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This has something to do with espionage.
We have a spy, and
I would like I've given over the word
from you to another former spy
because you also recently
decided to move to Berlin.
And
I would like to ask you
what see for the post
Snowden situation, Conquistadores,
I think it's a very interesting time for
whistleblowers post Snowden.
Obviously, he knew the risks
he was running because the US has been
waging a war against whistleblowers
anyway for the last six
years. Obama is trying to prosecute
or successfully prosecuted more
whistleblowers coming out of the
intelligence agencies in the U.S.
than all his predecessors put together
since 1917.
So if that's not a war, whistleblowers, I
don't know what is.
And against that background at
a standstill took the steps he took,
which was to expose to the world
this global panopticon surveillance
state. And I think Snowden is
going to be even more difficult for
whistleblowers. So unless you are pretty
much an uber geek and
can really work your way around Internet
security, there's a very high likelihood
that you will get caught now before you
can actually make it to the media.
I was going to invite Jamie to come up
and read a letter from Snowden.
So it's fresh news,
Jamie going to read it?
Yeah, we want to have an artistic
intervention.
OK, we're keeping them this country for
the rest of the ride.
I'm not sure why I'm reading this, but
I'll do it anyway.
After that, we should sing a song.
It's been one year.
Technology has been a liberating force in
our lives.
It allows us to create and share the
experiences that make us human
effortlessly.
But in secret, our very own government,
one bound by the Constitution and its
Bill of Rights as reverse engineered
something beautiful into a tool of
mass surveillance and oppression.
We've come a long way, but there's more
to be done.
Edward Snowden, American.
And then you've got to have an email from
your husband.
I mean, people want to
say something about the people working on
this in Berlin, why why
Berlin?
Well, because we had people like Warhol
on 30 years ago talking about
informational self-determination and to
protect your data public,
to keep the public data open
and then private, private.
And they made it to a culture.
And of course, the CCC was born.
And oddly enough, after that KGB
hack also twenty
five years ago, the CCC moved to Berlin
and then fomented this kind of culture
here, which meant that
when this did happen, when Laura
Poitras was working on her film, she
happened to be in Berlin
because she had less surveillance and
has on the streets.
Jake used to come here and hang out with
us at the telecom minister and Stonefish
or at the Republica and to talk.
So it was it was common for them to move
and feel at ease in Berlin.
That culture, that community was already
here. It didn't just happen overnight.
Just answer your question.
This is what I'm calling you
about, a small problem.
And he has a problem,
and this is spying on
your phone.
You need to destroy this phone right now.
You think you can?
I think in terms of why
a lot of whistleblowers are attracted to
Bellini's is precisely because of what we
saw when we went to the Stasi Museum
earlier today.
It put back flash sort of flashback
memories for me because it was very
similar to what my life was like in even
in the early 1990s when I was recruited.
So I think why people are attracted to
Berlin, because we have something called
the Stasi Museum, not the Stasi HQ.
And that is the simple answer that you
got. You managed to get rid of it by
people power.
So actually, you have to pay more
attention to the back of the bus.
And we are going to talk about Rosa
Parks. You can't ignore the back of the
bus.
This discussion of what makes Berlin
comfortable for all of these people that
are dealing with surveillance often tends
to forget that there are actually people
that have been surveilled not by the
Stasi, but by the book in
recent years for using terminology
like anti gentrification,
like that's still something you can
be surveilled for and watch television
telephonically surveilled in Germany
knows and like the West German archives
have been opened up.
But people still do get surveilled and
charged with things like terrorism.
And that happens today in Germany.
And we should not forget that because
this idea that a paradise of freedom,
we cannot just talk about the Stasi and
ignore what's happened in Germany today.
I'd like to ask you a question about
Transparency International, about,
you know, what does it mean that a Secret
Service brands itself
on transparency, overseeing a shift in
the meaning of transparency in the post
Snowden world?
I think we see the big
transparency discourse, but many people
in power use this word
word. This is really en vogue.
But to me, like the main difference,
first of all, transparency and privacy
are two sides of the same coin for me.
And the difference, the criterion is the
criterion of power, because those
in power should be transparent and
those and less need the privacy.
And I think that's very much what we saw
already at the start. We wouldn't have an
idea when you saw the spirit
of the law we have there.
That was a film clip by Simon, close
to one part of his
documentary project about the magical
secrecy tour.
My name is Leslie. I was a producer of
the tour. And I
wanted to tell you a bit about how the
project worked and what we
discovered by making this
journey through Berlin on a bus.
We basically were making a trip through
Berlin with a group of people
who were included hackers,
artists, activists,
ex spies, a whistleblower,
a lawyer.
Some of the people that you saw on the
bus already,
a number of people coming together,
traveling through Berlin for a full
nine hours, traveling
into the history and present sort
of world of surveillance culture and
having a discussion about it on the bus,
trying to learn from one another what
is actually going on and
whether we believe that
Berlin deserves this
right to be, say, the call itself,
say, the global capital
of processing and
reacting to and resisting global
surveillance.
So just to give you a sense, here
we are at Teufel SPAG,
the former NSA listening station
with Nigel Dunklee, who was a passenger
on our bus and gave the tour there with
one other person.
He's a guy who was a former
spy for MI6.
He was working at Teufel during
the Cold War.
And as he was
telling us a bit about his work there
during the tour, because I was
standing next to a Russian
guy and
a tech person and
a historian,
I was listening to what he was saying.
But I was also because of the heightened
awareness state we were in doing this
tour on the first anniversary of the
Snowden leaks, also paying
attention to these other things like
why is Nigel's hand
roughly facing in the direction of
Moscow? And what about
this graffiti?
What does it tell us about the volatile
history of a place like this
sector of Berlin and possibly therefore
also the volatile future of
this part of Berlin?
And what about that Radom that
radar dome up on the left?
What was that Radom designed
to conceal in terms of technology?
And which direction was that listening
device usually pointed in when
it was working there?
These are the kinds of things that
happened because of who we were on the
bus, the fact that we came together
to experience the surveillance
culture of Berlin, but also
sort of listening to each other and maybe
widening our usual perspective of things.
So I'd like to argue that Berlin
has a history of surveillance
that is more varied and
complex and
interesting, I guess you could say in
shorthand than that of any
other city in the world
today.
That makes it a very interesting place
to consider what's
going on in the global surveillance
situation that we're in and also
possibly to react to it in different
ways.
It's not just the history of
of Berlin, but also the current
communities that are in Berlin and the
current things that are going on in
Berlin that make give it this special
stature. So really, our mystery tour
was about this intersection between the
past and the present of the
dozens. And I'm I wish I
could tell you if I had time, I
would tell you all of the places we
considered going on our tour because
there are dozens and dozens of
fantastically rich possibilities.
We had to limit it to a few that we could
actually do with 60 people on a bus and
one nine hour period.
And therefore, we ended up with this
selection of destinations
which are in shorthand.
But just to give you a sense of the
inevitable visit to the Stasi Museum and
Archives in former East Berlin, on the
other end, the TV stands for Teufel Spag,
where we just saw the former NSA
listening station.
T stands for Tannen's
Mindiola offices where the bus departed
HQ Times two.
That was just a shorthand I put up for
capturing the fact that this was
the address. It happens to be the offices
both of Google and Dimler.
So that's where we discussed some
corporate espionage and also corporate
spying on on
corporate surveillance.
We went up to the BND is not
convinced Germany's foreign
intelligence service down to the
topography of terror,
former headquarters for the
Gestapo and the SS Nazi German
times, and then passed the USA
embassy, one of over 150
embassies in Berlin.
Of course, embassies
are there to protect their citizens, but
are also legendary hotspots
for espionage. So the. It was a natural
thing to include on the tour,
so just to give you a sense of the
of the map,
we gave some
actually program tours in certain
locations where we actually visited
things very carefully with an expert
usually actually every time with someone
on our actual bus the whole day.
So we have a continuing conversation.
But we also had a lot of loose time on
the bus itself to talk and process these
things and get into debates.
I just showed the clip from Simon
this that was about being on the bus.
So give you a flavor of that.
The bus, I would say,
became another site in Berlin.
Temporary? Yes.
Rolling, yes.
But moving among these
these static sites, it kind of created
another moment in the history of
surveillance culture.
Hopefully what we were doing was bringing
a higher level of consciousness of the
surveillance history and present
surveillance situation of Berlin by our
combined forces and carrying that
consciousness around somehow.
So for what that was worth,
it was filmed by someone closer.
And our mediator on
the right was Christopher
Gainsaying, who was the artistic director
of transmedia, who, along with N.K.
project, were my co producers
for this event while
we were on the bus going out toward
the Stasi archives.
Right at the beginning, Kristoffer said
to everyone on the bus, OK, you guys,
don't forget this paradox of seeing,
which is that when you look in one
direction, when you focus on something
and you're trying to pay attention to it
and learn from it, there's automatically
going to be something you're not seeing.
There's going to be the inevitable blind
spots. And these aren't just the blind
spots from are the mechanical reality
of our bus, but the conceptual blind
spots, because I'm used to seeing
something this way.
Someone else usually sees it this other
way. And we all know that
even as we're very sure that we're right,
often the more certain we are,
the less likely we are to actually
understand something more completely.
So we also reminded ourselves that
Snowden and his revelations
revealed the colossal blind spots,
which are very important not only
for revealing the technological realities
of our times and some of the geopolitical
realities of our times and other things,
but also for giving us
the sense that we are now able to see
things that we were blind to before.
But we also want it to be very careful
not to let that be something we would
take for granted, but also make an effort
on this tour to actually use the
Snowden leaks as a as a way to
motivate ourselves to look anew
at Berlin, but also
to not get too comfortable with the idea
that we actually understood anything.
So we're trying to look in a fresh
way.
So I just with the little time that I
have with you, I just wanted to mention
two different ways of seeing that I
think are valuable that we took away from
this tour.
I think there's many, many more.
And if I had an indefinite amount of
time, I would I would tell you about a
lot of others.
But the first of the two that I will tell
you about is captured
by my slide showing Nike
hindsight glasses just to stand
for the concept of seeing behind
you, seeing historically looking
into the past.
So this is
a really interesting thing about Berlin,
that history doesn't function the same
way there. I think that it does in other
places. And you'll see why in a minute.
But I just want to in order to kind of
activate the importance of Berlin's
history, I just want to put a pin in a
couple of moments. I think everybody
already knows what these moments would
be. You can probably name them already.
But let me just put a pin in these
moments without elaborating and just
wasn't there on this conceptual
map so that we can be aware of them.
I think maybe actually most people would
say that the history of Berlin
surveillance culture really begins in the
20th century.
But I'm going to propose to you that
it actually starts earlier than that,
when Berlin was the seat of the
Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire,
and that there was a kind of
authoritarian form of data
collection of mass population
under the statesman
Otto von Bismarck.
And that this I don't
know what you would call it, say a
preemptively anti socialist
socialist state
is actually maybe the first interesting
place to look at the history of data
collection in Berlin.
I'm going to flip forward here.
We're now in the Vontae conference house.
This is in the von district of Berlin.
This is a building where on January
20th, 1942,
Rhinehart Heydrich, then
director of the Reich Main
Security Office, convenes a meeting with
14 other higher ups in the Nazi
government to coordinate
and plan out extermination of Jews
in Europe.
And note that
this document, which I think now rates,
is one of the major documents
concerning the data fixation of humanity,
was supplied to meeting by
one of its participants as Adolf
Eichmann. And this details a number
of Jews in each territory that
is either occupied and controlled by
Germany or not.
You see the total of the bottom line to
TOMEN over 12 million.
And so altogether over 11 million.
I'm now slipping. Fast forward
to after the war.
We're now standing in East Berlin in
the Stasi compound, which
is the headquarters for all of the qaisi
in East Germany.
And we're facing House
Aints House one,
which was among many other buildings
there in the compound.
This one is the office was the
office of Milkha,
who was ahead of the Stasi for over 30
years.
I'm assuming I don't have to say a lot
about the Stasi.
Everybody probably has
a pretty florid set of ideas
about it.
I'm going to move along to this image
from 1985
showing Teufel Spag NSA
listening station in full throttle,
working 24 hours a day,
as we heard an interesting talk about
Felsberg last night.
No need to make any kind of sexual pun
about the three Radames to the right.
I guess Freudians
and feminists will go to town on that.
But I wanted to say
1961 and actually this this
is an interesting little detail.
It was in July of 1961
that the site was discovered by allied
spies as an interesting place to listen
out for what's going on in
the Eastern Bloc, or at least
that's what they claim they're listening
to.
So July 1961,
the the top of the hill of Teufel
is is discovered as a promising,
fruitful place to to listen out.
One month later, the Berlin Wall goes
up. August 1961 starts
on August 13. But this picture is
obviously from a bit after that.
November nine, 1989, the wall
comes down.
Just want to quickly say that I think
this is a really important moment in the
history of the world, in the history of
Berlin, but in particular with this topic
about whether Berlin deserves to be
considered a capital of reflection
on the significance of mass surveillance
in the global digital era
and preparing responses
to it, it is interesting to see
that the wall comes down in 1989,
really at the moment when the emergence
of digital culture just starts to take
off. So just as its healing
itself from this split and
restitching itself together, Berlin is
also got in its in its postwar
DNA, if you like, the
beginning of the digital
era.
So now we one year later, the
former offices of Eric Milkha are
now a museum which we visited.
And one of the passengers on our bus
asked, when was NSA going to be a museum,
one of the head office of the NSA
going to be a museum?
And while it's not yet a museum,
it is true that Teufel, the former
listening post, is a sort of museum
like place where you can go and you can
paint there, you
can visit it. And it's privately
managed historic site
reunification I'm going to go for
because I only have a few minutes left.
And I want to get to a really interesting
point. This is a
just a display of the German
constitution.
I think anybody looking at
Berlin from the magical secrecy to her
point of view can't help but notice,
first of all, how hard it was for
Germany to gain these incredible points
that are made in its constitution and
therefore how poignant it is to go and
see in abbreviated form here in this
public display.
You can read the articles of the
Constitution and see just how
not healthy some of them are
that we now realize, thanks to the
Snowden leaks, particularly the one
on the left there that looks really tiny,
it sort of in the middle distance.
But the smallest one,
Article 10, my personal favorite,
which says something like privacy
of letters,
posts and telecommunications shall remain
inviolable with the word inviolable,
normally meaning not to be tampered
with under any circumstances.
So
one other way of saying that we really
got to appreciate on our trip through
Berlin is the
artistic way of saying and this is a
drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of the human
eye and sight lines and peripheral
vision being kind of figured out for the
first time.
I want to propose to you that artists,
whether they're digital artists or or
artists working in painting or any other
art form.
Can sometimes also supply incredible
insight that help us to see into blind
spots in ways that historians
and and more logical approaches
to reality do
not. So this incredibly valuable
to supplement one way of looking with
another for the purposes of
this Congress, with its title being
a new dawn.
I just wanted to go back to a painting
first exhibited in Berlin 200 years ago,
still hanging there in the
Alta National Gallery.
And it's by Caspar
David Friedrich is called a Monk,
the Monk by the Sea.
No one is really sure if it shows a monk,
it could just be anybody.
But I think post the Magical
Secrecy Tour, he looks
a lot more like a hacker than anything
else. And that this is a really
interesting representation
from today's point of view of the concept
of a blind spot. This is just mist and
fog and clouds was maybe a hint
of transparency and enlightenment in the
distance.
So even even artwork that is
from a digital era, I think can be seen
completely anew when we think
about it in these terms and show us
things that may suggest something about
our own priorities and our own
vulnerabilities, maybe
also provide some inspiration.
And another area that's very rich
in Berlin, of course, is the performing
arts. I just want to note here
one very interesting
theater, the Shobna Theater in
in west part of Berlin.
This caption for
this photo should probably be
something's rotten in the surveillance
state of Denmark, of Denmark.
This is last year.
The great, staggeringly
great, I would say, actor portraying
Hamlet at the shop.
And this is Shakespeare's great
tragedy about surveillance and the toll
it takes on
the toll that surveillance and
self-censorship take on a person and
a family and a whole society.
The existential and ontological crisis
that results when someone is
forced to ask, OK, I'm being
watched. So should I change my behavior
and and pretend to be myself, just
act myself and perform myself.
And if I do that for a while, what if I
mistake that self for my real self?
And will I go crazy?
And if I'm crazy, is life worth living?
And I really think that this is a great
Shakespeare play about the very problem.
Also, this staging is extraordinary.
This is a Thomas Ostermeier production
with a lot of soil on the stage.
This is really Berlin production
of Hamlet. The soil is very thick
every time they try to put something in
it, like a corpse or a symbol of power,
like the sword or the crown or just tears
of grief or what have you,
it doesn't stay in there, just keeps
popping up. It just keeps coming back on
the surface of the stage.
They can't get anything to go into the
past. I think it's a really interesting
insight. This is a peripheral vision from
these artists. What is really going on
in Berlin is the history
of this place can't quite
stay historically comes up into the
present. So all of these things we were
talking about earlier, from the
historical vision standpoint,
they are very much vibrant and febrile
and alive in Berlin in ways that
make it possible for them to serve a
wider understanding.
Just wanted to thank Lah's, also
this great actor for
serving as our.
For being in this photograph
taken by a surveillance camera at the
American Academy in Berlin, it we use
this as a publicity image for the
magical secrecy tour on our
tour. We have some great artists as well
who widened our perspective.
One was Michelle Tehran.
She she had an interceptor set
up inside the bus.
We had these monitors.
And what happened was
she was able to capture some private
CCTV footage so that as we're going
around Berlin thinking about about
government surveillance and corporate
surveillance and and the rest, she
was giving us flickering images of
of private surveillance happening
around us. Wherever we were moving with
the bus at Teufel Square, we
have in the Radom a special
performance during the tour beyond Peter
Sontag, the sound artist.
He built a some special
equipment which was able to capture
some electrical activity in the
stratosphere.
So we sat and listened to this
extraordinary crackling and wooshing,
really strange kind of music of the
stratosphere,
which also threw
into perspective a completely different
understanding of the history of the NSA
listening post and how what normal
listening would have been like at this
location. Not so long ago,
we ended our tour
at Seabass Space Station,
where we had an interesting discussion
about the future of transparency
and privacy.
I think the creative artistic environment
that we were in helped to promote a
really interesting and
playful discussion, which was useful at
that moment to sort of imagine different
possibilities.
And it would have been a very different
discussion had it taken place at, say, a
museum or someplace else.
Next month at the transmedia
festival in Berlin,
we will be talking
about the magical secrecy tour in more
detail. And there will be a pretty
interesting panel about it.
I hope if you're interested, you'll come
and see some of the further videos from
someone close about this this
tour. I personally,
I'm very interested in participating
in order to to
talk about another thing that I think is
very useful about this
journey we made to
apply to the current discussion
coming out of the Snowden
debates and questions about how to
respond.
And that is I think we
hear a lot use this term Panopticon,
the global panopticon anymore.
And he just used it in the video clip as
well. And without all due respect
to everyone who uses this phrase,
it's really a problem because what's
going on today is categorically
different from a panopticon in ways that
are actually, unfortunately, I think, a
lot worse.
But I think if we don't get the right
name for the for what's happening,
we're going to be in trouble.
So help us to actually address what's
really going on if we find the right
language. And if I do have more than
one minute, I will tell you,
do I have more than one minute?
OK, so I would love to tell you
a juicy detail
about the Panopticon idea, but I guess
we'll have to come to transmit reality in
Berlin. I don't have time here.
Let me just wrap up by saying
these are fast changing times.
We're moving ahead quickly and it can be
heroic and feel good to have our focus
firmly set on a particular goal
and to be working toward that as
we think about what's the right thing to
do next and where do we want to head.
But I think if we learn anything from the
magical secrecy tour,
which was sort of based on this very
simple equation of Berlin
in its current and former and
peripheral ways, plus
Snowden, what we learned is that
it really does help to look
at the past, to look
in corners of your field
that you wouldn't consider necessarily
initially to be useful and interesting
and to try to see
things in as
varied a way as possible
in order to work through that
humongous
blind spot separating the
monk from the or
whoever that is on the on the coast
of the the image by Caspar
Friedrich to to
the relationship between that and see
the clear, open sky that
apparently is is somewhere out there
beyond. Thank you.