Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/145 Thanks!
Well, thank you very much for that, Nick.
And thank you to the CCC for inviting
me back. I had the pleasure of speaking
at the 24th Congress
in Berlin.
So all I can say is the CCC must be a
sucker for punishment to want me to speak
again.
And this has to be the biggest room I've
ever spoken in.
And it's wonderful to see so many people
here.
But, you know, the old adage size
isn't everything, it's what you do with
it.
So let's see what we can do now in very
limited time.
As Nick said, I used to work as a British
intelligence officer for the UK Domestic
Security Service and MI5,
and this was back in the Jurassic era,
in the mid to late 1990s.
And I and my former partner,
Michael David Shayla, were there for
about six years each.
And then we resigned in order to
blow the whistle.
In fact, I would suggest that in that
analog age, we were sort of whistleblower
1.0.
And what we're seeing now is the fruits
of our labors with wonderful people like
Edward Snowden coming forth and
changing the global debate around
what is proportionate about surveillance,
intelligence and democracy.
So that's why we're here to celebrate, I
think,
just to recap.
Just to recap very briefly, for those of
you who did not sit through my hour long
presentation last time,
I worked in MI5 in the 1990s
with David Shaila for six years,
and we saw a whole catalog of
crimes being committed by the British
spies, which ended up in us
resigning.
These included files
on government ministers, hundreds
of thousands of files on
political activists within the UK
bombs that could and should have been
prevented.
The exploded on UK streets planted by the
Provisional IRA, which
MI5 could have stopped but
then didn't, and then they lied to
government to cover up their mistakes
innocent people going to prison for
crimes and terrorist acts.
They did not commit illegal
phone taps.
There's a surprise.
And it culminated with what became
known as the Gaddafi plot, which was
Am I six? Which is a sort of James Bond
wing of British intelligence funding
known Islamic extremist terrorists
in Libya to try and assassinate Gadhafi
in 1996.
This operation was illegal under UK law.
It went wrong, manifestly because Gadhafi
survived to be assassinated another day
by CIA and MI6
backed rebel forces in 2011,
and it killed innocent people.
We couldn't think of anything more
happiness than that, so we decided to
resign and we ended up
blowing the whistle.
And we ended up actually going on the run
around Europe.
This was back in 1997.
We had to go on the run literally for
months with MI5 on our heels.
We had to live in hiding
in a remote French farmhouse for a year.
David had to live in French exile for
three years. He could not return to the
UK and he went to prison not
once, but twice.
First of all, in 1998, when
the British government tried but failed
to extradite him from France
to stand trial for a breach of
the Official Secrets Act, and
then in 2000, he returned
voluntarily to the UK to stand
trial.
And, of course, then ended up
imprisoned, found guilty and he was sent
to prison again.
So he paid a very high price
for his whistleblowing activities.
I paid a very high price for our
whistleblowing activities, and lots
of people around us did as well because
our friends, our family,
student activists, supporters and even
journalists were arrested
and in some cases convicted for
reporting or supporting this
kind of work.
But this is ancient history.
I mean, this is way back in the 1990s
where even Krypton was a mere
twinkle in John Young's eyes.
Although if you go on the site, you will
find a lot of documents still from the
Shaila whistleblowing is.
But one thing I learned from that a
couple of things are key things I learned
from that was one how the
media can be controlled.
It can be spun
by the intelligence agencies even
more than our government spin machine
and to the value of privacy.
Because during those years and
subsequently too, I still have my
paranoid moments during those years.
We knew that we were being investigated
by the spies.
We knew that our communications
were being intercepted.
We've been on the inside.
We knew how they did it, so we knew
our emails were not safe.
We knew that our telephones weren't safe.
We knew as well that there was a high
probability that there were property bugs
planted in our home.
Even in our bedroom where they could
listen to everything,
we also found out subsequently as well
that some of our friends had been
pressured by the secret police in the UK
to report on us.
So this is what it's like to live without
privacy. This is what it's like to live
under Stasi state, secret
police or totalitarian regime.
And we had it early because we
did something rather is rather
extraordinary. We blew the whistle, we
went on the run. We sort of expected that
pushback.
It does not mean it's easy to live with.
It's incredibly corrosive
to the human spirit to
think that everything you say, everything
you do, even if you just want to have a
private conversation with your mother,
is being listened to by some gray
person in a gray office.
And you begin to self-censor, you
begin to worry about what you're looking
at on the internet, you begin to worry
about what you're saying, what you might
be giving away inadvertently by talking
about your private life, your social
life.
And that's what we had to live through.
So role for now, of course.
And now we all know now we
all know that we are being listened to
and watched and surveyed
in an enormous, amazingly panopticon
manner.
Way worse than we faced back in the
1990s.
So this is why I continue to fight for
privacy, this is why I continue to
campaign against this
mission creep of the intelligence
services.
However, this talk originally was
pitched as a for war story,
which may seem a little tangential, but
bear with me.
This is something I began
to just state to cogitate
about in the last year because one of my
hats, one of the jobs I have is to
work as the European director of an
organization called Law Enforcement
against Prohibition,
which is a bunch of police officers,
judges, prison governors, intelligence
officers, you name it.
Lawyers who all say through
our professional experience, we
know that the war on drugs has failed
and we know it for these reasons.
So what I want to quickly scoot through,
although my what I call my full wars and
their wars on concepts, this is what
we're facing.
So it's the war on drugs,
the war on terror, the war
on the internet, of which you're
all expert. And of course, the war now
on whistleblowers.
And how do they link in my strange
mind, my little paranoid mind?
I'll explain.
I see these all
as a basic attempt
to subvert the basic freedoms
we in the West particularly
have fought for and spilled our
blood for and died for over the last five
or 600 years in our Western countries
to fight for the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights to fight for
the basic concept of rights.
So that we cannot be extra judicially
murdered. We cannot be kidnaped
and tortured and disappeared.
We cannot be stifled.
Our freedom of expression is enshrined of
freedom of privacy is enshrined.
So what we're looking at now, I think
over the last 50 years or so is
a concerted pushback against those
freedoms.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
came into being in 1948
as a direct result, a direct
pushback to the horrors of World
War Two.
And ever since then, we have seen what
President Eisenhower called the
military industrial complex, pushing
back, trying to erode, trying to
get rid of these basic rights in
their own interests.
The war on drugs, I think, is probably
the first version of
this fight back.
And I say this because the aim of the
war on drugs, of course, is a drug free.
Well, drugs are evil, drugs are bad, blah
blah blah.
We have a situation where the war
on drugs is being used for 50 years
to erode
civil liberties across the planet in
every country.
It becomes a reason to
to break into people's houses.
It becomes a reason to specifically
target certain ethnic communities and
imprison them disproportionately to
the general population.
And it specifically became a reason to
intervene as the US likes
euphemistically call it into other
countries across the planet where they
might have other strategic interests,
particularly Latin America
and particularly Central Asia and the
Middle East and North Africa.
And this trade is worth estimated
about half a trillion dollars per
year.
And that is all going into the pockets of
not only organized crime cartels,
organized criminals.
And not only the official criminals
in our banking system who do very well
out of it. Let's point that out.
But also.
Also into the pockets of
people, organizations that are designated
to be our terrorist enemies.
It is estimated that over half the
organizations on the planet who are
designated to be terrorists.
Are funded primarily through drug money.
So on the one hand, we prohibit
drugs, push the trade underground,
becomes hugely lucrative and then
it creates the war on drugs and then the
other. On the other hand, we want to
fight the war on drug, war on terror,
which is fantastic, isn't it?
This is a cyclical business model.
I mean, some genius somewhere that
up is perfect for the military
security complex.
I mean, even Afghanistan, which we
liberated, and they're so grateful and
they're so happy ten years ago,
over 10 years ago, they
estimate that during the West's
occupation, the acreage undergrowth
for the poppy has doubled
across the country and strangely
under the British run areas,
it's trebled.
And they're going to have a bumper crop
this year. So that worked
anyway.
This is a a major
problem, but I think it is probably
going to go away in the next few years.
There have been massive steps across
Europe in terms of harm reduction.
There have been massive steps across
Latin America, and many countries are now
beginning to legalize certain drug use
and tax it and regulate it.
And even in America itself, the
fountainhead of the war on drugs,
even in America, two states now
have fully legalized cannabis
use, even for fun.
Hey.
And over 20 states have already legalized
for medicinal use.
So this war is over.
The reason it's over is not because of
common sense prevailing at the U.N.
it's not for common sense prevailing in
on campaigning or with our politicians.
It's because they don't need it anymore,
in my view.
We have now the war on terror.
Bright, new, shiny toy.
Much more effective for intervening
across the planet.
The war on terror
after 9-11, when the intelligence
gloves came off has provided the perfect
pretext, the perfect pretext
for eroding all our hard
won civil liberties in all our countries.
It has produced the most amazing
pretext for intervening in any country we
deemed to be harboring terrorists,
whatever that is, or might be
threatening a national security, whatever
that is, that's never been legally
defined anywhere.
And we have this situation
where it's not just our rights
going. We have a situation where
the president on a Tuesday in the US
sits down and he's presented with
a list from the CIA
based on hearsay or
snitches or, you know,
electronic intelligence, saying
this person is a terrorist
and that is the CIA kill list that he
signs every week.
And when he puts his signature at the
bottom of that list, those people are
fair game.
Those people will be attacked
by kids in America, playing
video snuff movies, using
drones to take out that person
on the say so of anonymous intelligence
agents.
Where whole families and wedding parties
and village councils are eradicated
from unseen threats in the sky.
That is what we have coming out of
America now. And also the UK, by
the way, there is a RAAF base in
Lincolnshire, in the UK that is doing
the same thing.
This is disgusting.
We have a situation where the UK
spies have been caught out
and tried and found guilty
and had to pay reparation for torturing
terrorist suspects, kidnaping them,
torturing them.
And nobody is being put on trial.
Nobody's being held accountable, nobody
has been put in prison for engaging
in torture. These might be people I used
to work with go to,
you know, go out for dinner with or some
is just, it's just horrible.
And they are being covered up for
their being protected by the
establishment.
And this is all part of what I see as the
growing fascism.
Let's not mince words.
It's a growing fascism.
I say that advisedly using Benito
Mussolini definition of fascism, which
was the merger of the corporate and the
state.
That is precisely what we've seen.
That is precisely what we're seeing.
You will know better than I then
about the war on the internet.
I don't really need to go into that
detail here in this crowd,
but.
The disclosures of Edward Snowden have
laid bare the sheer scale
and depth and complicity
of the corporate side of the internet,
as well as the government side of the
internet.
This is not just about trying to stop
the free flow of information where they
can spy on what we send to each other.
This is also about trying, of course,
with the copyright wars to stop
the free flow of interesting information
because they want to control that
information and get us to pay for it.
So they've got us in a pincer movement
and the corporate lobbyists.
The big corporations have been laid
bare as being complicit with the NSA
snooping. Snowden disclosed very early
on, but they also have shown their true
colors by trying to push through all
these ghastly international trade
agreements around the Pacific Rim
across the Atlantic, and
we need to be aware of this sheer
scale of corporatism.
What is going on?
How many rights we're losing?
The fact that these corporations, these
lobbyists, can actually put these
proposals in writing
and tell our elected representatives
who are supposed to represent our
interests assistance.
You sign here. You can't read it.
Just rubberstamp it.
If that is not.
A definition of corporatism is that it's
not an analogy with what was going on in
1930s Germany.
I do not know what is.
And then, of course, the corollary of
that, the inevitable
pushback of that
is the whistleblowers.
This is someone described it as the last
ditch regulator of this degree
of corruption, not just within the
intelligence agencies mean, you know,
we've had this whole slew of
whistleblowers coming against the banking
sector.
We have seen the whistleblowers come into
health everything.
They are just there and they need a
voice. They need protection.
And Snowden, he's just
and he has done the most amazing thing
for the planet. I mean, there have been
many other whistleblowers in the past,
including coming out of the NSA like
Thomas Drake and Bill Binney
and John Kiriakou, who is the CIA officer
who exposed their use of torture, who's
currently in prison, although the
torturers are not in prison.
A whole slew of whistleblowers are coming
out, and the old adage that
you shoot the messenger but you do not
address the message is becoming more
and more and more entrenched, and it's
still working.
We have a situation where in America
they have a law.
The 1917 Espionage Act.
That is being used against
whistleblowers, not spies.
And President Obama, in his two terms,
has used this law against whistleblowers
more than all the other presidents
before.
That is a war on whistleblowers, in my
view, and if we don't have
whistleblowers, we will never know what's
going on. We need to know.
Otherwise, we can't take steps to change.
So we are in a situation where if we do
not have these people or if they
cannot survive the process of coming
forward.
Then we will not have future
whistleblowers coming forward,
and this is one of the
things that one WikiLeaks has been so
good trying to support and help people
like Edward Snowden and to produce
avenues and conduits where they can
publish the information of
whistleblowers.
But it's also something that we all need
to support. We all need to protect.
We'll need to encourage
future whistleblowers.
There is the free Snowden
website and you can all donate
to his defense fund.
I mean, he you know, he
is not going to not have a few
legal fights in his future, shall we say.
There are other campaigns.
Jeremy Hammond, Julian Assange,
John Kiriakou,
even on a Carter. I mean, this is so many
of them. We need people who have the
courage to stand up and fight.
But if if the ones who come before
are seen to be crushed are seen not to
survive, not only to lose their jobs or
face imprisonment, but lose everything,
then future potential whistleblowers.
And there may be some here.
There may be some here who
think I'm working in this organization.
I see this going wrong.
I, as a single
single person, I can make a difference.
One person can make a difference.
Such a difference, as we've seen with
Snowden. We need to encourage that.
We need to show they can survive the
process, not just survive, but flourish.
So what we are now doing
is setting up a sort of umbrella
protective organization
to help.
And this will help.
This will channel funds, this will
channel support and just show
the world that we value these people's
courage and this indeed is
what it's going to be called courage.
The fund to protect journalistic
sources Many,
many journalists break great stories with
whistleblowers. They make the careers.
It's fabulous. They get awards.
What happens? The whistleblower?
Usually they're left swinging in the
wind.
We want to show that they are
valued and important and incredibly
brave.
So there will be this new foundation,
which I will be involved in courage.
I think it's a fantastic name
and we want to
support the whistleblowers out there
already.
But crucially, we want to encourage
other whistleblowers to come forward.
There will be another one in a year or
two, of course, and we want to make sure
they immediately get protection.
They immediately get support, they
immediately get recognition because it's
a very, very frightening and very
lonely process to go through
when you're on the run and you're being
threatened with decades of imprisonment.
So please keep an eye out for that.
You can find the new site.
I think it's been registered in various
names, including Courage Fund, Doxy
H. You can find it through my website.
Initially, it's just being started,
and we want to encourage
future whistleblowers because without
them, we haven't got a clue what's going
on behind the scenes.
More and more, the laws are crushing
dissent. More and more, the laws are
crushing any resistance.
And actually, that is what we need.
And that's what we need as an
organization, as a group,
as a community to do.
Because I've said this many, many times,
the political process is broken.
Democracy has been corporatized.
We can't resist in the same way that
we used to think we could, you know,
civil society, protest groups, whatever
they are infiltrated, they are spied on.
We are all surveyed. We have no privacy.
We can't plan.
We can't think. We can't, right?
We can't communicate freely.
But your community, our community,
this is the one community
that can offer a line of defense.
I think you should stop calling yourself
the resistance because that is indeed
what you are.
Please go forth and fight.
So thank you very much for the applause
and having that be ready for
another one in one minute.
Thank you, Annie, for this.
She cut the talks down to 20 minutes.
She could tell you a lot more.
I'm so sorry you had to cut it because
there was some fuck up.
I was involved in two so
huge applause again.
Please thank you.