the interception but the storage and the fact that it's all encompassing is what shocked i mean we are talking about everyone in this all of your e mails all of your text messages all of your voice over internet phone calls etc etc etc your license plates being scanned by the local police as you drive through the streets all of them it's not maybe it's not probably it's not a lot of them it's not ninety nine percent of them it's not just most of you it's all of you and it's all of your communications all the time they're even intercepting your netflix streaming habits and they complain that they have to have a so much storage that it's costing billions of dollars because video files are so big and so literally sixty five to seventy percent of all bandwidth intercepted by the n s a is you watching game and i know isis i've read that isis likes game of thrones so maybe you're in league with isis but it's a it's just a you know it's it's actually just in comprehensible the and it's like obviously the technology has advanced to the point where the interception the big data algorithms and the storage capacity has suddenly become feasible on a fast scale on a scale that you know they really d seems like you're still at the end of the book you're still a little unclear as to why i mean did you do you have any insights into his character that you that you think make him especially prone to being the only one with access to this information because a lot of people had access to this information yet edward snowden is literally one in a million literally because one point four million n s a and cia and other intelligence staffers or private security contractors had access to many or all of the same documents that he revealed and yet he's really the one except you could also say you can add you could add his name thomas drake to that to that list so he's eighty two and a million and it's why these guys and so i interviewed drake in washington thomas drake was an n s a whistleblower of the mid two thousand and two who tried to work within the system and  and go to the senate intelligence committee and so on and he was rewarded by the whistle blower protection that involves the f b i breaking into your house in front of your wife and kid at six o'clock in the morning and taking careful steps to get you black balled from every possible company that might hire you and then prosecuting you on espionage charges and ruining your life and so he's now working the genius bar at an apple store in suburban maryland outside of washington so i asked him over dinner you know what what is it about you like why did you do it and he kept saying well it was wrong anyone could see it was wrong anyone can see that it was violated the fourth amendment anyone could see that our privacy rights were being devastated to made it and i was like yeah but all your colleagues saw it too so why did you do it and why didn't they do it and he kept saying the same thing well it was wrong and so i was trying to get at you know really hold his feet to the fire because after all i paid for dinner and i wanted my answer and you know he and i was like what is what why what you know why are you so special and he had some finally kind of said well you know i grew up in vermont it's a it's a state that values into independent individual ism and it has a town hall meeting structure so people are very engaged in democracy and i always felt i believed these things we learned in civics class but the point is that i've read so much about like why chelsea manning did it you know why did why did daniel ellsberg step forward with the pentagon papers and they all kind of say the same things i don't think they really know  what's different about them why are they wired that way i mean certainly their critics might say they're arrogant that's what that's one of the big criticisms of snowden he knows better slickly did know better and and and they think the question is why did everyone else not know better you know i mean people look at world war two in france and say well you know why we're only one or two percent of the french and involved in the french resistance and it's like well that's like a lot more than the that's more that's one or two percent more than would be involved in one here so you know it's ok i think that he did certainly have some things that point toward an unorthodox background look he's a child of divorce so what that's half of my generation and probably half of his my parents were divorced i didn't do anything like that i'm not a rebel and and and and he he dropped he dropped out of high school  he had moto when he was sixteen and did up having to get a ged you know so he's like a little bit of the outsider there didn't really care about it you know system which is meant to indoctrinate us into the world of work and citizenship never got a never even finished his community college education never got his associates and he did everything sort of the he was into gaming but so what lots of him gaming is the billions and billions of dollars business lots of people are involved  gaming he he i would say you know in terms of he worked for government he worked for the government but his he knew he was going to work for the government his parents worked for the government his siblings worked for the government you know there's there's nothing you can really point to except maybe he voted for ron paul i mean it's it's there's no one thing you know i don't want to i don't want to ruin this for anyone who doesn't read the book but in the end you highlight a ridiculous n outreach program and you come to the conclusion that they know they're in trouble which is a quote from the book but when i read that i was wondering what does an uncommon to two tional untouchable government agency have to be worried about tracking thing on it though and they follow you with the drone but like so it's about propaganda about the n s a s propaganda efforts and propaganda is in every society and even in an authorit regime under say saddam or under the former leader of turkmenistan who was famous for being a crazy dust better or or under nazi germany there's always you always have a need to propagandize children  everybody because you know you still need the consent of the governed whether you're in a nominal democracy like the united states or whether you're in absolute dictatorship because fundamentally the dick the government is afraid of its people the government knows that it's only there on the sufferance of its people and so when given a chance it's kind of like you know if you own a really big dog that could take you in a fair fight some nights you've got to worry that that  might decide to bite you and they're worried about us because they know that you know when governments change it's because they change in violent ways and they don't want that to happen do you think that there's a there's a happy ending in this story well the happy ending so far has been in a way that i can put as a socialist would have never anticipated there's kind of been some movement from the free market angle  would have wanted because he's a very libertarian guy for example the i phone six is encrypted point to point so if you make a call or issue a text message on your i phone six or six plus or whatever that is dark to n s a if you use it because of the snowden revelations there are now apps for example i use one called signal it's free for i o s and for android that allows you to send text messages and phone and make phone calls completely encrypted p g p snowden approved n s a is not listening make all your calls to isis on that and and it a and so there's the europeans for example have started building their euro cloud to compete with google's american cloud which google has was in most amid a lot of the major attack companies including google were in bed with the n s a until two thousand and thirteen like the only major tech company or telecom that wasn't was t mobile but all the other ones a t m t v arise and cetera where and so the europeans are are are definitely reacting to all this the united states has you i mean u s silicon valley businesses have lost billions if not trillions of dollars to business to to companies that are have moved their business out of the united states because they don't want and their their their material their data exposed to the n s a which was found to be doing industrial espionage as one of the snowden revelations so there's been some movement in the private marketplace and there's been some movement and certainly internationally but there hasn't been really anything here in the united states i mean so i mean like the only program that has has gotten any air time since two thousand and thirteen has really been the telephone metadata program and telephone metadata is the stuff that's on your phone bill like what time you made a call who how long it lasted who you called where you were where they were that's it so if you look at your phone bill that's kind of it obama that he wanted to reform that program but he didn't and congress sort of talked about it but they're not and that was it that was the entire to post snowden debate and it's like a fraction of a fraction of one percent of what the a is up to and like what the defenders of that program say well you know you don't have to worry about that because they're not that program isn't listening to your phone calls and that's true because they have another program that listens to your phone calls and then if they talk about their program that listens to your phone calls they say well don't worry about that one because that one doesn't store your phone calls because that's true we have another one that stores the phone calls and so there's so much  he said that that material is not actually collected when even if it's if it's taken from your device and then it's stored on their computers in a data farm in utah they don't actually have it it's not actually collected until an analyst goes and listens to it or reads it or watches it and and so i'm like well by that standard then the library of congress doesn't collect any  books until someone a librarian goes and opens the book it has not been collected that is the exactly the same logic and you know it's kind of like if you have my naked pictures and you just are too bored to look at them first of all i'm insulted and secondly i'm i'm i'm like pissed off because you shouldn't have my naked pictures so and speaking of naked pictures that's something that snowden revealed to you that the n s a has lots of naked pictures of piece of americans because they like to turn on the little camera in your device which could be unplugged by the way while they do this and they can watch people and video of them in their own homes and they do all the time and they catch them having sex and they save the videos and they trade them and they do this all the time for fun this is your tax dollars at work you know meanwhile we can't rebuild a school that i'm sure nobody here does anything disgusting in front computers ever so i want to ask you a little bit about the craft here was was the book always set up the way it is with mostly one picture per page and some text rather than did you ever anticipated as more of a traditional comic with panels  question yeah i originally when i was doing it i thought of it just naturally as multiple panels per page because that's how all comics are and when my publisher came back with the size i experimented with different approaches to this and i realized that multiple panels per page just were too small and you know i'm fifty two my eyes aren't what they used to be and so i'm kind of influenced by that and i wanted a book that was you know easy to read i mean often there are books that you know like i won't read doris kearns goodwin because the font on her books is too small and and and really i mean it's like make them longer and make the font bigger and let more letting i just need that and so i simple images per page seemed to work best for the for this ok now i think right when this book came out there was there is some issue with the l a times and the l a p d and and all that and it was kind of reported in a sort of lopsided way and i was wondering if maybe you'd be willing to talk about that and then we will jump to your question so start thinking up some good ones sure how many people have heard of this l a times sylvia p d thing ok i'm sorry so as for the rest of you i'll fill you in so i until until may of this well until july of this year i was the cartoonist at the l a times on the editorial page and i had that position since two thousand and nine and this story i'm about to tell you kind of tough into the snowden book in that it kind of addresses the quote that question you know if you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't be worried about government surveillance or state surveillance and here's an example of some someone me not doing anything wrong being subjected to state surveillance and still nevertheless getting screwed over so what happened was that in may of this year l a p d announced a crackdown on jaywalking and my cartoons were about local issues so i did a cartoon about it into a company that cartoon i put i wrote a blog that appeared on the on in the online edition of the l a times dot com that contained that just started out with a little personal anecdote of when fourteen years earlier back in two thousand and one i was arrested in the west hollywood section of l a for jaywalking and  cop apparently with a quota to fill didn't like the cut of my chip grabbed me spun me around should threw me against a wall handcuffed me wrote me up for a ticket attracted quite a crowd of people who were upset at what they saw and then they were yelling at him and stuff and then ultimately one of his colleagues showed up and he gave me my ticket and then he said here's your license back and threw my license into the gutter at the time i was furious and i'm still angry about it when i think about it and i filed a complaint with internal affairs division of the l a p d they'd norah ninety eight point four percent of all internal affairs complaints and even though you know i did have white privilege working for me they ignored mine too and so i didn't hear from them and that was that i've skipped forward to two thousand and fifteen and may of this year i mention this thing runs in the l a times a couple  months later i get a call from the l a times from a reporter who says l a p d is questioning your story and i say what you mean and he says well they say it didn't happen like i said of course they would say that he said yeah yeah they say there was none of it the angry crowd the license toss the the being roughed up being handcuffed you were never handcuffed that couldn't have even happened as it really could've happened because yeah the officer in question has never used his handcuffs in twenty years on the job and i said not even with his wife and then he's you know it's like discussed like the biggest slacker ever i mean i was like and so anyway he's like i'm like well whatever they can say whatever they want and he goes well they have proof and i'm like what do you mean they have proof and he goes yeah he was secretly tape recording your arrest and they gave us the p d gave us the tape and i'm like what it was like fourteen years ago l a p d was secretly audiotaping people they were arresting for jaywalking also i'm sorry to interrupt is that legal for them to record you without your without telling you it is legal in the state of california ok but they never use the tapes because they never hold up in court they're only used for firing cartoonists from newspapers right sorry really continue yes but that's a very specific purpose that we you know so yes so i'm like at this point i'm very upset i mean how is this possible i mean i'm like winston smith in one thousand nine hundred four sure that we've always been at war with the stage and suddenly and now we've always been friends with the stage and we're and i'm just freaking out and i'm like questioning my own memory and but i'm like no i would know i was handcuffed you don't really forget being handcuffed or thrown up against a wall and when you're sixty two you don't forget a cop who's six four six five either and so the you know we go back and forth the guy drills me asks me all sorts of interesting questions like why we can't hear the driver's license hitting the ground and i was like because we live on earth with the with the laws of physics that apply on earth it's like it's made of paper like we were supposed to make like my eleven year old son heard me tell it talk about it and he file away file and he and in the interest of transparency i listen to it for the first time with him on the phone and you can listen to this on my website or you can go to a new domain dot net a new domain dot net and there's other places where this tape has been embedded and you can listen to it it's six minutes and twenty seconds of a look twenty seconds of talk of the officer and then the rest of it is pringle the reporter says so what do you think i'm tired it's nine thirty at night i go i think this is it i said i think this is a joke and he it's not a joke i go you're right it's a fucking joke and then and then he's like well anyway this is so that thing starts spinning out of control twenty four hours later they've already made the decision to fire me three days later without having any kind of redress no ability to talk to my editors my editors on vacation in japan she doesn't know about any of this turns out this is coming from the highest levels by the way it's coming from the publisher of the l a times a guy named austin butte or billionaire former deputy mayor of l a in the edit my and my editors aren't even involved in any of this they cut me loose and they publish this editor's note that ma paint me like the new jason blair or stephen glass a lying sack of shit fabulist and it's just to you know i mean i don't cry a lot i cried i was so devastated and when this thing appeared fortunately for me and this is like you know yes the internet has completely destroyed political cartooning but it did save my ass in this one case because people read the story and they and there were these audio experts from all around the country who asked me to send them the file to see if they could enhance it and two days later one of them successfully got a really clean copy clean as we could expect given the quality and you could hear among other things a woman screaming at the cop take off his handcuffs so you know and the subject line from the audio expert was merry christmas so i was like i was like i was like oh my god this is going to be huge right this is going to be great like of course as soon as i contact my my editors at the l a times they will immediately do it any good journalistic organization would do and investigate look into  it and decide if they are proven wrong to retract and apologize and reverse their decision so anyway there's more on that tape to that there's other people screaming at the cops sexual innuendo making fun of them implying that he wants to sodomized me i mean they're pissed and so i send this tape and the links and everything to all the editors at the l a times crickets no answer nothing not even like we can't hear you nothing and so basically this builds in social media twitter is going crazy facebook and so on and and then there's company starts getting a lot of coverage like in the in the guardian in national business times new york observer did their own analysis of the tape they got the same results greg greg palast the investigative reporter did his own analysis got the same results the so finally the l a times is feeling the heat after three weeks and so what did they do they double down and publish another analogous piece and they hired their own tampered or spliced so they had two experts and a guy who specializes in enhancement and a guy who specializes in alice s so what do they publish the enhancement guy said that he his analysis revealed nothing and did not talk about enhancement the analysis guy talked about been handsome it and talk to talk about anything about his analysis so it's you know they know they're gil and so yeah i mean it's i don't want to but it's you know it's very time consuming and it's an ordeal but there's really no choice and there's a broader issue at stake here i mean there's there's some pretty nefarious connections between this major american newspaper which is the most important newspaper west of the mississippi river and the police for example and i won't get into all the details but the main one is that the l a p d pension fund is managed by a company called oak tree capital oak tree capital is the is the number one shareholder of tribune publishing which own to los angeles times so in other words the l a p d owns the los angeles times so when the calls the publisher of the l a times who by the way arranged for that transfer of money to oak tree capital there is a tendency for them to take that phone call and to take it very seriously and you know the  newspapers i mean a crate granted it's a newspaper chain it could be much worse it could be you know as something that actually matters in twenty delicatessen i want to ask you with your experience are you a fan of the idea of body cams on police officers or no yeah i'm editorialized in favor of body cams but even for example the sandra bland video really reveals the limitations of these because the cops know how to to to fake things and to cover things up like if you watch the sandra bland video anybody else notice that her beating takes place off dash cam like she's pulled off to the side and so she's on the sidewalk saying stop stop hitting me why are you doing that and she's very upset and crying but if you're on a jury and you watch that dash cam can you really say beyond a shadow of a doubt between that between beyond a reasonable doubt can you convict an officer for beating her you can't because maybe she's faking it maybe she's saying that you can't see it and so the point is the opposite work around these things i mean for example with the audiotape that was used in my case the officer is when he whistles throughout the tape and when that enhanced mint guy like like lifted away the whistles it was under the whistles that are the angry passers by yelling at the cops so they have these techniques where they tamp it down  the surveillance is like in l a that they in fact with just approved these uniform cameras and against the a c l u this recommendation the federal government has decided to pay for them even though the policy is has been set up to protect l a p d so whenever the in los angeles officer comes back from his duties he has the right or she has the right to review his or her d video before writing up his or her situation report for the incident at hand which obviously allows them to make to write a report that corresponds to what appears on the video and the chief of the police charlie beck told the l a times well you know it helps them remember true but you know i mean it does help them remember it also prevents them from being caught in lies and it allows them to say i mean you're acting i mean take for example my cop you know one of the reasons i was fired they said there was a discrepancy between what i said and what they said because you can hear my cut the cop being so polite and he's like here you go sir here's your driver's license back he sounds very polite and jovial while he's throwing my license on the ground he knows he's being taped i tried to explain that to the times over and over it was just like talking to morons but which i was in and so i resigned the off the record version is the sort of thing you should come up and ask me about after you so you went in a different direction i did go in a different direction yes seattle review of books dot com yes like i just read about a series of budget layoffs that are about to happen in the chicago tribune and they said many workers will be realigned aligned out of work i guess so yeah i do see an analogy here you know opposing it going out and something like this is really hard it's like obviously suing these people would not be nearly would not be a fraction as hard as as what snowden did but which took years for him to carry out among other things that he stuck in russia i don't think i'll end up getting stuck in russia as an example but as a  result but yeah i do see it if i can find the right lawyer who's willing to do it on a contingency i am going to do it and there's a broader issue that's more important much more important than me which is that the l a p d and police forces around the united states want to shoot black people like they're going out of season but on top of that they don't even want cartoonists to call about it call them out on it when they do it they don't even want any criticism whatsoever and that's what this is about they didn't like  mean if i'd been doing pro l a p d cartoons and i was the biggest lying sack of done in american journalism i'd still be working there probably would have gotten a raise so the thing is this is what this is about and they've said sell the police union gloated about it on their blog saying it's like great that this critic of the l a p d is gone and they were behind it so this is a this is about collusion it's about press freedom i mean you do not live in a democracy if a reporter or a cartoonist or an editor can be fired by a government agency and that's what this is it's it's a lot you know lord knows there's tons of examples of collusion between government and the media anyone who's ever seen the gary webb movie shoot the messenger knows that but and it's highly recommend that it's currently streaming online definitely i  know right now h b o yeah if you have h b o go go watch it but it's but it's brutal so yeah i mean i know this is one of those things where it's like time to take out the trash but taking out the trash is never any but they give you any insight into why snowden and the other whistleblowers it's oh i think see i think i know that if i were in his position i would have done the same thing absolutely the difference is that i would have never been in a position like that because it's a guy like me a lefty was never going to be recruited by the n s a so you know i mean like when i was in college at columbia i went to the cia recruiting table and i wanted to adventure what can i say and and they told me straight out like yeah we don't hire kids like you and i said what do you mean and they said you know this is true they said we prefer to hire mormons from utah and and i said and i was like really and there's like that's really fucked up and then they were like yeah well also didn't you go to some socialist party meetings on campus and i was like communist too and they were like you would think they'd want people from a variety of backgrounds but they don't or they didn't maybe things have changed but i would never have been able to get a job like that  that's why i would never be in a position to do something like that what makes snowden so unusual is that he came from such a conformist background and then made this political journey to to to do this radical act that's just very rare you know it's like my next follow up book to this is about bernie sanders he's the opposite this guy's had the same politics his entire life going back to his as his childhood he's always been the same guy  so he didn't have a political journey he his story is about consistency even through changing times so it's just that's very different thank you i was one of the people flyers outside before but i came in because i really wanted to hear you and thank you and then when i heard your count of your difficulties with the police in l a i decided i had to ask you what you think about this write up october that we were leafleting about were calling on people to fundraise to bring one hundred of the families of people that have been killed by the police to be in october twenty fourth in new york city and i was wondering what you thought of that what's not to like what's not to like but i mean more than that we're saying which side are you on because people are they they say oh oh well good luck to you we really like but we're saying look you have to take a stand because if you're saying if you're not doing something to stop it if if we sit and watch if we don't say anything about and stand up to among other injustices police violence then it's going to continue unabated i mean i hate i mean these cops are out of our out of control completely trouble with cops not just this one time and you know i heard so many other people have problems with cops it's like i mean why are we putting up with this crap you know i'm like america land of the free in the brave i was going through airport in kansas city a while back and there was a young man who kept being put through the security through the metal detector over and over it kept beating so i could go through one more time very rudely and like what the fuck and you know that's the country we live in now and you know just like a two years later i was in iran of all places ok where i'm the great from the great satan and i'm an ayatollah khomeini international airport and they're like no you know i go to put my my luggage through the baggage care through the x ray machine the oh no no no no you are a guest in our country it's disgusting to subject foreigners guest country to these kind of security measures like that happened repeatedly like just i'm like something's wrong you know something's really wrong we put up with way too much state oppression that's my and i believe that these two in line are going to be the last two questions of the night it just boggles my mind when i sit on the bus and i see ninety five people texting and i look at my e mails chloral every you can go see all this visit all your old you know all those documents that you can't find and like you do the search on your i phone and you're like i know i had that e mail and it just doesn't turn up like they obama and his buddies they have that in utah it's at this huge storage facility that they built out there talk about numbers i mean you know it's like you're talking like numerous tetra quads of data that are that are just going through the system you know it's like imagine the last scene of indiana jones but instead of it being like the arc of the competent and all that right that the storage is the thing is that the technology has evolved to the point where it's so much cheaper and more efficient to store data than it ever has been and so even though the system is awash in data they never you know they they have this new post nine eleven attitude they before nine eleven they said that they were looking for a needle in a haystack when they were looking for for example a terrorist suspect now the idea is this is their vernacular that they want to gather the entire haystack and then store it and have it at their disposal to look through their leisure and so that's you know that that library idea they want to have everything there and so there's no possibility of abuse of that you know richard nixon was impeached for first for tapping one hundred twenty phones now thanks for want to talk about snowden a question about snowden versus a son so snowden was a person a historical figure who works to improve the secrecy and privacy of communications and transactions among everybody including the most wealthy and powerful in our society a songe on the other hand was a figure who worked to bring to the public visibility all kinds of secret material which turned out to be very valuable believe for a long time that if the actual transactions and communications of those at the top of power were publicly available then there was to be world to be a different place in fact to be so much better that it's worth looking at changing the protections of privacy so for that reason i'm actually tired of hearing about snowden and i'd like to hear a lot more about asuncion about openness i don't know that's just my you know thank you for bringing that up because i mean  i i don't take it to not take anything away from what snowden did because he's the hero of our time for sure but open this is crucial i mean i don't understand why cabinet meetings can be behind closed doors and not not broadcast online i don't understand why government officials are allowed to meet at restaurants and discuss government business i don't understand why city council should be able to have a closed door meetings to me these are all people who work for us they are government employees they're our servants they don't have any secrets they have theirs their secrets are no secrets there are secrets they should be they don't have any right to privacy or reasonable expectation of privacy they should be all everything they do should be completely exposed to us lord knows they want to know what we're up to and i mean as we've been discussing so i think openness is crucial you know you go into like a a city council or a school board meeting you know everybody stands up and if there's a good turnout and members of the community come up and say their piece but the votes have already been decided the fix is already in everything was already discussed down at the local watering hole weeks before and it's all been window dressing so it's both democracy it's just it's no more legitimate than a