[00:02.250 --> 00:06.790]  I want to introduce one of my heroes, and hopefully one of your heroes.
[00:07.310 --> 00:16.230]  Someone who is a true American patriot and has made us more intelligent, more informed, and inspired God knows how many others.
[00:16.510 --> 00:17.790]  Mr. Daniel Ellsberg.
[00:52.980 --> 00:53.840]  Thank you.
[00:55.040 --> 00:56.920]  Oh, thank you, Emmanuel.
[00:57.220 --> 01:01.060]  That is so much better than a Moment of Hate from 1984.
[01:01.580 --> 01:07.960]  That's what they have in mind for us later, I think, but not the people in this room will be subject to that.
[01:08.540 --> 01:17.760]  In fact, I had the privilege just now back there of meeting Lonnie Snowden and his wife, Karen, who are Ed Snowden's parents.
[01:18.300 --> 01:30.580]  And it was a real pleasure for me to meet them because I know that it meant the world for Ed in Russia to know, to find out when it came out that he had his father's support on this.
[01:31.000 --> 01:35.500]  I know that from my own, and I wanted to thank him for being that way.
[01:35.700 --> 01:41.980]  I don't know what his prior politics were, and his background, like mine, involved clearance, just as it did for his son.
[01:43.280 --> 01:53.360]  That was also true for my father, who worked on the Atomic Energy Commission, had acute clearance, so that he couldn't tell me until 30 years later, really, what he had worked on.
[01:53.800 --> 01:55.900]  But it meant a lot to me.
[01:56.060 --> 02:04.600]  I didn't know when my wife and I were eluding the FBI for 13 days after the first publication of the Pentagon Papers.
[02:05.340 --> 02:11.060]  That was the first I knew that my father would know what I'd been doing, and I really didn't know how he'd react.
[02:11.060 --> 02:12.040]  He was a Republican.
[02:12.280 --> 02:14.420]  He was an engineer, structural engineer.
[02:14.760 --> 02:18.700]  Voted for Nixon twice, he told me, which I wasn't real happy to hear.
[02:19.240 --> 02:29.140]  But so I really didn't know entirely how he would react to this news that his son was a criminal, as I'm about to discuss here.
[02:30.200 --> 02:47.300]  And so I was very pleased when we were going from house to house in Cambridge while the FBI was looking all over the world for me in places I think they'd always wanted to go, sort of the Riviera, Bali, and a lot of junketing going on there, I think.
[02:47.380 --> 02:57.560]  But I was in Cambridge, and I saw my father being interviewed in Detroit and saying, I don't know if my son did this, but I can well believe that he did.
[02:58.220 --> 02:59.960]  It's just what he would do.
[03:00.220 --> 03:01.540]  He believed in...
[03:01.540 --> 03:06.500]  His letters from Vietnam, my father said, had turned him around on the war.
[03:07.080 --> 03:17.200]  And he said, I know Daniel has always believed in telling the truth, and he wanted to save those boys' lives.
[03:17.480 --> 03:20.440]  And his voice broke at that point on the television.
[03:20.440 --> 03:25.660]  And I was very, very pleased to hear that, as I say, knowing his background.
[03:25.840 --> 03:29.580]  Although, actually, he had broken from his father's background.
[03:29.820 --> 03:39.120]  My grandfather and grandmother came from Russia as immigrants because Jews had been emancipated, which meant they were now eligible for the draft, for a seven-year draft.
[03:39.540 --> 03:43.620]  And so he came to America to a land of freedom, where they didn't have a draft.
[03:44.080 --> 03:52.180]  And once, when my father was present, when I mentioned that, and afterwards he said, I wasn't happy with what you said about my father.
[03:52.380 --> 03:54.160]  He said, you made him sound like a draft dodger.
[03:54.380 --> 03:59.120]  I said, well, you know, that's what he did at that point.
[03:59.560 --> 04:03.620]  But his parents were not Republicans.
[04:03.840 --> 04:05.680]  When they came over, they were Russian anarchists.
[04:05.680 --> 04:11.340]  And their models and friends were Big Bill Haywood, who founded the IWW, the Wobblies.
[04:11.420 --> 04:14.400]  How many people here know... Let me see hands.
[04:14.540 --> 04:16.020]  How many have heard of Big Bill Haywood?
[04:16.920 --> 04:17.680]  Not as many.
[04:17.780 --> 04:19.100]  You can't see too many as I would have thought.
[04:19.160 --> 04:20.060]  How about Emma Goldman?
[04:21.000 --> 04:21.480]  And, yay.
[04:21.940 --> 04:22.140]  Okay.
[04:22.140 --> 04:24.980]  My grandfather, it turned out, was a lover of Emma Goldman.
[04:25.640 --> 04:31.500]  And I'm... that's not a too exclusive club, actually.
[04:31.720 --> 04:34.980]  But I'm proud of it.
[04:35.660 --> 04:38.320]  My grandmother didn't feel quite the same way about it.
[04:41.680 --> 04:58.840]  And as a little Jewish boy growing up in Colorado, actually, from... with Russian immigrant parents, I was surprised to learn, at a point when I got an award called the Tom Paine Award, that Tom Paine had been the big hero of my father when he was a boy.
[04:59.000 --> 05:01.600]  He got that from his parents, I'm sure.
[05:02.060 --> 05:06.040]  And Tom Paine said, in common sense, the...
[05:06.040 --> 05:12.920]  what virtually triggered, you know, fired up the revolution, nations should have no secrets.
[05:13.520 --> 05:22.040]  Because the secrets of courts, meaning monarchical courts, the secrets of courts, like those of individuals, are always their defects.
[05:23.100 --> 05:27.980]  Now, actually, that's a little extreme as a statement, to say no secrets.
[05:28.480 --> 05:39.420]  There are legitimate secrets, in a way, certainly in wartime, obviously, and in certain intelligence matters, that certainly I believe that.
[05:39.560 --> 05:44.240]  I was not an anarchist, certainly, or a Republican.
[05:44.240 --> 05:45.680]  I was a Cold War liberal.
[05:46.060 --> 05:47.480]  I was a Cold War Democrat.
[05:47.960 --> 05:56.220]  But when I took a lot of secrecy agreements, I was on the understanding, and I still believe, that there are legitimate secrets.
[05:56.560 --> 06:03.280]  I can argue with Julian Assange on that, who, even when I asked him, do you think government should have any secrets?
[06:03.280 --> 06:06.020]  And he said right away, yes, you know, that they should have no secrets?
[06:06.200 --> 06:06.420]  No.
[06:07.080 --> 06:09.420]  I said, for example, what do you have in mind?
[06:09.820 --> 06:14.280]  And he said, well, private medical records that they have, for example.
[06:14.400 --> 06:17.120]  It wasn't easy for him to come up with anything else, actually.
[06:17.760 --> 06:28.120]  And, in fact, I had an argument with Jake Applebaum, whom a lot of you know, who had pretty much the same attitude, a very, very notion that the government should be transparent.
[06:28.260 --> 06:44.600]  And I said, look, since they're getting all the private information of all of us, and keeping the fact that they're doing it secret until now, until soon, and they have all that information, if that got turned out en masse, you know, by digitally, which it could be virtually,
[06:44.980 --> 06:46.720]  that would not be a good thing.
[06:46.720 --> 06:55.760]  That would, because, of course, neither Assange nor Applebaum believe in total transparency for the individual or for associations, private associations.
[06:55.960 --> 06:57.780]  And the government has that now.
[06:58.120 --> 07:03.080]  So they could deprive us all of any kind of privacy or secrecy.
[07:03.220 --> 07:07.200]  And I think, by the way, that is what they're aiming to do, and they've gotten very far along on it.
[07:07.420 --> 07:11.720]  In any case, I think I'm pretty sure that Snowden...
[07:12.760 --> 07:18.260]  Assange, of course, and Applebaum were not insiders, and that's very good from many points of view.
[07:18.460 --> 07:28.000]  But also, I think they weren't exposed to things that, when you look at them, you say, okay, this is better to keep secret at this time, for some period of time.
[07:29.200 --> 07:46.640]  Certainly, Snowden, Manning, I, Tom Drake, and the other NSA people like Bill Binney, Lomas, and so forth, knew many more secrets than they have revealed or thought should be revealed.
[07:47.520 --> 07:48.880]  And that was true.
[07:49.000 --> 07:50.660]  Most people don't realize it about Manning.
[07:50.820 --> 07:56.460]  For example, they think, here's this young kid who, quote, dumped out everything he could.
[07:56.720 --> 07:59.720]  You know, you've heard that cliché, almost.
[07:59.960 --> 08:01.680]  By now, totally untrue.
[08:01.880 --> 08:13.440]  He worked in what was called a SCIF, Sensitive Compartment Information Facility, which meant to me immediately that most of what he was looking at was top secret or higher.
[08:13.740 --> 08:20.440]  Communications intelligence, covert intelligence, none of which he chose to put out, whether or not some of it...
[08:20.440 --> 08:28.140]  I'm sure some of it should have been put out, but he did not put anything like that out, meaning that his work was the opposite of indiscriminate.
[08:28.140 --> 08:38.620]  What he put out was secret or lower, which is a classification that I didn't have time to read, literally, in the Pentagon when I worked there as an official.
[08:38.840 --> 08:39.960]  I said, don't bring me secret.
[08:40.360 --> 08:42.600]  This notice, I just don't have time for it.
[08:42.720 --> 08:52.720]  And when I realized how many crimes were revealed by Manning, I realized, gee, I missed more than I realized by not saying any of this.
[08:52.720 --> 09:03.440]  And I wouldn't have thought they'd put this amount of criminality, torture, assassinations, 20,000 more civilian deaths than the newspapers had picked up.
[09:03.620 --> 09:08.540]  I wouldn't have thought that would all be at the secret level, but apparently it's become so routine...
[09:08.540 --> 09:10.640]  It probably wasn't in my day.
[09:10.920 --> 09:11.780]  Torture, for example.
[09:12.320 --> 09:22.940]  But now, so routine, even though Congress has not yet passed a law or rescinded the laws making that criminal, nevertheless, there it is in secret.
[09:23.180 --> 09:26.980]  And, of course, no one prosecuted as a result.
[09:27.440 --> 09:37.460]  By the way, you may or may not have realized that Manning's revelations of atrocities, through Julian Assange and through Le Monde, were absolutely critical in getting U.S.
[09:37.580 --> 09:38.960]  troops out of Iraq.
[09:39.580 --> 09:42.500]  Now, the neocons would say, well, that's a bad thing.
[09:42.600 --> 09:43.220]  They should have stayed.
[09:43.380 --> 09:46.820]  I didn't agree with that at the time, and I was happy to see them going out.
[09:46.820 --> 09:55.540]  But I do not believe that the presence of 10,000 troops there would do any good to anybody or would be preventing the kind of civil war we're seeing now.
[09:55.700 --> 10:04.060]  But in any case, it was the revelation of atrocities in those very cables that were not being prosecuted by the U.S.
[10:04.240 --> 10:23.860]  or investigated, even, that put pressure on Maliki, that he could not allow troops to stay there with immunity from Iraqi prosecutions, since the Americans clearly were not going to prosecute that crime, as they are legally, criminally obliged to do.
[10:24.460 --> 10:31.080]  What Manning was revealing from information from 2010 was that not only the previous president, George W.
[10:31.220 --> 10:56.980]  Bush, but the current president, Barack Obama, was absolutely indictable, let's say, before the Hague War Crimes Court, Court of Crimes, since our obligation to investigate any credible threat of torture obliged us to investigate it and to abstain from it and to try to stop it.
[10:56.980 --> 11:18.500]  And in fact, what Manning revealed in the course of thousands of cables, what could not have been revealed by one, was time after time after time, and we're talking hundreds, up to a thousand here, of American troops properly saying, these Iraqis we are turning over to Iraqi troops will be tortured.
[11:19.100 --> 11:26.300]  And many of them are political dissenters of various kinds who are revealing corruption in the Iraqi government.
[11:26.300 --> 11:28.680]  that they will be tortured or they have been tortured.
[11:28.900 --> 11:38.100]  And in every case, the response was a rote, stereotyped case, obviously revealing a high-level order, do not investigate further.
[11:39.180 --> 11:40.820]  That was an illegal order.
[11:41.260 --> 11:51.020]  As I say, the Geneva Convention and our domestic laws require that to be investigated, and that goes up to the top, including the commander-in-chief.
[11:51.020 --> 12:04.220]  And I have a feeling that that's one reason they were so upset, let's say, with Manning, that he was revealing crimes of the incumbent administration, as well as the prison one.
[12:04.580 --> 12:14.180]  Now, the idea of prosecuting someone for revealing evidence of crime sounds odd, doesn't it?
[12:14.180 --> 12:15.860]  It has a strange ring to it.
[12:16.180 --> 12:21.040]  And the ring is a mockery of the rule of law.
[12:21.620 --> 12:40.740]  The idea that evidence of a crime, a serious crime, torture here, in some cases murder with assassination, that that can be kept secret by anyone of a million or so, 100,000-whatever people, who can stamp that evidence of what Tom Paine would call defects.
[12:41.680 --> 12:44.080]  In this case, criminal defects.
[12:44.480 --> 12:48.080]  And keep that out of court, keep that out of the media, keep that from the public.
[12:48.460 --> 12:52.400]  That's absurd to say that you have a rule of law that involves that.
[12:52.980 --> 12:55.140]  Now, could Congress have made that legal?
[12:55.340 --> 12:56.220]  Well, it hasn't.
[12:56.680 --> 12:59.220]  Could the courts really rule?
[12:59.460 --> 13:02.580]  No such case has actually ever gone to the court.
[13:02.580 --> 13:22.660]  When Thomas Tam, who was a source for the NSA wiretapping that was going on from 2001 and on for the next five years, when he was subject to indictment, investigation, and subject to indictment for a number of years, including a couple of years into the Obama administration,
[13:23.140 --> 13:24.220]  it was finally dropped.
[13:24.660 --> 13:30.360]  But I told him, Tom and he agreed with me, I had mixed feelings about your case being dropped.
[13:30.360 --> 13:34.060]  I know, you know, it's been terrible for you, and he's going to affect blackball from...
[13:34.060 --> 13:39.440]  But I have to admit, I would have liked to see a case go to the Supreme Court and argued...
[13:39.940 --> 13:47.280]  I see the prosecutors argue in front of the justices that revealing evidence of a crime is itself criminal.
[13:48.240 --> 13:49.660]  It sounds ridiculous.
[13:49.660 --> 13:50.800]  And I was interested...
[13:51.240 --> 13:56.680]  Tam himself, whose life had been overturned by this terribly, did say, I agree with you.
[13:56.820 --> 14:04.400]  I would have liked to see that argued, although he was glad, you know, in the end, mixed feelings, not to have to go through that.
[14:04.980 --> 14:10.440]  Now, in my case, it isn't just evidence of crime that deserves to be known.
[14:10.440 --> 14:19.060]  There are other defects, in fact, that deserve to be known and will be kept secret by this government or any government that can do it.
[14:19.640 --> 14:27.580]  And any corporation, any group, any association that can keep such information secret will do what it can to do it.
[14:27.840 --> 14:30.100]  Private ones, any kind, certainly corporations.
[14:30.320 --> 14:31.000]  I'll come back to that.
[14:32.520 --> 14:39.180]  So, in my case, actually, the Pentagon Papers, there wasn't really revelation of ongoing...
[14:39.180 --> 15:02.140]  of actual war crimes in the way that Manning revealed or Ed Snowden revealed or Thomas Tam, because Ed Snowden revealed what Tam didn't, couldn't, and that was documentary evidence that the NSA knew that what they were doing in 2001, 2002, 3, 4, 5, until Congress began to try to legitimate it,
[15:02.920 --> 15:07.180]  was clearly criminal, with criminal penalties.
[15:07.380 --> 15:08.820]  So that's what Snowden revealed.
[15:09.300 --> 15:13.100]  Now, were we, in fact, criminals?
[15:13.280 --> 15:17.960]  Oh, I started to say, in the case of the Pentagon Papers, it wasn't, in fact, so much a matter of crime.
[15:18.100 --> 15:28.740]  It was high-level decision-making involving what could be argued was aggression, but it would be a complicated argument, unlike George W.
[15:28.900 --> 15:30.640]  Bush's invasion of Iraq.
[15:31.200 --> 15:34.580]  No complication in that one in front of The Hague at all.
[15:34.900 --> 15:45.320]  Clear-cut crime against the peace, aggression, war criminals, of the kind that people were hanged in Germany and Japan.
[15:45.860 --> 16:06.260]  Whatever you think about capital punishment, the point is that in terms of criminality, in terms of appropriate condemnation, stigmatization of doing such a thing, indictment, whatever the sentence is, in the end, there's no question that George W.
[16:06.360 --> 16:13.800]  Bush, Cheney, and everybody cooperating with him was as guilty as the people who were tried at Nuremberg and in Tokyo.
[16:14.640 --> 16:15.360]  But that...
[16:16.940 --> 16:17.960]  That was...
[16:19.760 --> 16:37.020]  Now, all of us, as I say, accepted to start with and continue to this day to feel that there are some legitimate secrets, which is to say some things that should not be leaked without authorization, and they're properly held for some period of time.
[16:38.260 --> 16:47.040]  That applies to very, very little that needs holding beyond months, a year or two, really two or three years.
[16:47.280 --> 17:06.180]  A real expert on this subject, I won't go into it now, named William Florence, who actually wrote most of the regulations on secrecy for the Pentagon, said that about 5% of classified information, as I say, he wrote the regulations, about 5% fulfills the criteria for classification when it's written.
[17:07.420 --> 17:12.160]  And he said two or three years later, that's about half of 1%.
[17:13.060 --> 17:15.640]  And that's a pretty good estimate, actually.
[17:15.800 --> 17:18.520]  As anybody inside the system, if they think about it, I think we'll know.
[17:18.740 --> 17:24.800]  It's not that over-classification affects a quarter, a third, a half of what's classified.
[17:26.480 --> 17:27.360]  Think 95%.
[17:28.300 --> 17:32.580]  Or after a couple of years, 98%, 99%.
[17:33.460 --> 17:52.120]  Irwin Griswold, the former dean of Harvard Law School, who argued the case for injunction of the Pentagon Papers, saying that any further publication of the papers, this first injunction ever requested by the government, any further publication would harm U.S.
[17:52.240 --> 17:55.320]  national security irrevocably, you know, and greatly.
[17:56.300 --> 18:09.240]  Thirty years later, I'm sitting in a panel like this, and hear Griswold say, looking back on it, I never believed that any of the material in the Pentagon Papers had any effect on security.
[18:09.240 --> 18:14.000]  I would have loved to hear him say that a little earlier, before I was on trial.
[18:14.280 --> 18:23.280]  But he said, and he made the good comment, he said, I've been in this system a long time, and very, very little deserves classification beyond a short period of time.
[18:23.700 --> 18:28.460]  Meaning, look at, people always bring up the Normandy invasion of 1944.
[18:30.280 --> 18:32.420]  Fine, the date and place of the Normandy invasion.
[18:32.580 --> 18:35.380]  Who would disagree that that had to be secret?
[18:35.980 --> 18:44.920]  And how secret did the billion or so pages relating to that have to be in August of 1944, or July?
[18:45.460 --> 18:48.320]  For a few days, there was a question of, you know, is this a feint?
[18:48.460 --> 18:49.740]  Where are they really coming, and so forth?
[18:50.740 --> 18:58.640]  By August of 44, now war's still on, the place of the Normandy landing is really not a very important secret to keep.
[18:58.840 --> 19:00.580]  But it was kept.
[19:00.780 --> 19:01.680]  You can be sure.
[19:01.880 --> 19:02.340]  I don't know.
[19:02.500 --> 19:03.980]  I'd like to see the statistics on this.
[19:03.980 --> 19:08.380]  I would guess that probably most of that was kept secret for the next 20 or 30 years.
[19:08.640 --> 19:12.640]  As a matter of fact, at the end of the war, there wasn't any mass declassification, whatever.
[19:13.100 --> 19:14.420]  And that's very typical.
[19:15.060 --> 19:31.280]  Now, all of us, when I say Manning, Snowden, and I, and Tom Drake, actually, had clearances for communications intelligence, for which there is a narrow official secrets act.
[19:31.280 --> 19:33.720]  And of course, communications, that's the big subject here.
[19:34.600 --> 19:42.200]  And generally, I'm sure that when we first signed a secrecy agreement relating to that, we not only thought, that's probably right.
[19:42.340 --> 19:56.720]  The interest, the need for the public to know this, that we are listening in to these foreign powers for our intelligence purposes, and the fact that we are doing it, and the content of it deserves to be kept secret, even for a long period of time.
[19:56.720 --> 20:07.980]  That's what is justified, generally, to keep people from changing their codes and be more aware that they have to be more careful against hackers, actually against spies.
[20:08.460 --> 20:10.780]  So, what you don't have here.
[20:11.020 --> 20:12.260]  So it sounds reasonable to us.
[20:13.520 --> 20:21.740]  I don't think that anymore, the way the law is written, and I'll come back to that, because it doesn't allow for a public interest defense.
[20:21.980 --> 20:26.160]  It's a strict liability law, which means, was it classified?
[20:26.160 --> 20:27.160]  Did you put it out?
[20:27.320 --> 20:27.900]  That's it.
[20:28.580 --> 20:29.600]  Away you go.
[20:30.080 --> 20:41.600]  No argument in court, whatever, as to the motives, the public benefit, or the lack of harm that may have caused by putting out this information.
[20:41.880 --> 20:43.160]  You can't argue that.
[20:43.300 --> 20:50.460]  I experienced that myself in the first prosecution ever held for a leak in America.
[20:50.600 --> 20:51.480]  And that was mine.
[20:52.180 --> 20:59.220]  And when, in four and a half days on the stand, my lawyer asked me, Mr. Ellsberg, why did you...
[21:00.100 --> 21:01.420]  We used to say...
[21:01.420 --> 21:08.520]  Outside the court, the lawyers always called me Dr. Ellsberg to PhD, to irritate the prosecutor.
[21:08.780 --> 21:13.220]  And the prosecutor made a motion that the word doctor should not be used in front of the jury.
[21:13.220 --> 21:16.260]  And the judge says...
[21:16.260 --> 21:17.340]  He agreed with that.
[21:17.440 --> 21:20.560]  He says, no titles in this courtroom, except for mine, of course.
[21:21.660 --> 21:26.660]  And so, Mr. Ellsberg, why did you copy the Pentagon papers?
[21:27.740 --> 21:28.960]  And I started to answer.
[21:29.120 --> 21:35.800]  I'd been prepared for this for a long time, to tell things that I had actually never told the press before, even though I'd been able, free to speak in interviews.
[21:35.980 --> 21:39.820]  But I thought, I'll say certain things for when I'm testifying under oath.
[21:39.820 --> 21:43.320]  And that will give it an authenticity and a drama that it wouldn't have otherwise.
[21:43.500 --> 21:44.340]  So I was ready to answer.
[21:46.100 --> 21:46.980]  Objection, irrelevant.
[21:47.980 --> 21:50.640]  Motives, not an element of this crime.
[21:51.080 --> 21:52.460]  And the judge upheld that.
[21:53.040 --> 21:56.800]  And my lawyer, Leonard Boudin, tried several other ways of phrasing it.
[21:57.760 --> 22:01.940]  Not motives, or not why, but you know, tell us about this or that or something.
[22:02.280 --> 22:03.280]  Couldn't get it through.
[22:04.120 --> 22:10.960]  And every time he was blocked, as Snowden would be and as Manning was in his court-martial.
[22:11.280 --> 22:11.840]  And Drake.
[22:12.660 --> 22:26.920]  And so finally my lawyer said to the judge, Judge Matthew Byrne, Your Honor, I've never heard of a case where a defendant in a criminal trial is not allowed to tell the jury why he did what he did.
[22:26.920 --> 22:31.740]  And the answer from the judge was, Now you're hearing it.
[22:32.060 --> 22:33.200]  And that was it.
[22:33.680 --> 22:49.160]  So the idea by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by current Secretary of State John Kerry, Snowden should come back here and make his case in court, is absolutely hollow.
[22:49.160 --> 22:53.140]  I had the chance to ask Ed, Do you think they believed that?
[22:53.960 --> 22:55.520]  And he thought not.
[22:55.740 --> 22:56.820]  I don't know what his basis is.
[22:57.000 --> 22:57.780]  Maybe we can...
[22:57.780 --> 22:59.760]  No, he says they know better than that.
[22:59.960 --> 23:01.180]  Maybe yes, maybe no.
[23:01.540 --> 23:07.620]  The truth is that not many lawyers know either the law or the bearing of the Constitution on this.
[23:07.920 --> 23:11.240]  Because in my case, there never had been a case.
[23:11.400 --> 23:12.980]  They didn't learn about it in law school.
[23:13.380 --> 23:17.400]  They didn't see any cases, because there weren't any to cite.
[23:17.400 --> 23:21.000]  So we
[23:24.260 --> 23:27.600]  come back to this question, Was I a criminal?
[23:27.760 --> 23:28.840]  Did I break a law?
[23:30.420 --> 23:40.120]  I asked my lawyer, Charlie Nesson, the Harvard Law professor still, about 10 years later, after all this, I said, Charlie, did I break any law?
[23:41.700 --> 23:44.740]  And he said, That's very hard to answer.
[23:45.720 --> 23:49.520]  And here's why it was, and to some degree still is.
[23:50.000 --> 24:05.440]  The reason I was asking, in a way, was that whereas I assumed I had broken law when I did it, and I assumed that I would go to jail for life on this, we found out in the course of reading that there had been no previous cases.
[24:05.600 --> 24:06.940]  Nobody knew that, actually.
[24:07.860 --> 24:11.400]  If this were an audience of lawyers, well, I'll come back to that.
[24:11.500 --> 24:16.580]  I would not expect you to know that, in fact, that my case was the first.
[24:16.720 --> 24:18.280]  There had been none before me.
[24:18.480 --> 24:19.400]  Or why?
[24:19.920 --> 24:36.460]  Well, according to Mel Nimmer, who was then the leading authority on law of information, which, again, we're dealing with very much, wrote an amicus brief for the ACLU, and then published that as a Stanford Law Review article in 1974.
[24:37.980 --> 24:54.620]  He said, the statutes which Ellsberg is accused, under which he is charged, which included the Espionage Act and Theft, either do not apply to his acts or, if so applied, are unconstitutional.
[24:55.740 --> 25:06.540]  And that judgment was backed up by Harold Edgar, Benno Schmidt, in the two magisterial articles, very big articles, one in the next year and one ten years later, looking back on it.
[25:06.860 --> 25:08.260]  Same argument, essentially.
[25:09.120 --> 25:24.400]  That to hold revealing information that was classified criminal per se, whatever the motives, whatever the benefits were, was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment.
[25:25.380 --> 25:29.180]  Now, we're talking here about speech by officials.
[25:29.900 --> 25:32.920]  Most of the discussion of the law here has had to do with the press.
[25:33.180 --> 25:35.020]  Does the press have rights?
[25:35.020 --> 25:41.620]  After all, it is named in the First Amendment as being protected or not.
[25:42.060 --> 25:43.780]  That's the question that's been addressed.
[25:43.880 --> 25:48.300]  And very little has been addressed on what about the free speech of officials?
[25:48.800 --> 25:51.400]  To what extent can that be restrained?
[25:51.940 --> 25:53.860]  Because I was on trial for this.
[25:53.860 --> 26:14.800]  Now, actually, nearly everybody nowadays looking at the Snowden case or the Manning case, even my friend and mentor, my hero, Glenn Greenwald, has said repeatedly, and I keep reproving him, but we haven't had a full discussion of it, no one doubts that Ellsberg and Manning,
[26:14.920 --> 26:17.300]  and then later Snowden, broke the law.
[26:18.140 --> 26:26.840]  Well, I've tried to tell him there is more question about that than even Glenn, who's a constitutional lawyer, may realize.
[26:28.020 --> 26:46.080]  Let me mention a number of things that I would not expect anyone in this room, even, because I've raised this to judges and lawyers and reporters, and now you people, to know, unless you've heard it from me, essentially, because it's just not in the public discussion.
[26:46.080 --> 26:50.900]  Actually, it was alluded to by Jess Radack very well the other day.
[26:51.200 --> 26:52.960]  How many people heard that, by the way?
[26:54.420 --> 26:55.080]  Not everybody?
[26:55.280 --> 26:56.240]  How many did not hear it?
[26:58.440 --> 26:59.400]  I can't see very well.
[26:59.700 --> 27:00.860]  Well, enough did not hear it.
[27:01.140 --> 27:02.200]  Let me summarize.
[27:02.200 --> 27:04.020]  She said it very well, and so did Tom Drake.
[27:04.400 --> 27:11.600]  But I'll just say seven or eight things that almost no one knows, even specialists like journalists.
[27:13.040 --> 27:13.880]  One point.
[27:14.480 --> 27:33.340]  Of course, there is no doubt that Snowden, Manning, and I, and not Drake, actually, interestingly, but Snowden, Manning, and I broke regulations, broke the secrecy rules, which are, in fact, administrative rules within the executive branch of the government.
[27:34.300 --> 27:39.560]  They've only existed for the last half century or so, since the early part of the Second World War.
[27:39.700 --> 27:42.140]  Well, actually, Jess said 52.
[27:42.420 --> 27:43.960]  I was a little surprised to hear that.
[27:44.020 --> 27:47.000]  I would have thought that it was during the war, the classification system.
[27:47.240 --> 27:51.540]  But anyway, I'll accept her authority on this, subject to rebuttal.
[27:56.480 --> 28:10.100]  And the regulations are very clear on this, you know, that you can't give classified information, now this is one compartment of it, to a person without clearance, to anyone not authorized to receive it.
[28:10.300 --> 28:20.620]  Now, you can have a clearance and still not be authorized to receive it, but let me focus on the question of giving it to, let's say, a newspaper man or to a congressional staffer or somebody who doesn't have a clearance.
[28:21.080 --> 28:23.640]  There's no question, then, that that violates the rules.
[28:24.160 --> 28:30.380]  And the rules of any organization subject you to what are called administrative penalties.
[28:32.220 --> 28:39.780]  The three of us, that I keep mentioning here, did not take a secrecy oath, although it's always described like that.
[28:39.780 --> 28:47.460]  There is an oath we took, an oath being, so help me God, very serious, very grave, raise your hand.
[28:47.940 --> 29:03.620]  We didn't take that, as I think Tom mentioned a lot, to the secrecy system or the president, but solely to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
[29:04.400 --> 29:13.900]  And, as I've been saying for some years what Tom said the other day, there are domestic enemies of the Constitution at large, and Dick Cheney is one of them, for example.
[29:18.600 --> 29:28.660]  And I don't mean that as an epithet, because all the presidents I served violated the Constitution, hardly any question.
[29:28.660 --> 29:33.840]  They all committed impeachable offenses, if that were an impeachable offense, to violate the Constitution.
[29:34.460 --> 29:37.860]  Congress has to decide that they want to go through that or not.
[29:38.140 --> 29:39.400]  But they all violated it.
[29:39.680 --> 29:43.040]  But really, Dick Cheney, and I even distinguish him here from Bush.
[29:43.140 --> 29:53.860]  I don't know what Bush felt about it, but Dick Cheney and his counsel, David Eddington, had a pretty coherent theory of what the Constitution should be, and was not the one they took an oath to defend.
[29:55.420 --> 30:06.180]  But that was especially true after 9-11 when George Bush joined them in this belief, which was, there is no restraint on the president.
[30:06.460 --> 30:09.420]  He or she is above the law.
[30:09.740 --> 30:13.740]  No treaty, like the Geneva Convention on Torture, binds him.
[30:13.920 --> 30:18.720]  Not the Constitution, not a treaty, not an act of Congress, nothing binds him.
[30:18.720 --> 30:23.320]  In the field of national security, which he defines himself.
[30:23.960 --> 30:28.480]  And during an emergency, which he defines himself.
[30:28.960 --> 30:36.620]  Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher of both of the Nazi regime and also of the Mussolini regime, defined this.
[30:36.720 --> 30:40.440]  He said, he is sovereign who determines the state of emergency.
[30:41.140 --> 30:42.420]  And we're in an emergency.
[30:42.460 --> 30:46.640]  I suspect that even in this audience, very few people realize that George W.
[30:47.040 --> 30:55.660]  Bush declared an emergency, which seemed very natural, 9-11, appropriate, and that that's been renewed every six months, including by Barack Obama.
[30:56.040 --> 30:59.400]  We're living in a state of emergency, legally.
[30:59.820 --> 31:01.400]  And what does that mean?
[31:01.800 --> 31:07.600]  Well, part of it is written out in a law, what the president can do in a state of emergency that he or she can't do otherwise.
[31:08.280 --> 31:09.760]  And part of it isn't.
[31:10.260 --> 31:11.460]  It's classified.
[31:12.280 --> 31:26.240]  And when people on the Homeland Security Committee tried to find out what is in the classified annex to these continuity of government regulations and the emergency regulations, answer, you aren't cleared for that.
[31:26.360 --> 31:27.220]  You can't get it.
[31:27.380 --> 31:29.900]  And the chairman asked for it and can't get it.
[31:29.900 --> 31:36.280]  By the way, that is an absolutely prime candidate for leak.
[31:36.620 --> 31:58.240]  Anybody who knows that in the government, I would say, is absolutely, absolutely contradicting their oath to defend and support the Constitution when they are party to keeping secret from Congress and the public, new executive regulations that amount to suspension of the Constitution.
[31:59.040 --> 32:02.280]  And I believe such orders have been given.
[32:02.820 --> 32:03.380]  Exactly.
[32:03.840 --> 32:16.160]  Any case, as Tom Drake was mentioning the other day, as he realized right away, the surveillance part, mass surveillance of people without a warrant, which they almost surely could have gotten from the federal...
[32:16.160 --> 32:19.300]  They really wanted to show that they weren't bound by a court.
[32:19.300 --> 32:21.980]  The court would almost certainly have given them that authority.
[32:22.160 --> 32:24.780]  But no, Cheney said, no, don't go for it.
[32:24.960 --> 32:28.040]  He didn't want to go for anything to Congress or the courts.
[32:28.180 --> 32:29.520]  We have the authority.
[32:29.640 --> 32:32.080]  That was the principle they wanted to establish.
[32:32.320 --> 32:36.200]  And so for years, this totally criminal operation was going on.
[32:37.440 --> 32:44.740]  Everybody involved in that who did not reveal it to the New York Times or others was guilty of violating their oath.
[32:45.080 --> 32:45.560]  Absolutely.
[32:45.960 --> 32:47.840]  Are there any penalties for that?
[32:48.740 --> 32:50.280]  Actually, I don't know.
[32:51.140 --> 32:52.000]  I'll ask Jess.
[32:52.160 --> 32:53.140]  I'll ask any lawyers here.
[32:53.320 --> 33:00.320]  I've never heard of somebody penalized or indicted or charged with violating their oath to uphold the Constitution.
[33:01.360 --> 33:03.520]  You know, where would you stop?
[33:03.840 --> 33:10.920]  You'd start with the President and the Vice President, but, you know, it would go pretty far, pretty wide when it comes to that.
[33:10.920 --> 33:16.380]  But I think they have pretty much immunity in the past, at least from that, and that ought to change.
[33:17.000 --> 33:25.200]  But what we did do was sign a secrecy agreement, a nondisclosure agreement, such as people in the tobacco company sign it, any company.
[33:25.920 --> 33:34.600]  In fact, I think my friend Julian Assange asked at one point people in WikiLeaks to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
[33:34.860 --> 33:37.900]  Nothing unusual about that except, you might say, for him a little bit.
[33:39.840 --> 33:44.720]  It certainly gets very irritated, you know, when he was leaked on, as does everybody.
[33:47.560 --> 33:49.600]  So, it's a funny way to put it.
[33:49.960 --> 33:54.960]  My wife used to hate me being called a leaguer.
[33:55.160 --> 34:02.300]  She said it made me sound incontinent, but I have to, I have to, I've had to get used to it now.
[34:02.480 --> 34:04.100]  It's just, it's the word.
[34:04.360 --> 34:04.820]  There is no...
[34:04.820 --> 34:07.360]  An unauthorized disclosure-er.
[34:08.740 --> 34:11.680]  That's not a little too complicated.
[34:11.680 --> 34:13.980]  So, we did sign this agreement.
[34:14.760 --> 34:19.000]  And it was an agreement, of course, not to reveal what we learned in the course of our employment.
[34:19.360 --> 34:24.640]  And not dissimilar as what is simply taken for granted between a lawyer and a client.
[34:24.780 --> 34:30.260]  I'm not sure, I'm looking at just here, but I'm not sure whether lawyers sign actual agreements.
[34:30.260 --> 34:31.560]  It's taken for granted, right?
[34:31.980 --> 34:35.500]  Like a priest in the confession booth and a doctor and so forth.
[34:35.700 --> 34:37.660]  But in corporations, very commonly.
[34:38.400 --> 34:40.120]  And that was the same kind of agreement.
[34:40.460 --> 34:43.520]  Except, we were warned in a footnote.
[34:43.820 --> 34:45.540]  Well, no, actually, in the text.
[34:45.700 --> 34:50.740]  It said, And I understand that I might be subject to prosecution.
[34:51.080 --> 34:52.300]  18 U.S.C.
[34:52.500 --> 34:53.900]  793 D&E.
[34:55.040 --> 35:01.760]  Which I happen to remember because I was the first person actually prosecuted under that, ever.
[35:01.760 --> 35:05.120]  And all these other people met that act later.
[35:05.640 --> 35:06.400]  The other whistleblowers.
[35:07.400 --> 35:09.020]  The point is, that was a bluff.
[35:10.440 --> 35:13.060]  No one had, in fact, been prosecuted.
[35:13.200 --> 35:15.700]  Although leaks happened, what, every day, every other day.
[35:16.580 --> 35:18.860]  Fifty years had passed since the Espionage Act.
[35:19.100 --> 35:22.060]  Fifty-four years had been passed in 1917.
[35:22.060 --> 35:29.940]  No one had been prosecuted for a leak because it was regarded as unconstitutional to have what amounted to an Official Secrets Act.
[35:30.380 --> 35:33.280]  So let me go back to my list of things that almost nobody knows.
[35:34.640 --> 35:53.740]  In contrast to most other countries in the world who have some version of a British-type Official Secrets Act, and I always say Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes any and all disclosure without authorization of protected information, classified information.
[35:54.860 --> 36:02.700]  The US doesn't have such an act, intended by Congress to be such an act, and having been found constitutional.
[36:03.600 --> 36:09.040]  In fact, and very specifically, the Espionage Act is not such an act.
[36:09.620 --> 36:15.500]  Now, the reason nobody knows this is that there haven't been cases, but because it seems natural to people to have such an act.
[36:15.640 --> 36:18.520]  I mean, the British live under it, and most other countries have it.
[36:18.520 --> 36:25.120]  And so everybody assumes, as I assumed, when I copied this material and put it out.
[36:25.180 --> 36:38.940]  And incidentally, Mel Nimmer pointed out, as the leading authority then, that I wasn't properly charged with theft in copying this stuff overnight in a corporation that, by the way, was a contractor like Ed Snowden's corporation, the RAND Corporation,
[36:39.160 --> 36:48.860]  and returning it to my safe in the morning after spending all night copying because I was the only person in the corporation authorized to read it.
[36:49.280 --> 36:53.340]  I was not depriving anybody of the use of that time.
[36:53.460 --> 36:57.680]  So even conversion was a very invalid claim against me.
[36:57.840 --> 37:01.800]  And in general, copying in those days was not held to be theft.
[37:01.940 --> 37:06.220]  You didn't deprive the owner, if there was an owner, of the use of the information.
[37:06.220 --> 37:19.300]  I understand that's changed significantly now in the digital age, that you can be held convicted of copying in a way that I wasn't, shouldn't have been susceptible to.
[37:19.500 --> 37:21.060]  But coming back to the Espionage Act.
[37:21.300 --> 37:24.260]  The Espionage Act was not intended for whistleblowers.
[37:24.260 --> 37:26.540]  That's clear from the legislative history.
[37:26.940 --> 37:33.340]  But courts nowadays have a trend where they're no longer paying that much attention to legislative history.
[37:33.340 --> 37:40.000]  They say, the plain language here, we care about, we don't care what Congress said at the time they passed it.
[37:40.480 --> 37:46.000]  So, the plain language, clearly, of the Espionage Act, we all broke.
[37:46.160 --> 37:49.160]  As we did the administrative regulation.
[37:50.040 --> 37:57.740]  Now, what had kept leaks to be as few as they were for those 50 years before my prosecution.
[37:58.040 --> 38:00.480]  Let me check on the time here.
[38:00.560 --> 38:01.000]  How are we doing?
[38:02.540 --> 38:03.400]  Anybody in charge?
[38:05.180 --> 38:05.580]  What?
[38:06.300 --> 38:08.620]  In this group of anarchists, who's in charge?
[38:10.820 --> 38:11.920]  That's what I want to know.
[38:12.080 --> 38:12.860]  Take me to your leader.
[38:15.400 --> 38:16.160]  Five minutes.
[38:16.300 --> 38:16.460]  What?
[38:16.660 --> 38:17.680]  Five minutes, Dan.
[38:17.700 --> 38:18.260]  Five minutes?
[38:19.080 --> 38:19.860]  Oy, Gavolt.
[38:20.180 --> 38:20.380]  Okay.
[38:22.160 --> 38:23.320]  I've used up my time.
[38:23.640 --> 38:24.520]  What can I say?
[38:25.660 --> 38:26.780]  Okay, I hadn't seen that.
[38:27.540 --> 38:29.040]  Okay, five minutes, let's see.
[38:29.760 --> 38:30.700]  Fat chance.
[38:31.400 --> 38:31.900]  Okay.
[38:35.920 --> 38:37.780]  We'll see, we'll see.
[38:38.120 --> 38:39.620]  They may be very disciplined here.
[38:40.040 --> 38:41.660]  What do I want to say in five minutes?
[38:41.740 --> 38:41.960]  Okay.
[38:44.930 --> 38:50.250]  There should not be a British-type official Secrets Act in this country.
[38:50.650 --> 38:52.850]  It is a violation of the First Amendment.
[38:54.090 --> 39:14.410]  But it turns out, unlike the founders' attitude towards slavery, which was not to their credit, and which eventually got changed in the course of a war, new amendments, et cetera, their attitudes on secrecy, on free speech, and freedom in the press, were very good.
[39:15.290 --> 39:16.730]  The First Amendment...
[39:16.730 --> 39:18.330]  I was thinking...
[39:18.330 --> 39:20.330]  I'm taking time here, but what's the...
[39:20.330 --> 39:21.870]  Fahrenheit 451?
[39:21.990 --> 39:36.210]  Isn't that the Ray Bradbury story where people memorized texts to pass them on when the government was incinerating all texts that might aid dissent of various kinds?
[39:36.310 --> 39:43.470]  And I've asked myself, if we get to that situation and we are on the way to it, what would I memorize?
[39:44.190 --> 39:51.410]  And not being able to memorize anything too lengthy at this point, the First Amendment is what I would choose.
[39:51.670 --> 39:55.050]  And I'll give it to you now to see all the words of that.
[39:55.130 --> 39:58.090]  But the focus has been on freedom of the press lately.
[39:58.590 --> 40:06.510]  And I want to say freedom of speech of officials deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten.
[40:06.510 --> 40:21.890]  Because if you can choke off the sources by adding to all the administrative punishments that are available, which are more than enough to keep more than enough secrets, secrets that should not be kept.
[40:22.070 --> 40:27.650]  That includes firing, losing your clearance, just losing access, no longer being important.
[40:27.950 --> 40:30.290]  Losing your career without a clearance.
[40:30.490 --> 40:33.590]  Very often, losing your marriage, very significantly.
[40:33.590 --> 40:39.250]  Losing all your friends, total ostracism of people who have clearances, which tends to be all your friends.
[40:39.250 --> 40:43.970]  If it's in that business, you become typhoid Mary, they can't talk to you at all anymore.
[40:44.210 --> 40:47.950]  That's a rather startling punishment that comes in.
[40:48.650 --> 40:53.490]  Keeps people quiet, no matter what the secret.
[40:54.150 --> 40:59.730]  As I said, we all signed a secrecy agreement to keep any and all secrets.
[41:00.470 --> 41:18.410]  But it didn't occur to us, I'll speak for myself, and I suspect for the others, it didn't occur to us how much criminal activity, or in the case of the Pentagon Papers, reckless, murderous, mass murder, unconstitutional behavior was being concealed by that secrecy.
[41:19.110 --> 41:36.370]  And we may or may not have come, as Tom said the other day, to realize at the moment that that was a violation of our oath to the Constitution, but we did know it was destroying our democracy in the case of what Snowden revealed, and destroying many lives as the ongoing war at the time of the Pentagon Papers.
[41:36.370 --> 41:43.130]  Whether what the government was doing was illegal or not, the secrets that kept it going should no longer be secret.
[41:45.630 --> 41:48.710]  And what was worth doing as a result of that?
[41:48.790 --> 41:54.830]  Well, I'd been in Vietnam a couple of years, driven the roads 10,000 miles actually, as much as anybody.
[41:54.830 --> 42:08.390]  I'd risked my body, my life, like 3 million other Americans who were expected to do that without any question, without getting psychological profiles done on them by CIA or anybody else.
[42:10.250 --> 42:33.850]  Is it not worth taking a risk of one's freedom, or maybe even life, life, definitely, to prevent this ongoing war in that case, in the case of Vietnam or in the case of Snowden, to prevent not just a violation of the Constitution, but a violation that should not be happening because it ate at the core of our democracy?
[42:33.910 --> 42:58.950]  A government that knows every communication between journalists and sources, congressional staffs, every bit of blackmail that can be gathered on the people who fund by budgeting the budgets of the NSA or anybody else, the Defense Department, judges, whoever else.
[43:00.070 --> 43:05.550]  Can you really have independent forms of government at that point?
[43:09.150 --> 43:19.830]  The complaint in the Senate Intelligence Committee that they had been overheard themselves by CIA when they were debating this stuff led to great outrage.
[43:21.350 --> 43:22.470]  Investigation closed.
[43:22.890 --> 43:24.050]  No prosecution.
[43:24.630 --> 43:25.450]  No further.
[43:25.970 --> 43:35.090]  Is the intelligence community really independent when they can be overheard without, you know, without any effect on that, even when it's found out?
[43:36.010 --> 43:36.890]  Obviously not.
[43:37.030 --> 43:37.710]  And it hasn't been.
[43:37.950 --> 43:38.270]  Two minutes.
[43:38.650 --> 43:39.370]  It hasn't been.
[43:40.250 --> 44:04.150]  One, take, for example, the Intelligence Committee, which has allowed a 6,000-page, the Pentagon Papers were 7,000 pages, a 6,000-page study of criminality on torture to be bottled up now for a couple of years and is still in the hands of CIA to decide whether they want us to know what they've been doing criminally at the order of the President.
[44:04.790 --> 44:05.810]  That's absurd.
[44:06.390 --> 44:17.150]  The people who are failing to leak that document to the press and to WikiLeaks, to Exposed Facts or whatever, are not just violating the Constitution.
[44:17.430 --> 44:19.370]  They do that every day in their jobs.
[44:19.650 --> 44:27.790]  They are, in fact, however, complicit in mass criminality here of a very serious, very serious story.
[44:27.790 --> 44:38.530]  So, I've got one more minute, so I will use it on one more leak we need.
[44:39.390 --> 44:54.370]  Without more whistleblowers, rather than less, which is what the Barack Obama administration is working very hard to achieve, less to no whistleblowers, we need more whistleblowers, very definitely, in the government, no question about that.
[44:54.370 --> 45:12.850]  And you people have to do what you can to make it possible through SecureDrop, through Exposed Facts, through new codes and ciphers to make it possible for people to do this without spending their life in prison, without spending 35 years in prison like Manning,
[45:13.050 --> 45:20.490]  or being totally oppressed financially like Tondrake, and without having to go into exile.
[45:20.750 --> 45:24.130]  Granted, exile better than prison, as Snowden says.
[45:24.390 --> 45:36.830]  Nevertheless, that shouldn't have to be the price, and you are the people who can make it possible for our democracy to survive that attack on whistleblowers by allowing anonymity.
[45:37.090 --> 45:38.770]  But it's not only the government.
[45:39.890 --> 45:47.130]  As I say, democracy, I don't think, can survive an effective Official Secrets Act, as the President is now doing.
[45:47.350 --> 46:02.110]  He is using, for the first time, with three previous exceptions, for the first time the Espionage Act, as if it were a United Kingdom Official Secrets Act, something that Congress had not allowed except once.
[46:02.390 --> 46:14.250]  Another fact you haven't heard, but Congress did pass such an act in 2000, in the last months of Clinton's administration, and Clinton vetoed it, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
[46:15.430 --> 46:17.010]  And we don't have it yet.
[46:17.410 --> 46:30.270]  But Obama now has discovered that with the current courts and so forth, he feels he can get away, and he has gotten away so far, with using the Espionage Act, Strict Liability Act, as if it were a British Official Secrets Act.
[46:30.270 --> 46:30.570]  Okay.
[46:31.730 --> 46:35.390]  Our survival as a species depends on...
[46:35.790 --> 46:38.290]  As a species, that's going to sound hyperbolic right away.
[46:38.350 --> 46:39.570]  Wait till you hear what I'm talking about.
[46:40.790 --> 46:58.390]  Depends on the public being informed that there really is climate change, and that it really is man-caused, human-caused, something that something like 30 to 40% of the American people don't believe at this point, because they have been lied to and manipulated by the gas,
[46:58.550 --> 47:06.010]  oil, and coal companies, who support companies whose product is doubt.
[47:06.430 --> 47:09.510]  And they've succeeded in selling that product.
[47:10.150 --> 47:28.490]  I am certain that there are documents inside each one of those companies, Exxon, Mobil, Shell, the coal companies, that show that they know perfectly well what's happening and what they are doing and what they propose to do in the way of producing and burning coal.
[47:28.750 --> 47:35.550]  And that you don't have to rely on James Hansen, who's given up his job and is doing civil disobedience, to try to get that through to people.
[47:35.950 --> 47:53.990]  You could have documents just as Merrill Williams and Jeffrey Weigand, two people, exposed from the tobacco companies, proving that they were lying when they said under oath, that they did not know that their product was carcinogenic, addictive, and that they were selling it to minors.
[47:54.150 --> 48:05.730]  That was the basis for all the class action suits since then, which in this country have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, more than all of our wars put together except the Civil War.
[48:05.990 --> 48:14.630]  Didn't save lives abroad because the tobacco companies are busy making even more profit selling it to the Third World, but it did have an effect here.
[48:14.910 --> 48:26.670]  And I'm saying, people inside ExxonMobil and the others, absolutely, they won't even be subject to prosecution, just to the ostracism and the loss of income and everything else.
[48:27.130 --> 48:40.310]  If they reveal to us, if they leak to us, the knowledge by their bosses that they are ending civilization within, if it's the next 30 years or the next 200 years, that they are earning it by doing it.
[48:40.310 --> 48:41.570]  I'm sure that's with their analyses.
[48:41.810 --> 48:43.170]  And of course it should be out.
[48:43.590 --> 48:47.610]  And yes, the people in those corporations need your help too.
[48:47.950 --> 48:51.410]  Even though it's not classified, they need anonymity.
[48:51.930 --> 48:56.610]  You can give it to them if you work at it and save the world.
[48:56.770 --> 48:57.930]  And that's what we're all up to, right?
[48:57.930 --> 48:58.530]  Thank you.
[48:58.850 --> 48:59.930]  Thank you.
[49:39.060 --> 49:39.600]  Wow.