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We know
and we know, they know and
they know, we know, they
know, and in turn
we know, they know, we know, they know.
Except until quite
recently, us
we we mortals
didn't know. They knew.
They knew until Mr. Edward
Snowden let us know.
He knew.
Whether we call it eavesdropping or
spying or signals intelligence,
the very nature of electronic
monitoring has radically evolved
over the past few decades and we
are still trying to wrap our monkey
brains around what
it all means.
Let's begin at the beginning.
We're here to talk about field station
Berlin and anyone who's
been to Berlin has looked up at the
skyline and somewhere
between the film, Tom and the fans.
Tom has seen
a vaguely phallic shaped, whitish
structure silhouetted against Berlin's
sleek, gray sky.
It's abandoned now.
The only things that live there now are
ghosts and untold secrets.
It was my home for two years in the
1980s.
And as I stand before you today,
I still don't quite understand how
and why I ended up there.
But I can tell you that if I hadn't
started there, I certainly
wouldn't have ended up here.
So bear with me
and let Zen navigate our way back in time
and then to that strange building.
Officially, it was the radar station,
but Berliners knew better.
They called it the Gwoza or
buggier.
I'm a lucky man.
I now have the coolest job in
the world.
I get to travel around.
The planet is one of the few security
experts in public relations
putting out fires, fixing people's
problems and launching and developing
their companies.
I'm a PR cypherpunk.
There's really no career path for what I
do. But if I had to start somewhere,
it had to be my completely
accidental, unplanned
career as an intelligence officer
working for the National Security
Agency and not
just as any random analyst, but as the US
Army signals intelligence analyst
at field station Berlin at the height
of the Cold War.
I had never even planned on joining the
Army, but Ronald
Reagan had done an excellent job in
destroying economic opportunity for all
but the very rich.
And let's.
Nice round for Ronnie
and for those of us straight out of
college, there was next to nothing to do
out there.
I was once rejected for
a job as a waiter because
I didn't have a graduate degree.
So my life choices came down
to moving back home with my parental
units.
Committing suicide
this way. Right.
Or joining the army,
really.
And so that's how I found myself in the
US Army uniform, studying Russian
at the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California.
It's important to remember that the
National Security Agency was
and is primarily a military
agency.
You should look at it as a fifth branch
of the U.S. military.
Its head has always been a two or three
star general and well, its
budget has always been several orders
of magnitude greater than that of the
CIA.
It's always spent its money on equipment
rather than people
running. A global intelligence network
required a lot of cheap labor.
And we soldiers, airmen
and seamen were the worker bees that
collected and processed the pollen
before sending it back to the mother hive
at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Thank God I don't have to look at that
picture.
So after learning, the language du jour
would be shipped off to Goodfellow Air
Force Base in San Angelo, Texas,
where the only things to do besides
learning the dark arts of cryptanalysis
was the occasional armadillo race
and the regular consumption of margaritas
and nachos.
Lots of tequila.
So enough about me.
Let me tell you a little bit more about
me, because I found myself
after all of this landing at Tegel
Airport on a Pan Am jet in
what was then West Berlin.
You could tell from the flight in from
Frankfurt that this was no ordinary place
to be living.
For once you hit the German border.
The plane dropped drastically
to about three thousand feet, and the
flight attendants knew exactly when to
scoop up the glassware, which was
almost to the minute of when your ears
exploded from the rapid drop in air
pressure, the air transit agreements
with the Soviets dated from the late
forties.
So that's how they flew
now without exhuming all the whitened
bones of the Cold War.
But just so we know what we're talking
about. I was working on the second
floor of that phallic shape,
top secret intelligence facility
located on a mountain of World War Two
rubble, which was the highest point in
Berlin, which was in the middle of a
forest in a city of two million people
surrounded by a concrete wall with guard
towers, a machine gun nests at regular
intervals, which was in turn surrounded
by twenty three Soviet motorized rifle
brigades and tank regiments, and not
to mention a very large, very well-armed
East German military.
The info on.
There were three year olds in three air
corridors out and the duty train ran
once a day.
I was fresh out of college, had just
graduated from an intelligence school in
the army. I never wanted to join
and I knew how to say, don't shoot.
I know secrets in several
languages, so.
Welcome to field station Berlin.
It's difficult to explain just how hard
it is to even talk about working at such
a place in its day, Teufel
Spag, the Devils Hill was one
of the most secretive intelligence
facilities in the entire world.
The feds really put the fear of God into
you about the penalties, the severe
penalties that would result if you
ever told stories out of school.
This makes it difficult for me, even now,
a quarter of a century later
to talk about my experiences.
You know what?
The Cold War is long over, and
I know a lot of you were born after the
Soviet Union collapsed,
but I feel on pretty
safe ground talking about this
for one good reason.
And his name is Jim
Hall.
Me, Jim.
Jim got to Field Station Berlin just
a few months before I did.
He, too, was an analyst,
that Jim was a pretty friendly guy.
He used to come up and pay me a visit
and talk to the other analysts about what
we're up to and would go down
and hang out with him in his section of
field station Berlin, where he was busy
tracking Soviet Spetsnaz units.
You know, the Special Forces and
Jim was always good for a drink
and a laugh.
And a couple of years after I left,
he was busted for espionage
and treason.
It turns out that Jim was found
with a duffel bag full of cash in the
trunk of a very nice Mercedes
because Jim had been selling secrets
to the Russians for a very long time.
He went to jail for 30 years or so.
And anything I could possibly tell
you, he sold to the Soviets a long
time ago
because we knew they knew
that.
We knew they know. They we knew.
And if you're wondering why this is
the first time anyone has ever given a
serious talk about the inner workings of
Troy Felsberg, this talk should
give you a pretty good idea why.
Let me take you into the compound.
We called it The Hill, and I
worked on the Hill for a little over
two years.
At any one time there'd be about
two hundred people working up there.
Twenty four hours a day, 365
days a year.
I celebrated New Year's there in nineteen
eighty four.
A bunch of us went up to the fifth floor
and looked out on the city awash in
fireworks. At midnight you
could even see the borders between East
and West Berlin and not just because of
the wall and the illuminated death strip,
but because the fireworks celebration
stopped where the wall began.
In the beginning, as I understand it,
field station Berlin was just a
collection point where signals were
intercepted and recorded and then the
tapes would be sent back to Fort Meade
for processing.
Sometimes the backlog would get severe
and it would take months before the tapes
would be listened to.
An old story on the Hill says that what
brought about real change to field
station Berlin was the fact that
we had advance warning
about the building of the Berlin Wall.
But because the tape containing this
intelligence was listened to almost
six months later,
it was ultimately too late.
Construction had already begun.
So from the 60s onward, there was an
early warning element to our operations,
by the time I got there, we not only
had operators rolling up on frequencies
to record them, but actively listening
in and making notations.
These recordings were then sent off to
the processing shop with the scanners
would transcribe their contents.
The transcripts would then be sent over
to the analysts who would then write up a
report and send it off to Fort Meade.
And I was one of those analysts.
The Hill was the Joint Forces Base.
There were elements from the U.S.
Army, the American Air Force, the British
Army and the RAF.
There was only one way to get on to the
hill, the gate was guarded
by German local nationals.
We called them L.N. guards and backing
them up was a company of military
policemen who typically came
to work on the duty shuttle, which was a
bus that ran from the field
station barracks and left to fend off.
And if you lived off base or you missed
the shuttle, you could just take the Ubon
to terrorist plots and then walk.
If you time to just right.
The duty shuttle would stop for you or
someone with a car would pick you up.
The bus would drive you through the gate
and stop right at the front steps and
you'd walk up, show your electronic
blue badge to the MP and then pass
it over the electronic reader and proceed
down the main corridor to the
immediate right. You would see a metal
door that led to the area that the Brits
used.
The English were our poor cousins
when we disposed of our old equipment,
did go outside and scavenge our thrown
away rocks
there, intercept gear was almost all off
the rack, whereas ours was almost
all bespoke.
And I don't want to go into too deep dove
into that. The technology we
had. If you have any questions, you'll
find me at the bar afterwards.
But suffice to say that Felsberg
was beyond state of the art.
And I know there's some old guy out there
in the audience who worked for IBM in the
fifties that remembers using Skype
when I was Boon's counselor.
But up on Teufel back in the 80s,
we were using instant messaging
and we'd already started translating
transitioning in the early eighties from
mag tape to hard drives.
So enough now about toys
continuing our journey through the inside
a field station, Berlin, past the Brits
area going down the corridor.
On the left was the paper shredding
and pulping area known as
Jaws.
If you annoy the wrong people, you
would find yourself working at Jaws
for a shift.
It was a loud, wet and disgusting
job that involved pulping and baling
the many untold reams of paper
generated by field station Berlin.
Weirdly, the pulping paper
bills were supposedly sent to
a disposal site in East Germany, so
the security guys were regularly
unveiling and rebelling just to
make sure everything was properly
destroyed.
At any rate, you would continue down the
corridor where you would find a
set of elevators which would take you to
the area where you worked and I worked
on the second floor, which was where the
analysis section was, the European
communist section, which looked
after the East Germans and the Poles was
also there, as well as where the Air
Force, Air Defense and operations
interceptors worked in another
area on the same floor behind a rather
flimsy door with the cryptologic was
La Fox, which was our data center.
And that's where all the racks and
intercept recorders were kept and
maintained and very, very large racks.
I did a little bit of time back in La
Fox, where my job was to
explain to the technical guys what the
operators on the floor meant.
A job, kind of the reverse of what I do
today, which is to explain to mundanes
what technologists are really up to.
Moving on behind the analyst section was
where the watch officer responsible
for the oversight of all operations
of that shift behind him,
where 10 to 15 teletype printers
constantly pumping out intelligence
reports from around the world.
We would, of course, only get things that
related to us in Central and Eastern
Europe, but also hourly reports
about what was happening all over the
world.
There'd be somebody assigned to separate
and collate these reports into daily
read files in.
One of the great things about working as
an analyst was that you got
to read the read file.
Now, what the intelligence community
considers super secret or very valuable
is a very strange thing.
If you bought a copy of today's paper and
looked up to see what the weather was in
Moscow that day, that would
be unclassified.
Now, if you brought that paper, that
same paper into a field station, Berlin,
as part of a report, it remains
unclassified but gains a classification
because, you know, you were using it to
bolster your information about the
weather in Moscow.
But if you pointed a dish
at the group of Soviet forces, Germany's
weather information line and read or
heard the weather was going to be cloudy
and 19 in Red Square tomorrow, then
all of a sudden this becomes highly
classified code word information,
because we don't just
know from reading the newspaper,
you know, the Kremlin knows
that it's going to be 19 and cloudy in
Moscow.
You live in this you live in
this ethereal world where you know things
and then you really know
things.
And you feel like you have an inside,
and I believe one does have a true
insight into what's going on
in the world or more importantly,
what the most important people on Earth
are basing their decisions on,
because this is considered definitive
information for working the analysis
desk for the National Security Agency.
I knew what they knew that.
I knew that they knew.
My favorite section of all was
located diagonally across from the
analyst section, just over from
treadmill, which was the Russian
processing area.
It was an unassuming area full of shelves
and cabinets filled with books and
binders and videotapes.
It was it was the library.
Now, I've never been able to walk past a
bookstore, a library without exploring
and a library in an NSA
field station.
Well, that's just too good to pass up.
When things were quiet at Bury My Head in
the library and read the real history
of historical events.
Yes, because there really
are classified accounts of historical
events, two things
I remember well, we're watching a talk
by the man who was then CIA
station chief in Tehran when the embassy
was taken over in 1979.
The CIA station chief was one of the
51 hostages held by
the Iranians for over a year.
The talk he gave was in the form of an
interview before an audience of spies.
And the one part I'll never forget
was his answer to the question,
what did the Iranians get?
He said after a very
long pause.
They got everything.
Turns out that no one initiated
destruct procedures, and so all
of the classified material, you'd expect
to be inside a CIA station.
And so what wasn't given to the
Soviets ended up in an Iranian
museum of American imperialism.
So we knew.
They knew. We knew.
Another historical event I learned about
was the incident of the USS Liberty,
which was an NSA ship in the
Mediterranean staffed by U.S.
Navy sailors that was repeatedly
bombed and strafed by the Israelis in
1973.
Scores of Americans were killed.
The Israelis claim that it was a case of
mistaken identity, but the real
history was clear in its verdict.
The Israelis knew exactly whom they were
killing.
They just didn't want the Americans to
know what they were up to in the Sinai
before they invaded Egypt.
We field station analysts, when we
weren't busy reading the read file,
browsing through the intelligence
library, playing pranks on people
or taking in the air up on the fifth
floor, spent our time writing reports
and every report was addressed to one
man and one man, only
dancer, director,
NSA.
Everything was to Dansa.
We call them big daddy,
as in a scandal.
Did you get that third shot?
Think you see them off after Big Daddy
or. Yeah, it's important, but it's
not worth waking up.
Big Daddy.
Big Daddy knew everything.
He was the hive queen to whom
we brought the intel Nektar.
Now, NSA listening posts are neither
pretty nor comfortable inside.
Everything is pretty much gray or white
field station. Berlin's interior looked a
lot like mission control at Cape
Canaveral. Real glamorous, right?
But instead of people sitting in movie
theater style rows in front of monitors,
field station Berlin was set up with bags
of workers in front of monitors and racks
of de multiplexes and receivers
around the edge of the room or in pods
in the middle of the room think
harshly lit arcades like from the
movie War Games, but with all the screens
in black and white.
All the medal was Battleship Gray from
the racks to the covers of the receivers
to our main computer screen,
which was originally built as a fire
direction control system for recommission
battleships, every
room was built on raised flooring that
provided tempest proofing, as well as
ample space for cable.
It was called purposely so
because of the electronics.
We'd cut the fingers off of our wool
gloves so we could keep
typing well at the same time keeping our
hands warm.
Within the context of the Cold War,
working in a building full of spies on
top of the highest point in an island
city surrounded by a quarter million
troops of your adversaries does
not make you feel terribly safe.
In fact, a gallows humor sets
in sort of a distilled version of the
kind of humor everybody else and then
West Berlin developed in response
to Wall fever.
But while the working environment could
occasionally be harsh and stressful,
it didn't mean it was all work and no
play.
What happens in a tightly contained
environment full of smart 20 somethings
is the same that happens everywhere
else.
People play jokes.
One of the things that would be done
would be carbon paper in somebody's
headphones.
Now, when typewriters were still common,
you'd make a copy by taking a piece of
carbon paper and sticking it between
two sheets of paper.
What we do is would take a piece of
carbon paper and rub it on the inside of
somebody's headphones.
And this would leave an extremely large,
very big black mark
around each of their ears.
That would be very difficult to remove
because that's what you get when you take
your headphones off.
If you're foolish enough to take off your
tunic and work in your T-shirt, it
was not unknown for someone to soak their
shirt and water and fold it perfectly
and put it in the freezer
and by the end of shift, it be a
perfectly frozen rectangle.
Never happened to me.
Some of the jokes were jobs specific,
for example, in Signal's direction,
finding each line of direction is called
a lop.
So you take three bearings
from three different positions.
In where the three loops intersect is
the location of your target.
Lops knew people would be sent
back to engineering for a box of them.
They'd be directed to pick up a scary,
badly weighted box full of broken glass
and nuts and bolts, so even the slightest
movement would make them think that
they broke something.
You broke the law
and every new intercept operator
eventually found themselves
unintentionally taking copy
from West Berlin taxi drivers.
No, I didn't see that
coming.
No, I stated
that eventually get overwhelmed with all
the traffic and more than one would
eventually come to believe that we were
under attack once they realized
the signals were coming from inside West
Berlin.
There was also a very heavy element of
fetishizing our enemy, our targets,
to brighten up the otherwise white and
gray surroundings, the walls of
workspaces would be typically decorated
with Soviet flags, East
German propaganda posters
and other bits of communist regalia
with intentionally speak like communist
politicians.
You know, the freedom level
of a democratic republic
with we'd watched it our friends in
and and I knew a couple of
people who even dressed
in their private lives in clothes
they bought in stores in East Berlin
to get inside your head.
There was a.. There was an unofficial
rule that if the German scanner's the
the people who wrote up the tape
transcripts for the German section
when they were called in to work an extra
shift because of heightened activity,
they would show up wearing free German
youth uniform shirts.
The local German guards at field station
Berlin love posting the new guys at the
front gate when a dozen or so after
yodelers would successfully enter
the facility
through.
The European communist section was also
home to the station's best collection
of propaganda posters, they
raised money for their parties by running
a cafe out of an old wooden footlocker
cafe. Yorka would sell us
overpriced Caprice on potato chips
and candy bars in order to fund
their off duty debauches.
Our Air Force counterparts also had their
fun, they ran something called
the Google Pool whenever
the Soviets trained in the air.
Now, the Soviet pilots were infamous
for their recklessness in the air during
training exercises.
So our spies ran an in-house
gambling book.
You placed bets for the Gool pool,
and to win, you had to name the type of
aircraft involved in a crash
and where it happens.
I remember someone winning quite
a bit of money when they successfully
called the midair collision
of two hind V helicopters over
the Yuta bog permanent restricted area.
Sometimes we German speaking intel types
would be called out to assist in training
the infantry units from the Berlin
Brigade.
There was an urban warfare training
center in Salem, Dorff called Doughboy's
City, complete with
Esbjorn and buildings and everything.
We'd pretend to be punks.
Well, some of us had to pretend less
than others
to give the soldiers a good and proper
hard time so they wouldn't react badly
in an actual crisis.
One evening we were sent into Doughboy's
city to pretend to be anarchists,
German house occupiers, Vollans
visits, house visits
and the American soldiers were to evict
us as these soldiers
did not know that we
were also soldiers.
Now, this made for a lot of fun in the
beginning when we got to drop balloons
full of urine on them and throw pieces of
wood at their heads.
But it became a lot less fun
when the German riot police showed up.
They were a secondary force called in
because the American soldiers failed to
evict us.
I am still not sure if the German
cops didn't know it was an exercise,
but they came in and beat the
crap out of us.
I personally received three
stitches over my eyebrow from
that.
Let me tell you a little bit about the
people I worked with
at a time when the US military had
very few women, over 30
percent of field station Berlin was
female when I was stationed there.
It was considered at the time that women
had better natural faculties for foreign
language learning, but at the same
time women were equally scattered
throughout the chain of command.
Field station Berlin may have been
progressive on the sex front, but
racially it was very, very
white.
There were only five black
people, five
in an intelligence unit of around
750.
Other groups were overrepresented,
a surprisingly large number of
Teufel SPAG workers were either Morman
or Seventh Day Adventists.
I'd later been told that this was because
of the ease of which they were granted
security clearance, because all good
Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists not
to drink or smoke nor.
Indulged in physical pleasures,
this would all be fine and well if this
were only about the personal morality,
but is it good for a nation when groups
that hold moral positions out of line
with the mainstream populace start
making decisions about war and peace
and what is right and wrong?
I'm not sure.
Many of the people who worked at field
station Berlin were smart misfits,
we got out of college, couldn't find
a job and were crazy or stupid
enough to join the army.
There were at least two PhDs in my unit
and a number with graduate degrees.
And just going through Nessa's
cryptanalysis course really does do
something to your brain, just
as lawyers have their brains rewired
in law school.
The Krypto course, absolutely
redmap sections of your brain
and gives you the strange but very real
ability to predict the future
in very, very limited ways,
which is a useful skill, whatever you do
in your life.
We sergant worker bees.
We're almost all better educated than our
officers.
And this was something that all accepted
for the most part and it made for a
pretty good working environment.
But.
There's always one that just doesn't
want to work within the system.
In my case, there was a new
captain by the name of Mooney
who was the watch commander of my shift.
He insisted on calling me into the
watch office when I could have been doing
something more useful just to discuss
with him the big
picture.
Mooney was a bit of a conspiracy nut in
training.
He was pretty sure there was something
really big going on out there,
but we just hadn't spotted it, hence
the big picture discussions.
And on one very, very
slow night, after being called
in about the big picture,
one too many times,
I went back to my section and found a
small news article in the Army daily
newspaper Stars and Stripes.
You probably know that mentioned
that several military bases in West
Germany had gone on heightened alert
for unspecified terrorist threats.
So I took this unimportant snippet of
news and paired it with some routine
radio training for the East German
border guards for their new guys in the
guard towers.
And so I wrote this up as a very short
report, merely reporting the facts
and giving it the appropriate levels, a
very high classification.
And turned it over to Captain Mooney.
He was ecstatic.
This clearly the big picture
he was looking for.
So right at shift change, just as I
was leaving on a Sunday.
Captain Mooney put field station
Berlin on red alert
battle stations.
This meant that everyone that came on
duty could neither leave nor
be relieved.
Soldiers coming to work wearing clothes
for normal shift found themselves
in the middle of winter stand station.
In the cold with sticks means they didn't
know how to shoot on the roof.
With the building on lockdown,
no food or drink.
All the other destruct gear was put on a
hair trigger.
It was mayhem.
And the last words that man ever
said to me were gettle.
You're going to get a medal for this.
And I told him that the credit was all
his and I'd
prefer to just have my name left off the
report.
He told me he'd never forget this day.
And unfortunately, a lot of people never
quite forgave me for that one,
including all my commanding officers.
We humans have the useful ability to look
back in times of trouble
and remember the funny, the amusing, the
good times, but the world of field
station Berlin could quickly turned
deadly serious.
One Sunday, I came on watch in total
chaos was going on in the analyst shop,
multiple alerts had been sent out from
our stations around the world about a
pending Soviet attack.
Tactical nuclear weapons were on the move
and chemical units were gearing up for
battle.
We were all going to die.
This was it.
It was the big one.
And all because Ronald Reagan,
in preparation for his weekly radio
address, decided to test the mic,
not realizing it was live
with the words.
I've signed legislation that will outlaw
Russia forever.
We begin bombing in five
minutes.
I don't think to this day anyone realizes
how close we came to total nuclear
destruction because of that ignorant
man's actions.
Fortunately, we knew, they
knew, and so we let
them know. So they knew.
And so in the course of the eight hour
shift, Soviet military activity
gradually returned to normal and
we all lived to spy another day.
Looking back, I think I may
very well have been working during the
golden age of Sergant,
a relatively short period in history
when there were a hard and fast rules
over what was legitimately a target
and what was none of our business.
Collection was highly targeted.
There was no wholesale vacuuming
of data, not only because the
world was still very much analog,
but because it was illegal under US
law.
In the 1970s, the NSA
committed a number of crimes against the
state that were exposed by
a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee led
by Frank Church, the
church committee set down hard and fast
rules about what the NSA could
and could not do.
The most important of which being
they absolutely, positively
could not spy on Americans.
This was codified in an intelligence
directive known as Use of the 18
when I worked on the Hill and you
had the grave misfortune to intercept
a U.S. person, all
hell broke loose.
Tapes were wiped, brains
were dowsed, papers were shredded.
You expected and you
did to delete whatever
it was that you don't remember
that you just deleted.
You no longer knew,
you knew.
I realize that NSA not spying
on Americans gives little comfort
to her friends and allies, but
it's an important thing because it
demonstrates that there was
once upon a time, a culture
of rules and behavior that codified
an almost fundamentalist
level of privacy and
respect for the people that you
were sworn to defend.
You did not spy on your own.
The power and might of the community
was so great and so powerful
that even in the 1980s
it was self-evident that these powerful
weapons should never, ever
be pointed at one's own people.
That's not to say that some spying isn't
good, knowing what your adversary
is up to and how your adversary
is thinking prevents war
and minimizes poor judgment.
Field station Berlins ability to
intercept and analyze information
quickly meant that the West could
be more deliberate in their foreign
policy.
One such example was the day a
high level East German functionary
based in Moscow called his mistress
in East Berlin, telling
her that he was so sorry Schatzi, but
he wouldn't be coming on this weekend
because constant change, the Konstantin
Chernenko died and he'd need to stick
around in Moscow into the funeral.
Whenever that would be, now,
if there's ever been an example of loose
lips sink ships, the Soviets
did not announce the death of their
general secretary of the Communist Party
for several weeks.
Chernenko death set off a massive
power struggle inside the Soviet Central
Committee, a fight that generally
resulted that eventually resulted
in the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev
as general secretary.
But for three weeks, we
knew, they knew
and they didn't know that.
We were then able to keep calm
and not overreact while the Soviets
solved their own internal squabbles.
Now that's targeting.
Being selective.
Smart spying.
Yet the wholesale vacuuming up of
everything that serves
only to confuse,
we used to joke that if we wanted
to destroy the KGB, all
we had to do was empty all the
contents of all of our intelligence
facilities onto the front steps
of their headquarters and the square,
the choke on the information
that they know everything, which
would mean they'd know nothing.
And we'd know that.
An intelligence community that treats
everyone, whether friend or foe,
as a suspect is not
a tool of war prevention, but
a means of control.
To collect everything on Avani,
to collect everything on everyone is a
totalitarian act.
So here I stand.
A lucky man.
I got a front row balcony seat
inside one of the strangest,
most curious theaters of the Cold War.
Field station Berlin did a lot of good,
it had a very targeted mission
and the work, we turned out helped cooler
heads prevail at a time when the
world was at three minutes to nuclear
midnight.
And today, field station Berlin
stands empty, a derelict,
the big ear hears nothing
but the wind.
It's intelligence purposes past,
but there it stands, an off-White
phallic shape between the full term
and the fancy to him against the slate
gray Brooklyn sky.
It may now be a derelict, but
isn't it also a monument,
a monument to the good things
that knowledge can provide?
Hey, we didn't blow ourselves up,
the Cold War never turned hot,
and if we didn't know what
we knew, we knew because of signals
intelligence, it could have heated
up pretty fast.
Field station Berlin stands
as a monument and a memorial
to the power of knowledge and learning
over brute strength.
But it's also a warning.
A big white phallic
symbol reminding us that if
we use these intelligence weapons
on our own people, we're
all literally screwed.
Let's save Teufel Sebag,
let's preserve field station,
Berlin, at least the
outside, as both a monument
and a warning.
German is such a descriptively specific
language.
The word is Myanmar,
a warning monument.
Teufel, Baghdad, a symbol
for democracy, visions on
the island, Creed's of the Hinden
Arber and unmodern and context
Kenis einen under the Buddhi Tom Harben
Reutter give us kind of Gwoza
radar Schussel DC Izvestiya
hot kind of click
What a retard Sylve
is. Putsy it Needmore
Fundies Spitzer Inas Hughleys.
It's just in an election centrum,
in a telephone, Gizelle shop, a garment
district audit and other network
clouds or the malware of Iran
computer.
Ordered up,
but we're still humans,
we still are trying to wrap
our monkey brains around what
it all means, we still
need the pictograph.
So I ask you to preserve field
station Berlin.
We need to know that.
They know.
We know.
Thank you.
So thanks for your grandfather.
We do have enough time for a Q&A
session, so you may learn about
the microphones. If you leave before,
please do as quietly
as possible
and not like you do now.
Please be quiet.
So we have a Q&A just beat in the bar.
We don't need to do a Q&A.
We can just meet in the bar.
As you wish.
I was
happy to answer any of it.
OK, if it gets more quiet, we may start
the Q&A.
As such.
Connector's, I have
a question.
No, not a question, a statement.
I don't really trust you.
If I if I put on my tie, will
that help?
OK, I want to please
yeah, hello.
It's really strange because you remind
me of the old Stasi
officers from our family and
all around and old same
stories of, oh, we are so great guys
and we know everything about way they
know, but they don't know.
And I don't know why it's James
Hall or Mr. Carney, your reason
to Spokeo and not Mr. Edward Snowden.
It's really strange that you not
broke and your friends of the NSA spoke
about things that matter and not
histories and funny stories from
your military career.
It's strange that you use
this thing like an intelligence agency
is defended by your years, can go
to make good things and everything else
that's, I don't know, disgusting.
Were you at the same speech?
I was.
Well, OK, microphone one,
OK. Hello.
Um, first I wondered whether
it might be the wrong place for this
talk, but later I realized
that this talk really gave me
an insight into how
things work out within signal
intelligence and how people think
and how they reflect on the work.
And the problem was, I didn't
got the impression that you reflected
much about what you've done, because
you told us in the last part
of this talk that the world
has been nearly into
the hot the hot
moment of the Cold War.
And before you told us that you faked
some kind of document for
and have some kind
of impact to your paranoid officer
or I don't know.
And so.
Have you any idea
what responsibility
was worth in your job when you are
telling us all these jobs?
You know what I mean, this
responsibility in faking
a document when you know that there is a
Cold War going on and
there are there is a chain
of command.
Taking action, maybe you can control
later.
Well, certainly, you know, 30 years on,
you can think about that, sure.
I think that you bring up an interesting
point, which is which is that you have
a group of people that that can select
documents and create pretty much whatever
they want. I mean, we saw that
with the build up to the Iraq war, that
it didn't matter what the intelligence
showed because the
then American vice president went and
sent some of his cronies over to cherry
pick documents and create
a series of facts that weren't
facts at all.
And country high,
even before Snowden, the NSA
was already spying on friendly
governments, have you guys
ever discussed among your group what
this actually means for democracy, or was
this just daily business?
I mean, first of all, was 30 years ago.
I, I don't think
well, I know that we
weren't at all interested in
spying on our friends because that's a
waste of time.
I think one of the great problems
right now is that if if
you take in everything, you know nothing.
So it's a colossal waste of time to be
listening to a Council of Merkel's
telephone or yours
or mine.
My point is maybe more specific.
I mean, I understand you guys were all in
your 20s, but did you
have in that area
when you worked there?
Did you have political discussions or did
you just do your job and don't think
longer and deeper about what you're
actually doing as the
NSA?
I think.
I think like a lot of things in life
that there's sort of this this mental
break between who you are and what you
do, and I most of us,
I'd say we're politically, you know,
to the center of the left
and didn't really think
about this is some global
thing that we're doing.
If anything, we looked at it as well.
Doing this is a lot better than people
shooting at one another.
And it was obviously very, very different
world at that time.
I mean, it it's strange
to think now that that people
were absolutely terrified about
this this monolithic communist thing
coming in to, you know, eat
their grandmothers baked goods.
But but it was a great fear.
Nuclear war was a great fear.
So so being in a in a
position where you're gathering
information
and in good faith, I think to your
point, the other the other
thing is that things hadn't been
politicized, that there really was
a series pretty hard and fast rules and
and people weren't weren't thinking about
politicizing the work that they did.
So you thought you were doing the good
thing?
Sure, I think so.
Sure. Absolutely.
OK.
I'm from Fourplex.
Thank you for your talk.
I, I, I don't know, I have a problem
with your claim that Facebook is a is
a symbol for the good sides of
surveillance, because this is
the surveillance you describe is made for
a world, but you can differentiate
between your friend and your enemy.
And it's a bit difficult to to listen to
to your talk, because from the American
perspective today, everybody
who is not American is an enemy.
Well, actually, anyone who's also
American is an enemy that's also from
American citizens themselves.
So your emphasis is on becomes about our
own people, but we are all being spied on
by the American government.
And the second thing I wanted
wanted to say is it's I find it quite I
was happy to hear a talk because
it's quite scary to see that 20,
20, something, 20 something myself,
the 20 something year olds are in charge
of such powerful weapons and there are
today as well.
So thank you for this insight.
Welcome to two things.
One, I
think the important part about not spying
on your own people and that there were,
in fact, very hard and fast guidelines
back then is relevant
to today because we need to figure out a
way we being all
of us need to figure out a way
that we can.
Not point these things
at us and
at the same time and at the same time,
accept that
you need to be looking for bad guys at
some level. But treating everyone as a
criminal is is
is absurd.
I mean, if there's a crime scene, you put
a piece of tape around it and you look at
it. What's happening now
is that NSA is is treating the
entire planet as a crime scene and
wrapping the whole planet and
police line do not cross tape, which
makes absolutely no sense.
OK, microphone, too.
So I also found it very interesting
and my question goes along the lines of
this last question, like even
during this answer, you kept talking
about us. We have to decide
this thing and it's OK to listen
to them. And I will ask
who is us and who is?
That's a fine question.
And and if you drink,
come and have a drink with me, and if you
don't, then you can watch me drink,
because I think that that's a very
interesting question. I mean, I spent
time in various places around
the world and this idea of them and
us and us and them gets very complicated.
But I think that we can all agree
that there are
some elements that don't like other
elements and and that
keeping a general look
on what those elements are up to and
being able to take appropriate measures
is is a lot better than
wholesale wanton destruction.
It's a horrible.
I'm not here to defend this.
Did you listen to my speech?
OK, we have only three minutes
left for more questions, so
we continue with Maroon five.
I have a question about your security
clearance, you told
us that you didn't tell everything
because you're
you're not supposed to know what
would happen if you
if you tell us all I would arrest you
tonight or kill you tonight
or what happens to to someone
telling telling a 30 year old stuff?
I have no idea.
I mean, I feel I'm perfectly safe
ground talking about everything I've
talked about tonight.
I mean, I mean, the things you didn't
tell, if so,
so the security between you and
you, you mean about the aliens?
No, I mean, there are people, people
working in jobs like you did
today.
If they would go out and tell
us what would happen.
So I believe I believe one guy is
currently living somewhere outside
of Moscow with his girlfriend.
OK, when we've got a question from
the Internet, do you really
believe that you ever prevented anything
but justifications?
Do you have for that or can you give any
examples?
Well, I think that the example
of of finding out that
that the leader
of our adversary had died
and there was an internal power struggle
going on that they didn't want us to
know, certainly helped
all of the Western countries
keep a cool head because.
At the time, people when a politician
said something, then
the other side reacted to it.
I mean, you saw with with Reagan saying
something completely evil into
a into a microphone he didn't realize was
live, you know, caused a massive
overreaction.
But because we saw the massive
overreaction.
We were able to at least engage in
discussions if we didn't know
that they knew that we knew, then
wouldn't be able to have that kind of a
conversation.
If if you don't know what's
going on behind the scenes, it's
difficult to, you know,
take a measured response or to remain,
you know, cool cool-headed when
things get heated up.
So I think that sure, I think that
that intelligence in general
does a lot of good in keeping the peace.
Sure.
OK, before only time for one more
question. So if you don't get your
question, asked me to wait at
the bar.
Microphone six, please.
Oh, hi.
I think no single
individual in the room
and the hall is a bit confusing,
but I am trying to come.
But say
about the Times, did
you use HVAC systems
from did the VA
got the ideas confusing.
Oh yeah.
I was an analyst.
I wasn't involved
in running the technology.
I mean, I couldn't tell you what flavor
of a lot of things were.
I mean, to answer.
OK, thank you, Bill.
Please give them another one on the bus.
OK, thank you.