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Thanks very much. It's really great being
here.
The CCC and I go back almost
as far the same year I
my first book, The Puzzle Palace, came
out in nineteen eighty two
and the first of CCC
was in 1983.
So it's really great to have sort of
a reunion here.
What are the things that I really
noticed lately since Edward
Snowden was how many people know about
NSA? When I first started writing
about NSA, the first book I did was
the Puzzle Palace in 1982.
Virtually nobody had ever heard of NSA.
There was a senator, Senator Bill
Bradley, one of the most prominent
senators in the US Congress.
I was in a car with him going to a
speaking engagement, and he said, What's
your book about? And I said this about
NSA?
And he said, what's that?
So we got a TV show and
the host asked me how secret is NSA?
And I said, well, even Senator Bradley
had never heard of it.
So he got up and went
back to the hotel by himself.
He didn't want to ride in the same car
with me after I
thought I insulted him.
But so
that's how little known NSA
was back then.
And last
summer, I spent
with Ed Snowden.
I hung out with him for three days in
Moscow for a cover story for Wired
magazine.
And it was really quite amazing.
We had pizza together and
hung out for three days and really
amazing being with him.
And, you know, one of the things
that has changed now,
it's back in the old days, NSA,
the old joke was it stood for
no such agency or never say
anything. And now it stands for not
secret anymore,
which it got a big kick
out of.
So I really never talked about my
background because it was the same way
with Ed when I was talking to him,
because he just never wanted to give me
anything about his background.
It was like pulling teeth to find out
how he got into this whole thing
when he was growing up.
But he was reading that kind of thing.
So I never really talk about it.
And then when I was with Laura Poitras
last year, I told her,
you know, I've been a whistleblower one
time with NSA, although I never made
any
really never mentioned it before.
So she wanted me to write a cover story
or write a big piece
for her publication,
The Intercept. And I did.
So I began talking
a little bit about it. So I thought it
might be interesting to give a little
background before I get into my main
talk.
Anyway, in the Navy,
I was really lucky during the Vietnam
War. I got no one on the draft.
You know, it's the only thing I ever won
in my life.
And I don't really consider that winning.
But anyway, I spent three years in the
Navy and like Snowden,
I got sent to a NSA
secret NSA place in Hawaii
for three years.
Um, I did a few other things
like fishing, but I also
did this work for the NSA
that is mostly focused on Vietnam and so
forth. And then after
that, I was in law school
as a picture of me.
I have more hair.
So when I was in law school,
I had to think about what I was going to
do and one
of the things while I was there, I was
still in the Navy Reserve.
And so the Navy, I had
to do two weeks active duty once a year.
So the Navy sent me down to
another listening post.
Uh.
It was caused by A.H.
in Puerto Rico and.
It was a big listening post here, mostly
focused on Cuba and
South America, Central America, the
Caribbean, and that's
a big round circle, their
nickname, Elephant Cages, because those
are antennas, those huge things going
around the quarter mile
wide. And the people
work in that little
central square box
there. That's where all the interceptions
done.
And not many people have ever seen
the inside of one of those.
But I'll show you what it looked like in
there with all the people listening.
Here they are.
That's what it was, and there you see
Barack and and
George down there, they got their
training down there
anyway. So we were in the
I was doing the the
work in the listening post.
I was mostly trying to avoid work.
I was just down there for two weeks,
active duty. And then
some day I went out drinking
with an I.V. for sodomy and say,
hey, you want to listen to something?
So I, I said,
look, I don't really speak Spanish much.
I don't you know, it's not going to do me
much good.
So I don't know. It's English.
I say, OK, I'll put the earphones
on.
What do you know it was Americans talking
to each other is kind of odd,
especially listening to the, you
know, South Americans or Cubans or
somebody like that.
So.
This is sort of what it was like inside,
they were doing all the eavesdropping
on different telephone calls and, you
know, I was very surprised that the
that the Americans were on
the other side of the communication.
So I decided I when I got back
to law school,
it was at the same time the church
committee was doing their investigation.
And so I decided to be a whistleblower
and I called up the church committee.
I said, did you know that the NSA is
doing eavesdropping down in
Hawaii or rather down in Puerto Rico?
And they had heard from NSA that
they had been doing this eavesdropping,
but they stopped that a year and a half
earlier.
And I said, well, I was just down there
like last month and they're still doing
it.
And at the time, it was a
program that was known as Minaret.
And they were focused on really
the the most serious criminals
and hardened terrorists in
the United States, like Jane Fonda.
Another one was Dr.
Benjamin Spock, he says
is hiding the weapons behind the baby.
They're Muhammad
Ali
and then Dr. Martin
Luther King.
So this was a project minaret.
They were eavesdropping on US
communications and all these hardened
targets here.
So after I told
Frank the church committee about
the NSA,
they were.
Like I said during their hearings at the
time, they said
come down to Washington as soon as you
can. So the next morning I flew down to
Washington and they had
had me brief Senator Frank Church.
An executive session, a very
it was off the record, kind
of a quiet little
briefing in his office, and
when I told him that the NSA is still
doing what they said, they stopped a year
and a half earlier.
He practically flipped.
He he was really angry,
you know, so he he decided
to send his staff
on a surprise visit down to Puerto Rico
to check out what was going on.
And again,
the people at the listening post had no
idea that these people are coming down.
So what happened was.
They did a surprise visit down at
Savannah Saica, they flew down
there and when they got down there,
they they really caught these guys
by surprise.
I mean, the the the station chiefs
running away, all the
all the people, they started really
hiding out wherever they could.
So.
Anyway, when, when?
The staff got back to Washington,
they told Senator Frank Church what was
going on, you know, all of a sudden
he found out the NSA was lying.
I mean, you know, the NSA would actually
lie. So,
you know, that was a big shock.
The NSA
had been telling him for a year and a
half. We stopped it and all of a sudden
they're still doing it.
So it was a big shock.
It was a shock to me to you know, I
this surprised NSA would
do something like that.
So at the time I was in law school
and when I graduated,
instead of, you know, handling
divorces or doing something for
in in law, I
decided to become a writer and.
Because of what I saw
with NASA and all that, I decided to
become the writer
of the first book on NSA, the Puzzle
Palace, which was a
really interesting thing.
I spent three years on it.
Nobody'd ever done a book on NSA.
It was very it was like exploring
a brand new continent.
One of the things that I
discovered in doing my research
was this document here.
It was a document I got under the Freedom
of Information Act from the Justice
Department. It was extraordinarily
interesting document.
Nobody ever knew that this document
existed. There were only two copies of
whatever it were made.
And what it was was the criminal
file of NSA.
In nineteen seventy, 1975, the Justice
Department actually began a criminal
investigation of NSA, the first time
a federal agency had ever been subject
to an actual criminal investigation.
But it was top secret.
They they wouldn't tell anybody that this
investigation was going on.
And then by the time the
investigation was ended,
they felt that everything was too secret
to actually bring anybody
to trial. But they actually
read the Miranda rights to the senior
officials at NSA.
They considered the whole agency a
potential criminal entity,
you know, like the Mafia.
So.
And they found they found 20 different
areas where they could prosecute, but
they decided, you know, including
eavesdropping on Jane Fonda and all these
people. So but because of
the secrecy, they said they they couldn't
bring it to court.
But what happened was that
the Justice Department had released
that document to me under the Free
Information Act, but NSA had no idea
that they released it to me.
So when NSA found out,
they reclassified it as top secret
and demanded I give it back.
Which I wasn't about to do,
but they were really
insistent and they were threatening me
with the espionage statute.
There is a part of the espionage statute
that says if you come into possession of
classified documents and refuse
to return them to the proper custodian,
you could be charged under the espionage
statute. So,
uh, but regardless,
I decided not to
give it back, and
they eventually went away.
But when I did the piece
for The Intercept, the
Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept, people
put it online.
So it's now available.
If you go to the intercept and look at my
article, you could read the top
secret report.
So
that's what happened.
They they threatened me with prosecution.
That's what was going through my mind at
the time when they were threatening me
with prosecution there.
I could just see myself
being arrested and so forth.
But
what they wanted to do actually was stop
the book from coming out.
They had to threaten me twice
with prosecution once when the
I won't give the documents back and once
before the book came out, because they
said the book is going to contain all
kinds of secrets. But it came out
and there were a few unhappy
people at NSA.
There were a few people that weren't very
happy that my book came out.
I took some pictures of a few of them
there. Uh,
they they just
overreacted a little bit to the fact that
I was writing this book anyway.
Now, let me get back to what I was going
to be talking about here was the
the NSA and
its relationship with the corporate
world, with the telecom companies and
all that. I mean, this is NSA.
It's the largest intelligence
agency on earth.
More than thirty seven thousand cars are
registered there.
It has its own post office.
Seventy thousand pieces of mail a day.
Thirty two miles of road.
You can't see this.
That whole complex from the road, it's
all hidden, but
it's just one gigantic agency,
the the
headquarters itself, the US Capitol
Building can fit in there four times
over.
So it's a monstrous agency,
but it didn't start out that way.
This is how it started out, that's
one forty one East thirty seven Street in
New York, that was the original
NSA. It was called the Black Chamber in
1920.
It was a four
story townhouse in Manhattan.
The first floor was a cover.
It was they made supposedly commercial
codes. The top floor was
where this guy lived.
He was the he was in charge.
His name was really are the he was
the first head of the black chamber.
It started in 1920.
Prior to that, there was World War One.
And during World War One, the US
had censorship so they could get access
to everybody's communications during
wartime.
But after the war,
uh, censorship was ended.
So they had the once
again, it was time
for privacy and in
and the communications
were not allowed to be intercepted by
anybody, including the government.
But the government came in every once in
a while and did some eavesdropping.
And that was the the way
Herbert Yardley found it when he
created the Black Chamber in nineteen
twenty, he found he
had no way to get access to all that
information he had during World
War One. So the whole idea
was he had to make relationships
with the telecom companies.
This is the very first origin
of the NSA, NSA,
his predecessor having secret
agreements with the telecom companies.
And what Herbert early
did was he went to New
York City.
He decided to knock on
the doors of the telegraph companies.
This is back in those days.
That was the email of the day telegrams.
It's how people communicated
electronically with each other.
So he wanted access to everybody's
telegrams, just the way the NSA
gets access to everybody's metadata,
telephone calls, emails and all that
today.
Uh, so you hardly went to the, uh, the
heads of the telecom companies
and knock on their door.
And at Western Union, for
example, they said it was easier than
I imagined.
After the minute after
we put all our cards on the table,
President Carlton anxiously,
uh, seemed anxious to do everything you
could for us.
So no problem with Western Union.
They, uh, despite the fact that it was
against the law, they they
cooperated with Yardley.
Then he went across town
to the there were three big companies
doing this at the time.
He went across the postal telegraph
headquarters. That was the other big
company doing it.
They were a little bit more nervous and
they actually had to cut out some lawyer
that they had to deal with with Yardley
because they were very afraid of getting
arrested.
And then he.
Finally got all the cooperation of all
the different companies
and.
All the companies began sending all their
telegrams to NSA,
just like NSA is getting all this
email today back then.
The companies cooperated and they
began sending all their telegrams
to the to the black chamber.
I'm not sure about the singing telegrams,
whether they made it there or not.
But by the
end of 1920, the Black Chamber
had the secret and illegal cooperation
of virtually the entire American
cable industry, the telegram
industry.
But 1929, it all came to
an end. Henry Simpson.
Simpson was secretary of state.
He had no idea that the government
had a black chamber, that the government
was actually doing all this
eavesdropping.
So as a result, he he shut
down the black chamber in 1929
and that put Herbert Yardley out of work.
He'd been doing it for 10 years.
And now all of a sudden, he was out of a
job.
So he decided to become the world's
first NSA whistleblower.
So long before Yardley,
long before Snowden, Herbert Yardley
became a whistle blower, he wrote a book
called The American Black Chamber.
I mean, the government was extremely
upset, but they had never heard of this
before. Nobody had ever written the book
about secret things in government
before.
So they try to ban the book or they try
to put them in jail. But there were no
laws at that time that could really do
that. So
he tried another book after that
was called Japanese Diplomatic Secrets
1921 in 1922.
And he actually included real
messages that he took from the Black
Chamber in the book.
And the government got furious and they
they secretly basically stole
his manuscript.
And that manuscript was hidden
for years and years until I found that
manuscript in government
documents. Back in round
two, my book came out.
So after they closed the black chamber,
the NSA, there was no real
NSA for a while because
the black chamber was closed, but the
British have been doing this for a very
long time. I mean, the British have been
eavesdropping on communications
around the world for
virtually since the beginning of the
century, last century,
maybe even before that.
This is a map from
one of the undersea cables,
and that was how the British
were able to eavesdrop on so much
communications.
I mean, this, again, didn't just start a
few years ago. The British have been
doing this for more than 100
years now because
they owned all the cables around the
world. That's those are all the cables
owned by the Brits.
So if they own the cables around the
world, they
have an easy job of doing all the
eavesdropping and they've been doing it
ever since.
And then World War Two came.
They are censorship again and once again
they could eavesdrop because of
censorship. And then when World War Two
ended, the NSA
was back in the same position where
Yeardley was all of a sudden
censorship ended.
The the privacy laws came
back into play and they were
without any kind of access
to to the cables and the telegraph,
the telecom companies.
So instead of you, are they now you had
this Brigadier General
Preston Quartermain, who had to
make the rounds up in New York.
He had to go up there and they weren't as
friendly as when you already found him.
He was getting some resistance from
a number of companies, including I.T.
They basically threw him out the door.
They said they listen to their general
counsel and they said this is against the
law. What are you talking about?
We're not going to give you our
telegrams.
So what he did was he walked across the
street a couple blocks away
to Western Union headquarters
and Western Union.
They weren't happy.
Their general counsel
didn't want him to do it, but they did
agree, providing that the attorney
general of the United States secretly
approve it and then
they they would cooperate
and give all their telegrams to
the NSA.
So then.
Cornerman goes back
to it and basically,
uh, intimidates them, says,
look, you don't want to be the only
company not cooperating with us, so we
just got Western Union cooperating.
So then because of that,
I.T.
agreed again.
They wanted cooperation
as long as they wanted a
grant of immunity, secret grant of
immunity from the attorney general in
case they got caught.
So then they went to RCA, the third
biggest company doing all this, and.
Going in there and saying the other two
companies have cooperated, that
that pretty much sealed it for RCA,
they said, OK, you know, we'll do it
because the other companies are doing it.
But again, we want this this letter
from the from the attorney general,
because they're very they were very
afraid of being prosecuted.
This is how the NSA
got the material.
They they
set up the secret office in New York.
They had it masqueraded as a television
tape processing company.
And every night, just
after midnight, somebody would go to the
back door, the telecom companies,
and ask for
the the all the the
the communications for that day, all the
telegrams coming into the country, going
out of the country are going through the
company.
And they would take
them, take the tapes
back to the the phony
television tape processing company.
They make duplicates of all those
telegrams, millions of telegrams.
And then they send them down
to they make a copy.
They take the original back to the
company before the day shift came in,
before the morning shift, because it was
only the midnight shift that knew this
was going on.
And and then they send
the dupes down to NSA
and they put them through this huge
computer.
It was the biggest, fastest,
most powerful computer at the time.
It was appropriately called the Harvest
Computer, because that's what it did.
It harvested all the names
of everybody. They were looking for
names of people. They were looking for
words, phrases, whatever they were
looking for.
The computer would go all through these,
you know, law school.
We're told that if you're
in the government, you want to get access
summaries, telegram.
You have to go to a judge and an
impartial judge and present probable
cause and so forth.
Never occurred to NSA.
They just got everybody's telegram and
without any kind of a warrant.
So, you know, these companies are getting
very nervous here,
Sarnoff from RCA, for example,
and Western Union, these other companies
are getting very, very nervous that
that they're doing this because it is
totally illegal. And they didn't
particularly want to go to jail
and they were getting worried because
they weren't getting this letter that had
been promised from the attorney general
and they were thinking that there may
be getting steamrolled here.
And one of these days, you know, New York
Times is going to come up with a story
and they're going to head off to
court for prosecution.
So so instead
of this letter, Dwight
Eisenhower was a five star general
at the time. He was chief of staff of the
of the US Army.
He sent a letter of appreciation to
him. I mean, it didn't really mean much,
but that's best they could do at the
time.
That's Eisenhower.
And again, this is when Truman was
president.
So.
It didn't do much good, the heads of the
telecom companies are still very nervous,
they were very afraid that
they were going to go to jail.
So they were putting more pressure on
on the Pentagon basically
to come up with some kind of a
guarantee that they weren't going to be
prosecuted.
What happened was that the
forest was was the
secretary of defense at the time and
forests, first of all, had a meeting with
them and he told them he was speaking
for the president.
And as long as the attorney general was
in office, he could guarantee or
he could give assurances anyway that the
Department of Justice would do everything
in his power to keep them out of
jail, didn't make them feel too good, but
it was better than nothing.
But they still wanted something in
writing something from the government
that said that, look, what we're doing
here is is
on behalf of the president or somebody.
The problem was that
the only person that knew what they were
doing basically was
Forestar, the secretary of defense,
and all of a sudden he resigned.
Not only that, a few weeks later,
he was in a hospital
in the hospital for psychiatric
examination.
And then he put a sash around his neck
and jumped out of the 16th
floor window of Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Among the people that were very worried
were the people in the telecom companies,
but four days earlier,
luckily, they had met with
the person who took for ourselves place,
Louis Johnson, and
and he
gave them the assurances that the
attorney general and the president
had both approved this
and they were presented
a memorandum.
And the memorandum was actually
it wasn't signed by Truman,
but it was initialed by Truman
or initialed that he had
been okayed by the president, Tom Clark,
and that was it.
That's the last time the telecom
chiefs ever sought assurances.
But it did indicate that at least the
the knowledge of this one is high is
true. And the fact that they were doing
this illegal
eavesdropping on everybody's
telecom communications.
So, uh.
Nobody knew anything about this until the
church committee that was in nineteen
seventy five, the church committee had
this investigation, they found out that
NSA had been doing this and
I had testified in executive session
before the church committee, as I
mentioned earlier, my little part.
And they, you know, did a really good job
of looking into what NSA was doing
in terms of spying.
But there were still somewhat
of falling in line
with regard to NSA.
NSA was saying, please, please don't
say much about all this stuff.
So they only had one day of hearings
on NSA and it was the director of
NSA that was called to testify.
But they never really got into the
telecoms, what the telecoms
were doing.
The only person that did that was this
woman, Bella Abzug.
I mean, she was she was like
the ultimate tarah in Congress.
You never, ever wanted to cross Bella
Abzug. I mean, she was just the most
ferocious person in Congress.
So she got very angry.
The church committee wasn't looking into
the companies, the companies that were
doing all this, all this
eavesdropping illegally.
So she decided to hold a hearing
and she was going to call the
all the telecom chiefs to
a public hearing and say, what have you
been doing? Would you cooperate with what
have you given to the government?
And at the time, Jerry Ford was president
and there were two people that really
were stopping her from holding a hearing
and they were trying to impeach her in
every way possible, you'll never guess
who they were.
One was a guy named Donald Rumsfeld who
was secretary of defense at the time.
Another guy you may have heard of before,
his name was Dick Cheney.
So they they did everything
they could to try to stop Bella
Abzug from holding this hearing of the
telecom chiefs.
And they went so far as to
issue executive privilege
against the companies, I mean, this has
never been done before. Nobody ever heard
of how can you issue executive privilege
against a company, you know, we issued
against the the CIA
or the NSA or the FBI or whoever, but not
private companies.
Uh, so for the first time in history,
Ford, at the
suggestions of Rumsfeld and Cheney,
issued executive privilege to keep the
companies from testifying in
public. And Bella Abzug
hearing.
But the companies
were more afraid of Bella Abzug than they
were Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Ford.
So they are they all
took the stand, they all testified, they
told basically what what
the NSA had been making them do.
They even gave a list of the targets
and everything else. So it was really
amazing. I
really have to hand it to Bella Abzug.
She really got
a lot more out of these people than
anybody else I think would have at the
time.
So one of the reforms that came out of
the church committee and
Bella Abzug and all that was creation
of the FISA court, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which
everybody's heard of now, a
few years ago, hardly anybody ever heard
of the FISA court
and.
These are the judges here.
They're there sort.
This is a rosÃ© where they wear them over
the tops of their heads so nobody can
see who they are.
But the FISA court was created and
basically became a rubber stamp.
They this is where they
hang out the third floor supposed
to be secret where they're hanging out.
But they their office is on the third
floor of the federal
court building in Washington.
Few people have actually been inside
that. I did manage to get one picture
inside the court.
The court in session never been seen
before shortly here.
These are the these are the judges right
here.
They
you can see they they really
don't want to know what they're doing
or what they're signing, but they
Rubber-Stamp like thirty thousand
warrants, I think they only rejected two
in 30 years.
But that was sort of the reform.
And for 30 years, from 1978
until 2001,
there weren't really that many problems.
They just rubber stamped everything and
everything sort of went normally until
until this happened,
until cleared out Menar.
This is a place very few people have
been. I'm I think one of the very few
people
have been there and lived to tell about
it. This is actually Osama bin
Laden's operational center in Yemen
outside of outside of Sana'a.
I did a documentary for PBS
and we went there and filmed it.
This is where actually all the operations
took place, where the people were
kind of trained, where they were based.
And it was bin Laden's communications
center.
He didn't bin Laden
would communicate to the house from
Afghanistan where most
of the operations were being planned.
And and then
the people in the house, Khalid Ahmed
Shah, was married to the
daughter of the owner of the house and he
lived there.
And Khalid Ahmed Shah and Nawaf
Alhazmi were the first two terrorists.
What's interesting is that NSA had been
eavesdropping on that house for years.
They were eavesdropping on everything
that went in and everything that came
out. Bin Laden used a satellite
phone that was never encrypted,
and so they were just eavesdropping on
the house.
So the whole 9/11
activity took place.
There are the first indication of 9/11
took place in December
of 1999.
That was when a phone call was made from
bin Laden to that house saying
send Khalid and Nawaf
to Kuala Lumpur for the big meeting.
And that was the first tip off
of of of 9/11.
NSA had picked it up.
So NSA is kind of known about
these guys since the very beginning,
since nineteen ninety nine,
December ninety nine, when this meeting
was set up and
these were the terrorists, they came to
the United States and so forth, km
Nawaf Alhazmi were the first to.
And so the NSA finally
after after a
couple of years, finally realized
the in the last month or so
that these guys were
in the United States and they had this
mad scramble to try to find them.
I mean, they they they basically
ignored the intelligence up until
that time they were eavesdropping on
them even while they were in the United
States Clete ometer.
He was in San Diego and he was actually
coming back to that house.
So NSA was picking up that
communications.
So these guys had to find someplace.
So the crew that was going to blow up the
Pentagon had to find someplace to make
their headquarters for like
six weeks before the attack.
And at the same time, NASA is looking
for him everywhere at this time, like
three weeks or so before the attack, they
suddenly realize, you know,
oh God, we've got to find where some of
these guys are. I think they're
terrorists.
And so so the terrorists
set up their their
headquarters at this place
here.
It was called the Valencia Motel.
And it happened to be in a place
called Laurel, Maryland, which happened
to be just
two miles from NASA headquarters.
I've actually been in the director's
office at NSA.
I've interviewed
General Hayden there one time for one of
my books, and you can almost see
the Valencia Motel from his office,
so.
These guys were
going to the same gyms that the NSA
people were going to and Laurel, they
were shopping in the same supermarkets
and NSA is looking all over for them.
You know, they're eavesdropping on
everybody, but they can't find them.
And and they're right down the street,
literally down the street,
so.
After.
After 9/11,
George Bush decided, you know,
he can't trust the FISA court anymore,
so he decided to bypass
the FISA court and do all the
begin the whole program of warrantless
eavesdropping, which
became a stellar win.
And
one of the things that came out in one of
the first documents that Snowden actually
the first document that was released from
the Snowden archive
was the inspector general's report
on on Stellar Wind.
And what it showed was
that not only
did they like back in Yardley's
day and back after World War Two, where
they had to go and get the telecom
companies to cooperate,
AT&T actually volunteered
before they were even asked.
They call up the NSA and they said, can
we do something?
You know, would you like our our material
here? And and
NSA was sort of
shocked because this is even before they
started the warrantless eavesdropping.
And so at NSA, they were saying, well,
how should we do this?
I mean, we've never had somebody offer
some company offers all this material
before. So then they finally figured
out some some phony legal
authorization from
John Yoo at the Justice Department and so
forth. And that was the beginning
of the warrantless eavesdropping in the
secret room and in
in San Francisco's
telecom center.
And then from there, they went
to the cable companies and it's a little
less clear what the cooperation was
because they had PRISM,
the PRISM program
where they went in the front door,
basically was
sort of legal papers,
FISA warrants, things like that.
And then they had the operation
muscular, where they secretly tap the
unencrypted cables between the
the data centers and so
forth.
So, again, we never
would have learned about any of that
without the help
of these people here.
Bill Bennett, I
was the first one really to interview
Bill Binney. I put him in a cover
story I did for Wired magazine on the
on the big data center in Utah.
And, you know, Bill Bennett is a real
hero to me.
I interviewed him and he was a senior
official at NSA.
And I said, look, you know,
I could say senior government official
or source or whatever.
You know, I don't have to use your name
because you're going to be in a lot of
trouble possibly.
And he says, no, I wanted my name in
there. So I
left his name in there.
And he's been, you know,
one of the the shining
light team before Snowden
telling what went on at NSA in terms
of the warrantless eavesdropping.
So I've got a lot of admiration for him.
And then Tom Drake, I
was on his legal team.
The legal team hired me to be the
legal consultant, and
he was facing 35 years in prison
for cooperating with Siobhan
Gordon, The Baltimore Sun.
At the time, the NSA
wanted to use him as a
as an example to all the other NSA people
saying if you ever
even think about leaking, this is what's
going to happen to you.
So thirty five years in prison,
the rest of his life, basically.
But when I looked at the the
case, I said, look, a lot of this
stuff is probably in the public domain.
So I spent three months searching
through everything in the public domain.
And I came up with two
big binders of virtually
all the material that they were charging
him with as being top secret.
So after we did that
and I was able to show not only was this
information in the public domain, but
have been placed there by the government
itself, by a speech by
Mike Hayden or whatever.
And once we presented that to the judge
and the prosecutors and having,
you know, actually worked on a number
of espionage cases over the years, I had
never seen anything like this.
They actually came back and they dropped
the case. They dropped the whole case
against
Tom Drake.
It's never happened in an espionage case.
And they said, we'll drop the
case. All you have to do is just sign
this little piece of paper saying
you agreed to
saying that you
plead guilty to a misdemeanor.
It was actually less than a parking
ticket because there is no fine and no
jail time.
So I
was really happy to see that.
And Kirk Wiebe.
Yeah. I mean, Tom went through
hell.
And Tom's been speaking out ever since.
So, again, these are all my heroes
here, and Kirk Wiebe was working with
Bill Binney and he helped me
also. And then Chelsea
Manning, of course, he you know, he
people don't realize the trauma
you go through when you're actually in
combat and you watch
people gunned down, innocent civilians
gunned down. And that's what got
Chelsea Manning to
decide to become a whistleblower.
And there were
just enormous amounts of
information that came out from some of
these documents. And then, of course, as
Snowden and there's never
been anybody like Ed Snowden.
I hope there's a lot of people that
follow in his footsteps.
But the information
that he had was just astounding.
I've written about NSA for 30 years.
I just couldn't believe half the stuff
that was coming out from from his
documents. So, you know, I'm really a big
supporter of whistleblowers.
The there's really two
forces out there.
One is the force of fear,
the fear mongers who are always pushing
for more surveillance
and scaring everybody with
with fear. You know, there's been I think
there were four terrorists,
four people killed in the United States
last year by terrorists.
There are twenty four people killed by
dog bites.
And that's an average except for
9/11 every other year normally like
that. So it's just fear mongering.
The only only thing opposing that,
the only thing opposing fear is
information. And the only people that can
get the information out are the
whistleblowers. So what's the
take away the take away the what
the.
Well, I took away from all this is that
No one, the NSA and the telecoms have
been secretly cooperating for
nearly a century.
I mean, it just didn't happen with George
Bush has been going on for a long
time.
Number two,
they occasionally get caught, but no one
ever gets punished or prosecuted.
Is neither the eavesdropping nor the
companies. I mean, they just they do
it. They get caught and
they just keep doing it again.
Uh, a number three.
As I just said, after they get caught,
they stop for a while and then they just
resume their illegal eavesdropping
one after another.
So.
What's the answer?
One answer have a major
church style investigation, but this time
not by Congress.
I mean, what's Congress going to do,
investigate themselves?
This time have sort of a 9/11 commission,
but not a lot of old government hacks
on there, put some journalists,
writers, privacy advocates,
now some people
like former Senator Udall, for example,
or soon to be former
senator.
Uh, no. To have a major Bella
Abzug style hearing and force the
companies to testify
about their involvement publicly.
And three, have the Justice Department
get another full, full blown criminal
investigation of the NSA.
Now, all these things have a precedent.
I mean, a major investigation as a church
committee. Is the president calling the
the telecoms as Bella Abzug
searing as a precedent?
And the nineteen seventy five criminal
investigation of NSA
is a precedent for a new investigation.
Uh, just one thing different
they should do this time, however.
Prosecute them.
Now, having worked in a
bar on and off, especially espionage
cases since I got out of law school,
I've seen a lot of the criminal justice
system and to some degree, it does
work. You know, it does work.
You put somebody in jail more time
so they stop doing what they're
what they have been doing.
So this will come very
easy for NSA.
I've even worked out a plan, say
that's NASA headquarters right
across the street, there's an abandoned
asylum for the Kremlin saying.
You just march him across
very easy
and like I said, it does work
after they're in there for a while, it
will work.
And I guarantee you that,
you know, you have
General Alexander in a prison
cell for a while.
When he comes out, he's going to be
reformed.
And this is where he's going to look
like.
So after he gets out
of prison, after he reformed, after
he becomes an advocate for
Ed Snowden,
then the next thing is going to happen
is.
Ed, Snowden is going to go on the
Cryptologic Hall of Fame right
next to Herbert Yardley, who
was also
charged with being a whistleblower after
70 years.
Believe it or not, after 70 years in
1999, despite the fact
that they were basically ready to
prosecute Herbert Yardley for writing a
book,
they put him on the Cryptologic Hall of
Fame. So in 70 years, I
predict that Ed Snowden is going to be up
there along with Herbert Yardley.
So anyway, listen, I appreciate
all your attention here, and I'm happy
to take any kind of questions anybody
like to ask.
Yeah, big thank you to this talk, it
was quite great and a lot of people
wanted to see it that we're not allowed
to come in here. So there were even more
people like liking to talk
anyway. If you have time for some
questions and answers and maybe
you should start to ask them, I
know that that's one question.
The Internet at the moment.
Yes.
Uh, one first use.
New Zealand researcher Nikki Hager
has written about his country's
involvement in the NSA surveillance
network.
One example, if you recall, was that
analysis in New Zealand.
We are told by the US to Poulter's
economics and intelligence of Japan
over all else, given that
we have examples of corporate
entities profiting from control
over competitors.
Is it fair to say that the sole purpose
of it is to uphold US
economic economy?
So it's contributing to crime, but also
a sort of a secondary purpose?
The question has to do with whether NSA
is doing economic intelligence
of actually testified before the European
Parliament on this.
It's a more nuanced, complicated
question. The NSA doesn't
I don't think the NSA spies on
Airbus, for example, then passes that
information on to Boeing.
It's just too complicated to do
that. They'd have to set up a skiff at
Boeing and then they have to give
it to Lockheed and everything else.
So I don't think there's there's
I don't think there's economic espionage
in that sort of micro sense.
I think there is economic espionage in
the macro sense where they find out,
you know, what the
Petrobas is doing down and
down in Brazil as part of
a more a larger
economic espionage.
And then they're also eavesdropping
on companies that they think may be
in violation of embargoes and things.
So they do do
macro espionage.
The other area that they do in terms
of economics, which is very interesting,
and they've been doing this ever since
the NSA was created.
Any time there's a like a G-7
or one of these big economic conferences,
NSA spends months
trying to set up eavesdropping
capabilities. They know what everybody at
the G-7 or whatever, what their
negotiating positions are going to be.
So on the big macro issue of
economics, they do do a lot of spying
on individual companies and passing
that on to American companies.
I don't think so. But one area
where that linkage does happen is where
people leave NSA and then go
to work for the companies and then they
know what they've
known for years, what the
companies don't know because they've been
eavesdropping on them.
OK, the next question is coming from the
room, it's from Damaturu.
So do you believe that the U.S.
government is capable of investigating
itself, that things like Abscam
from the 1980s in which
I think thirty one politicians were
targeted and
only a handful were actually ever
followed through to prosecution?
Do you feel that a
church committee hearing could actually
be convened in this day and age?
Yes, good question, because
like I mentioned, I don't think
the Congress is capable of
doing it.
I thought the 9/11 Commission left a lot
to be desired.
I thought that they did a sloppy job.
They virtually did no investigation
of NSA at all.
On the other hand, you had the
presidential panel that was appointed by
Barack Obama and they came
out what it was three
people on. There are four people,
something like that. One of them was a
former CIA deputy director.
And they actually did come out with a
recommendation of forty six areas
that should be changed for the areas
that the that they thought the government
was doing illegal or improper
or unethical or immoral or whatever
kind of activities.
The problem wasn't that they
came out with a bad report that came out
with a very good report.
The problem was Barack Obama ignored it.
I mean, he basically brushed
it off. He said, OK, there's like three
or four, maybe six things that we could
change.
And then the other 40
he ignored. So those
are the two problems. One is firing
government people who will do this
or rather find people that will go on to
on a committee or whatever, that will
do an energetic job like the church
committee. And the other one is, once
they've done, will
the Congress, which is now more
Republican than ever or president,
go along with it?
So is a really an uphill
battle, but you've got to start
someplace. And I think
starting with a full investigation,
9/11 style, what the government's been
doing in terms of eavesdropping, torture
and all that really needs I
mean, we haven't had it since nineteen
seventy five.
You know, you need one once a century
at least.
So anyway.
I hope so.
OK, the next question is from the four.
Yes you may.
Applause I
a few of us watched the 1992
Hollywood film Sneakers the other night
and part of the
plot hinges on NSA domestic
surveillance. And as far as I know,
it wasn't really in the popular
consciousness at that time.
And it seems really prescient.
And I'm just kind of curious whether
the producers had some inside track
on on some of the revelations
that eventually came out in your books.
I'm sorry, whether who
had the the producers of
the film?
Yeah, even whether
the producers of the film Sneakers had
had
insight into the NSA.
Through through what?
Through I I'm not sure.
It it just seemed very prescient,
you know, based on recent revelations
and know
that's true.
You know, it was a really interesting
movie in there.
Another one was enemy of the state that
came out in the late 90s.
Yeah. No, there have been
periodic people that have been
interested in domestic spying.
My first book came out in 82.
It was a bestseller, made quite
a bit of noise and I've been writing
about it for a long time, the domestic
aspects of it.
But it didn't really
the public hadn't really caught on
to what the NSA was doing
since the church committee until
the Snowden revelations, because
I mean, this is very interesting.
One of the things that Snowden told me
when I was in Moscow
was that, you know, he had several
choices when he became a whistleblower.
He could become a whistle blower like
Bill Bennett, who was
a whistle blower to me for my
Wired article.
And what happened in that
Wired article when I interviewed Bill
Bennett and I put down what Bill Bennett
said about these all this eavesdropping.
General Alexander came out, I don't know
how many of you saw Laura Poitras was
film last night,
but there was a scene in there where
General Alexander is sitting in front of
a congressional committee
and they're saying, does the US do
domestic eavesdropping?
Does the NSA spy on Americans?
Are the U.S. dropped on their
emails and he kept saying, no, no,
no.
Well, that was a response to my article.
My article came out.
And so then he testified
and he lied in front of the committees.
And so all the the press,
Washington Post and so forth,
they reported, oh, this is all nonsense.
You know, General Alexander came out and
said they don't do it. So of course they
don't do it.
So Snowden's seeing that he's
he's seeing that when he's
thinking about becoming a whistleblower
and he sees what happened to Bill
Bennett. Bill Bennett comes out, he says
the US is doing all this spying.
Alexander comes out and says, no, we're
not. The press buys
into Alexander because he's got four
stars on his shoulder.
And so Snowden
thinks there's only one way to do this,
and that's to actually walk out with
the documents.
I mean, if I got the documents and I give
them to, you know, people in the press,
then you're not going to have Alexander
being able to lie anymore.
So I think that's one
of the things that happened was in the
past, people would come out, they blow
the whistle.
NSA would say it's know like Tom
Drake or whatever is nonsense.
And and so then people
would hadn't
paid much attention.
So that's why I think it was the
documents that made the whole difference
with Snowden.
OK, then another question from the
Internet.
Yeah, the question is, how
is the civic coverage outside
of Congress and government about
sort of two things?
How did supporters behave for the
time since the founding of a
was civic earlier?
Can you just ask me just one more time?
Yeah.
How this specific coverage outside
of Congress and government about
the eavesdropping things, how does
the purse behave for the first time
since the founding of the NSA
was old early.
Earlier?
Yeah, a good question.
You know, the press how
one big problem is the press.
They they
never pay attention to NSA until
there's some big thing like like Snowden.
When I wrote my first book about NSA,
The Puzzle Palace, nineteen eighty two,
there had never been anybody in the press
that ever did an investigative story on
NSA before that it was just a
nobody paid attention to hard
CIA is very easy because they've got
sources, you know, drop a dime
and you'll get twenty CIA
sources show up.
It's fairly easy for journalists to find.
I mean you can't leave CIA without
writing a book
for virtually everybody at
CIA writes a book.
So there's a million CIA sources.
Nobody from NSA has ever written a book.
So NSA sources are very hard.
And if it's very hard, the journalists
are going to go the easy way, which is
CIA, and not pay any attention
to the NSA.
The other thing is CIA is very easy.
You know, it's a spy.
They leave a bag behind a tree and
somebody picks it up or they
shoot somebody with a drone.
NSA, you've got to know a little bit
about electronics.
You have no satellites are up in the air
and that radio signals go through.
And so but that's journalists
don't usually study science.
So NSA is a lot harder for
them to deal with. So that's a
lot of reasons why you hardly ever see
people doing investigative stories on
NSA, at least pre Snowden was
because of the, first of all, the
difficulty of getting sources.
And second of all, the
the fact that you have to know at least
a little bit about science in order
to write about NSA.
OK, then the last question from the room,
I know that there are more questions,
but, um, the time is up,
so it's number one.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
My question is, if
the NSA and other
services are not capable
of catching so-called
terrorists, even if they shop in
the same supermarket,
why the heck are these
agencies there?
Is this just for
making money for a security
industry?
Yes.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
I'll give you a I'll give you a sense of
his track record and this is the first
World Trade Center bombing and
this the attack on the USS Cole, even
though it took place in Yemen, a key
target of NSA in this, the
attacks on the
US embassies in East Africa,
even though the NSA
had been focusing on that house
where where the operation was
planned for years,
it missed 9/11.
The director of the NSA was having a
meeting in his office at the time of
9/11, the director of NSA,
and he looks over his TV set and sees the
planes going in, you know, so NSA
found out about it from a three hundred
dollar television set.
And then after 9/11, they they
miss the Times Square bomber.
You know, that was some people in
Times Square that happened to find that
they missed the Christmas
Day underwear bomber completely
missed it. They missed the the
the marathon bombing.
So, yeah, the NSA
doesn't do that. I mean, it wasn't set up
to catch Terry's. It wasn't what it was
set up for set up to find
when Russia was about to launch a nuclear
war, basically.
So it's an agency.
It's not doing what it was set
up to do and it can't do what it's trying
to do very well.
So, yeah, the the
key beneficiary of this is the are the
telecom companies and the rather
the defense contractors, the
the war profiteers basically who
make profits on all this stuff.
The the amount of contractors
that make money from NSA is just
astonishing.
But anyway, that's that's a
simple answer. Your question is yes.
That's the key beneficiaries of all this
is not the American public.
It's the war profiteers.
But thanks very much.
Yeah, thank you.