[00:00.000 --> 00:00.900]  Good time so far?
[00:02.680 --> 00:03.720]  Yes, okay.
[00:04.580 --> 00:06.080]  Incredible, incredible program.
[00:06.320 --> 00:11.340]  This is the 20th year of the HOPE events, not the 20th HOPE event, it's HOPE number 10.
[00:11.540 --> 00:16.680]  But we've been doing this for a little while now, and we're still trying to break new ground, and of course you are part of that.
[00:16.900 --> 00:24.760]  In the U-Track, the U-Room, which is our fourth sort of unscheduled track, there's a crypto workshop going on from 1 to 3.
[00:24.760 --> 00:26.820]  We also have lightning talks at 4 p.m.
[00:26.820 --> 00:30.620]  That's up the hallway here in what's called the Madison Room by the hotel.
[00:30.880 --> 00:41.020]  We called it the U-Room, because as you might have noticed, we named the rooms after some famous dissenters and whistleblowers, and that's one of the big themes this time around.
[00:41.680 --> 00:47.680]  And, of course, it seemed fitting to make the one where you are bringing the content be called the U-Room.
[00:47.780 --> 00:49.460]  So that's the logic there.
[00:50.980 --> 01:03.460]  So, the other thing, just a reminder, I know some of you have heard it, and most of you are paying attention to it, but it's always a great time to put your cell phone on vibrate and be courteous to your fellow attendees.
[01:04.240 --> 01:12.860]  And last thing I know some of you have heard a few times already is we have some lovely red tape in this room, and the idea is if you want to stand on the side, then stand on the side.
[01:12.980 --> 01:20.340]  If you want to stand maybe in the other taped areas, that's okay, but we need to keep the aisle clear as they file fire regulation.
[01:21.480 --> 01:23.700]  Oh, and also TED, camera people.
[01:23.820 --> 01:26.840]  There might be people in the room that wanted to be a producer.
[01:27.000 --> 01:27.860]  Maybe you went to college.
[01:27.880 --> 01:29.200]  Maybe you went to production school.
[01:29.440 --> 01:31.280]  Maybe you like taking selfies.
[01:31.960 --> 01:39.520]  There's an opportunity for people who would like to work the cameras as volunteers for our AV recording.
[01:39.660 --> 01:43.140]  If you're interested in that, go and speak to the person on the camera in any of the room.
[01:43.140 --> 01:43.980]  They're in the back of the room.
[01:44.140 --> 01:48.040]  Or speak with Ted, who's the camera supervisor.
[01:48.140 --> 01:50.640]  And he's running around, and he's also towards the back of this room usually.
[01:51.700 --> 01:53.820]  Okay, so let's get rolling.
[01:54.180 --> 02:15.460]  This is the start of an astounding series of talks we have today and tomorrow, where we have the real folks that are very much in the trenches in the efforts to do what we can to make it safe for whistleblowers, and we hope eventually unsafe for people that will squash their efforts to bring truth to light.
[02:16.160 --> 02:30.400]  And this is partially about the story of what happened when whistleblowers are treated as terrorists, and what it is that some people are doing about it, including some organizations.
[02:33.870 --> 02:35.070]  Here's Jesselyn Radack.
[02:43.990 --> 02:45.110]  Thank you, guys.
[02:45.410 --> 02:48.730]  I'm moving the mic down enough that I can try to see you.
[02:49.850 --> 03:01.410]  I think I want to introduce this topic of whistleblowers being treated as spies with a little video from some friends of mine, because it's quite a grim subject.
[03:01.770 --> 03:06.070]  So, in order to bring it alive, I would like to show a clip.
[03:11.330 --> 03:16.590]  This story is about government waste, but there are individuals out there...
[03:18.650 --> 03:20.510]  Agency analyst Thomas Drake.
[03:20.930 --> 03:28.330]  When I was employed at the NSA, one of my responsibilities was to discover the very best that existed at NSA and put it into the fight.
[03:28.510 --> 03:31.510]  And one of those programs was THINTHREAD.
[03:31.850 --> 03:35.690]  THINTHREAd was an efficient $4 million intelligence-gathering program.
[03:35.690 --> 03:45.790]  The problem was, the NSA already had a program called TRAILBLAZER that didn't quite work, spied on Americans, and... was a tiny bit more expensive.
[03:46.110 --> 03:51.170]  A $3 million program made a $4 billion program look pretty bad.
[03:51.670 --> 03:59.370]  And after he showed his superiors how much money they could save by implementing THINTHREAD, he received the government's highest honor.
[03:59.370 --> 04:00.510]  I was charged as a spy.
[04:01.270 --> 04:04.250]  Oh, you... sorry, I... you... you misspoke, yeah?
[04:04.290 --> 04:11.970]  I was charged under the SNR Act for blowing the whistle on massive fraud, waste, abuse, and illegalities committed by the U.S. government.
[04:12.790 --> 04:13.070]  Whoa!
[04:13.430 --> 04:16.170]  This guy wasn't some pencil-pushing cost-benefit analyst.
[04:17.150 --> 04:20.650]  He was a super-spy at war with the Obama administration.
[04:20.950 --> 04:23.470]  We needed to meet more discreetly.
[04:23.690 --> 04:25.370]  I think this is a safe place we can talk.
[04:25.530 --> 04:25.990]  Yeah, I hope so.
[04:25.990 --> 04:27.130]  You gentlemen have a permit?
[04:27.250 --> 04:27.330]  What?
[04:27.710 --> 04:28.110]  Pardon me?
[04:28.810 --> 04:29.990]  I need a permit to film here.
[04:30.350 --> 04:35.570]  The government had had us tailed, so we met again far from the watchful eye of Big Brother.
[04:35.950 --> 04:36.670]  What on the world?
[04:36.910 --> 04:37.570]  Guys, seriously.
[04:37.730 --> 04:39.350]  I told you, you can't be here without a permit.
[04:39.610 --> 04:41.890]  Where the hell are we supposed to shoot in this stupid city then?
[04:42.170 --> 04:42.910]  Alright, f*ck it.
[04:42.970 --> 04:43.750]  We went back to the hotel.
[04:44.270 --> 04:49.370]  And like any good spy, he brought his lawyer to help him explain why he wasn't a spy.
[04:49.850 --> 04:53.910]  THINTHREAD was a program developed with just a few million dollars.
[04:53.910 --> 04:56.130]  And yeah, they shut down the program because it's too effective.
[04:56.330 --> 04:57.810]  It severely embarrassed them.
[04:57.970 --> 04:59.070]  So what did you do about it?
[04:59.230 --> 05:01.790]  I brought THINTHREAD to my reporting official.
[05:01.970 --> 05:04.750]  He said, you don't want to ask any more questions, Mr. Drake.
[05:05.610 --> 05:06.590]  Leave it alone.
[05:07.490 --> 05:08.290]  Holy shit.
[05:08.610 --> 05:11.470]  That meeting would make an awesome f*cking movie.
[05:12.770 --> 05:13.910]  TDS Studios presents...
[05:14.590 --> 05:17.130]  I went to the far ends of NSA to find the truth.
[05:17.470 --> 05:19.810]  Jason Jones as Thomas Drake.
[05:19.810 --> 05:22.070]  I took off the banner for THINTHREAD.
[05:22.310 --> 05:24.810]  In the whistleblower.
[05:27.230 --> 05:29.910]  It's my way or the die way.
[05:30.610 --> 05:31.950]  I choose die way.
[05:34.790 --> 05:36.170]  State Thread, motherf*cker!
[05:45.630 --> 05:47.070]  There were no guns.
[05:47.650 --> 05:49.150]  What do you mean, no guns?
[05:49.810 --> 05:51.010]  This is the NSA.
[05:51.430 --> 05:51.850]  No guns.
[05:52.250 --> 05:54.470]  This doesn't sound very spy-like.
[05:54.470 --> 05:57.230]  Well, I had my two pieces of paper out.
[05:57.390 --> 05:59.070]  So you went in there, two papers a blazing.
[06:00.730 --> 06:02.790]  I'm here to cut costs and kick ass.
[06:04.350 --> 06:06.150]  Looks like I'm all out of costs.
[06:23.700 --> 06:26.200]  No findings actually allowed on NSA premises.
[06:26.560 --> 06:27.200]  Oh, come on!
[06:27.320 --> 06:28.100]  That was badass!
[06:30.020 --> 06:30.900]  Look at that!
[06:31.420 --> 06:32.640]  No, didn't have to do that.
[06:32.700 --> 06:33.280]  I made an appointment.
[06:33.520 --> 06:33.920]  Okay.
[06:34.140 --> 06:34.640]  To meet with her.
[06:34.760 --> 06:35.200]  I gotcha.
[06:38.960 --> 06:41.260]  I was just wondering if he was available on the 3rd.
[06:41.260 --> 06:43.180]  He's doctor's appointment.
[06:43.640 --> 06:44.000]  Okay.
[06:44.740 --> 06:45.020]  All right.
[06:45.680 --> 06:46.500]  Yes, I'll hold it.
[06:47.520 --> 06:49.240]  This is not a very good spy story.
[06:49.440 --> 06:50.240]  It's real life.
[06:50.620 --> 06:51.480]  So what came next?
[06:51.500 --> 06:52.140]  What did you do next?
[06:52.380 --> 06:54.080]  Well, I was not going to remain silent.
[06:54.340 --> 06:59.600]  I make a faithful decision to contact a reporter at the Baltimore Sun.
[06:59.980 --> 07:02.160]  So how did you get the secrets out of the NSA?
[07:02.760 --> 07:03.980]  Microscopic dot on your shoe.
[07:06.260 --> 07:07.140]  Hollow esophagus.
[07:07.680 --> 07:09.780]  Using a very secure email system.
[07:09.780 --> 07:11.440]  You used your email.
[07:11.620 --> 07:19.100]  And I share with her information, revealing publicly for the first time, not only the existence of a program called THINTHREAD, but massive fraud, waste and abuse.
[07:19.300 --> 07:28.380]  This desk jockey also revealed that an internal test of THINTHREAD discovered information in NSA's own database that might have actually stopped 9-11.
[07:29.700 --> 07:33.140]  And that is when the government sent in their ninja.
[07:36.740 --> 07:39.320]  Actually, there are no ninjas employed by NSA.
[07:40.040 --> 07:43.860]  Who in their right mind would think this guy is a f*cking spy?
[07:44.640 --> 07:45.580]  He's terrible.
[07:46.760 --> 07:47.620]  I was an American.
[07:47.780 --> 07:48.980]  I took a note to defend the Constitution.
[07:49.360 --> 07:51.400]  It's not criminal to have contact with a reporter.
[07:51.400 --> 07:54.040]  But according to the government, it is.
[07:54.220 --> 07:55.440]  So they arrested him.
[07:55.640 --> 08:03.660]  Here I am facing the prospect of a public trial in which if I were found guilty, I would essentially spend the rest of my natural life in prison.
[08:03.880 --> 08:12.260]  But when the media started publicizing Drake's case and the NSA's incompetence became public, it was clear that the ten felony counts were utter bullshit.
[08:12.260 --> 08:17.420]  But the government still managed to get him to plead to the most damning charge they could muster.
[08:17.640 --> 08:19.960]  To exceeding authorized use of a computer.
[08:20.820 --> 08:23.800]  It's the equivalent of playing too much Facebook on your work computer.
[08:24.140 --> 08:26.140]  That's not a great name for a movie title.
[08:27.160 --> 08:28.360]  This is not a movie.
[08:28.620 --> 08:29.920]  You bet your ass it's not.
[08:30.680 --> 08:33.860]  Drake ruined everything for my movie career.
[08:34.460 --> 08:36.180]  Oh, and also the NSA.
[08:36.480 --> 08:38.960]  They've criminalized First Amendment activities.
[08:39.220 --> 08:42.140]  They've criminalized the exposure of criminal activity.
[08:42.840 --> 08:44.920]  Conducted at the highest levels of our own government.
[08:45.140 --> 08:47.140]  Or to put that in legal terms...
[08:47.140 --> 08:48.140]  It's f*cked up.
[08:50.100 --> 08:53.080]  Now that is a much better title.
[08:54.800 --> 08:56.460]  Jason Jones, we'll be right back.
[09:04.680 --> 09:11.720]  So I appreciate the fact that Jon Stewart and Jason Jones can bring some levity to this.
[09:12.080 --> 09:14.080]  That I probably can't.
[09:14.460 --> 09:16.400]  Because it is so messed up.
[09:16.400 --> 09:21.400]  I got into this line of business of representing whistleblowers.
[09:22.320 --> 09:25.100]  I'm Jessalyn Radack with the Government Accountability Project.
[09:25.340 --> 09:27.740]  And we're one of the nation's leading whistleblower organizations.
[09:29.140 --> 09:36.160]  And for me, representing whistleblowers had always been bread and butter.
[09:37.300 --> 09:44.280]  Employees who were blowing the whistle on fraud, waste, abuse, and illegality.
[09:44.280 --> 09:49.220]  But usually suffered reprisal in the form of a transfer.
[09:49.640 --> 09:51.060]  Or a demotion.
[09:51.480 --> 09:54.580]  Or maybe the government screwing with their security clearance.
[09:55.540 --> 10:06.720]  I myself, ten years ago, right after 9-11, became the target of one of the first federal criminal leak investigations after 9-11.
[10:06.720 --> 10:14.520]  And for blowing the whistle in a case of torture of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lind.
[10:14.980 --> 10:20.040]  Because at that point, I worked for the Department of Justice as an ethics attorney.
[10:20.680 --> 10:24.920]  And I didn't think we should interrogate someone without their attorney.
[10:24.920 --> 10:28.240]  And we certainly shouldn't be in the business of torturing them.
[10:29.320 --> 10:35.980]  I thought the retaliation that I experienced under Bush was really over the top.
[10:36.380 --> 10:39.620]  As I said, I was placed under criminal investigation.
[10:40.080 --> 10:44.520]  I was referred to the state bars in which I'm licensed as an attorney.
[10:44.760 --> 10:47.220]  And I was put on the no-fly list.
[10:48.020 --> 10:50.260]  I thought that was complete overkill.
[10:50.260 --> 11:01.320]  So you can imagine my surprise in 2010 when I read a newspaper article about an NSA whistleblower named Thomas Drake.
[11:02.960 --> 11:10.040]  Not only had he been criminally indicted, but he had been indicted under the Espionage Act.
[11:10.040 --> 11:14.260]  The most serious charge that you can level against an American.
[11:15.080 --> 11:20.040]  He also became the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg.
[11:20.400 --> 11:24.760]  The patriarch of whistleblowers of Pentagon Papers fame.
[11:25.040 --> 11:26.920]  And who I know is in the audience right now.
[11:27.120 --> 11:27.540]  Hi, Dan.
[11:28.260 --> 11:29.240]  Right there.
[11:29.580 --> 11:29.920]  Hey, Dan.
[11:39.420 --> 11:44.240]  You'll hear from Dan and another client of mine, Ed Snowden, tomorrow.
[11:44.980 --> 11:52.100]  But meanwhile, Tom became the first whistleblower since Dan to be charged under the Espionage Act.
[11:52.100 --> 12:19.580]  And from everything I could read in the newspaper article about him, he had blown the whistle on a program that cost billions of dollars, that didn't work, and that invaded people's privacy in terms of mass surveillance, when there was a cheaper, effective program with anonymization features that did not involve spying on Americans.
[12:21.380 --> 12:30.940]  Also, it turned out that Tom Drake, from what I could tell, had blown more whistles than anyone I ever had worked with.
[12:31.580 --> 12:38.040]  He went through every conceivable internal channel possible for an NSA whistleblower.
[12:38.040 --> 12:45.500]  And for all of those people who were complaining that Ed Snowden should have gone through channels, which, by the way, he tried to do.
[12:45.960 --> 12:50.160]  It's important that you know, Tom Drake went to his boss.
[12:50.420 --> 12:52.860]  He went to the NSA General Counsel.
[12:53.540 --> 12:56.900]  He went to the Department of Defense Inspector General.
[12:56.900 --> 13:01.120]  And he went to two 9-11 congressional investigations.
[13:01.740 --> 13:19.380]  And not only did they fail to redress his concern, they turned around and prosecuted him for espionage, exactly the same boat in which Edward Snowden would find himself today if he were in the United States.
[13:20.520 --> 13:27.960]  And if you think the Espionage Act is a fair proceeding, you are completely wrong.
[13:28.660 --> 13:38.100]  A lot of people don't know what happened inside the Tom Drake case, because so much of it was occurring in secret.
[13:38.100 --> 13:48.420]  When you become an Espionage Act defendant, you often get your own personalized SCIF, a sensitive, compartmented information from Drake.
[13:49.080 --> 13:51.040]  You would go in that SCIF.
[13:51.240 --> 13:57.620]  That's where you had to go to view the evidence against you, if that evidence existed.
[13:58.100 --> 14:07.700]  In Tom Drake's case, the government admitted to destroying exculpatory evidence as part of its document destruction policy.
[14:08.680 --> 14:15.560]  When I researched that, I found out there really is a government department retention policy.
[14:16.440 --> 14:21.180]  But that was really only one of the concerns in trying this case.
[14:21.900 --> 14:31.120]  For Tom and for anyone else charged with espionage, you have to go through CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act.
[14:31.120 --> 14:45.620]  This is a way, supposedly, that we can bring classified information into the public realm through redactions or summaries, or in Tom's case, by speaking in code.
[14:46.120 --> 15:01.160]  That is what the government suggested, that the prosecutor and the defense attorney, the jury and the judge, have a secret code whereby they could try the case and the public would have no idea what was going on.
[15:02.020 --> 15:05.780]  This is a good point to mention the Bradley Manning court-martial.
[15:06.180 --> 15:12.840]  Another trial where it was almost impossible to know what was going on.
[15:13.320 --> 15:28.800]  That's because a judge in that case, Judge Lynn, would often read decisions from the bench based on motions that were made in secret, argued in secret, and you would basically have no idea what the f*ck she was talking about.
[15:29.700 --> 15:50.000]  In fact, if it weren't for Alexa O'Brien and Kevin Costola, both of whom are here, none of us would have any record whatsoever of the Manning proceeding, because there were no written transcripts made, except the ones created by Alexa, and then the analysis done by Kevin.
[15:50.000 --> 15:58.600]  Even the public affairs office would tell reporters that if they wanted to know what happened, they should check with Alexa for a transcript.
[16:00.460 --> 16:27.120]  On top of the SCIF and CIPA, other ways that they tried to make Tom Drake's trial a secret was by filing motions in limine to preclude the use of the word whistleblower or whistleblowing, to preclude the use of newspaper articles, to preclude the use of the word First Amendment.
[16:29.540 --> 16:33.380]  I know it seems almost absurd, and it is.
[16:33.560 --> 16:34.800]  It's very Kafkaesque.
[16:35.100 --> 16:38.000]  But in reality, it's no laughing matter.
[16:39.160 --> 16:47.020]  Tom's case ended up having all charges dropped, similar to Barrett Brown's.
[16:47.180 --> 16:49.340]  But you still have that taint.
[16:49.880 --> 17:01.760]  Tom pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor under the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, another very problematic law that I'll talk about a little bit later on.
[17:01.920 --> 17:05.280]  But all ten felony counts were dropped.
[17:05.560 --> 17:08.680]  All Espionage Act charges failed.
[17:09.120 --> 17:17.300]  That is also true in the case of John Kiriakou, another client, a CIA client, prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
[17:17.300 --> 17:23.900]  He's spending 30 months in jail right now, so he can get back to his five kids as soon as possible.
[17:25.200 --> 17:39.180]  But the people who blew the whistle on two of the biggest scandals from the Bush administration, namely surveillance and torture, are the ones being prosecuted for espionage.
[17:39.180 --> 17:42.460]  So Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on surveillance.
[17:42.940 --> 17:44.800]  Ditto with Edward Snowden.
[17:45.360 --> 17:51.080]  John Kiriakou, who confirmed that we had a torture program and that we were waterboarding people.
[17:51.780 --> 17:55.620]  All of these folks are being charged under the Espionage Act.
[17:55.900 --> 18:05.100]  A pernicious law arcane from 1917 that's meant to go after spies, not whistleblowers.
[18:05.100 --> 18:17.640]  The problem, one of the many problems with the Espionage Act, for example, is that the word classification didn't even come into existence until 1952.
[18:18.520 --> 18:29.640]  Another problem with the Espionage Act, besides its vague, overbroad, ambiguous, there is no public interest defense.
[18:29.640 --> 18:40.980]  So in English, that means that all the people, including, I think most recently, Hillary Clinton, who say that Ed Snowden should just come back to the U.S.
[18:41.060 --> 18:48.040]  and argue his case to a jury and to the public, he can't do that under the Espionage Act.
[18:48.380 --> 18:55.060]  There is no public interest defense, no First Amendment defense, no whistleblower defense.
[18:55.060 --> 19:09.260]  You can't say that you were disclosing information for good motives, to give it back to the American people from whom it was being kept in secret without their knowledge.
[19:09.900 --> 19:15.120]  It didn't matter whether you had sold secrets to an enemy for profit.
[19:15.120 --> 19:21.360]  It simply didn't matter and does not matter what your motive is at all.
[19:21.740 --> 19:34.840]  So there really is not this romanticized view of a trial that we see in TV and the movies that I think most of us hold where you can just tell it all to a jury and somehow justice will prevail.
[19:35.700 --> 19:42.600]  If the court-martial of Chelsea is any example, justice will not prevail.
[19:44.160 --> 19:51.340]  Part of the Espionage Act is this more overarching war on whistleblowers.
[19:51.760 --> 19:59.260]  President Obama has prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than any previous president.
[19:59.740 --> 20:10.120]  In fact, he's prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all presidents combined for whistleblower-type activity.
[20:10.120 --> 20:13.060]  I think we're on number eight right now.
[20:13.820 --> 20:23.740]  And I'm glad to be able to have had and to have a role in those cases, but I would much rather be doing bread-and-butter employment law.
[20:24.220 --> 20:26.400]  That retaliation is bad enough.
[20:27.540 --> 20:33.000]  People often ask about the war on whistleblowers and why Obama is doing this.
[20:33.880 --> 20:43.320]  And I think initially it was to kowtow to the national security and intelligence establishments, which saw him as weak, coming into office.
[20:43.740 --> 20:51.120]  But I really have said all along, since 2010, that this is a backdoor war on journalists.
[20:51.560 --> 21:00.920]  And more broadly, a way to create an official Secrets Act, which we've managed to live without for more than 200 years in this country.
[21:01.640 --> 21:04.560]  The war on journalists we can see playing out.
[21:04.800 --> 21:18.700]  You can see it in the 23 subpoenas of the AP journalists' phone lines, the search warrant for Fox News reporter Jim Rosen, and for the subpoena that Jim Risen now has to face.
[21:18.700 --> 21:29.160]  He can either testify against a source in, here's a shocker, another Espionage Act case involving a whistleblower, or he can go to jail.
[21:30.560 --> 21:43.800]  I think that this war on whistleblowers, this war on journalists, and this war on hacktivists is really a war on information.
[21:44.660 --> 21:49.740]  There are a number of people you know by their first names.
[21:50.300 --> 21:58.260]  Aaron, Jeremy, Weave, Barrett, Chelsea, Snowden.
[21:58.780 --> 22:02.360]  And the government means for it to be that way.
[22:02.580 --> 22:07.860]  It wants you to know these people by their first name and be scared by what happened to them.
[22:07.860 --> 22:12.720]  Because even when you prevail, it still sends a very chilling message.
[22:12.840 --> 22:24.500]  Once the government is done caricaturing you, you will not recognize who you are, and even your friends and family will or could shun you.
[22:26.380 --> 22:27.600]  What's at stake?
[22:27.880 --> 22:48.020]  We keep having to ask this over and over again, and I hope this will seep into everybody's mind, that normally we live in a country in which the work of the government is supposed to be public, and our personal lives are to be private.
[22:48.480 --> 22:50.620]  But that's been completely inverted.
[22:51.000 --> 22:57.100]  The work of the government is being done in secret, and our personal lives are public fodder.
[22:57.900 --> 22:59.960]  That's not what you call democracy.
[23:01.160 --> 23:06.800]  Now, in terms of Edward Snowden, I think we have him to thank for quite a bit here.
[23:07.020 --> 23:12.880]  And I'm glad to see whistleblowing on the agenda in a way that it wasn't for HOPE 9.
[23:14.060 --> 23:27.320]  Bill Binney, another former NSA whistleblower I represent, spoke to you at HOPE 9 about a lot of what Ed Snowden was able to luckily document and provide living proof of.
[23:27.320 --> 23:35.260]  He has unlocked two non-functioning branches of our tripartite government.
[23:36.100 --> 23:46.760]  Congress, for the last 10 years, has either been complicit or compliant and or lied to by NSA.
[23:47.280 --> 23:50.080]  They're the ones who are supposed to be doing oversight.
[23:50.880 --> 23:58.680]  Thanks to Snowden and his revelations, we have more than two dozen bills on the floor of Congress right now.
[23:59.300 --> 24:06.540]  And hopefully, the USA Freedom Act, which got butchered by the House, will be restored by the Senate.
[24:06.820 --> 24:12.440]  But again, I can't say that for sure, the Senate, the place where all good bills go to die.
[24:13.460 --> 24:17.580]  You know, I don't know what will ultimately happen in Congress.
[24:17.660 --> 24:20.080]  But I live in D.C.
[24:20.280 --> 24:22.900]  I don't have a voting representative in Congress.
[24:23.300 --> 24:24.420]  You guys do.
[24:24.620 --> 24:28.620]  And I know you're busy hacking and doing hacker stuff and hackerish stuff.
[24:28.860 --> 24:35.440]  And, you know, I mean, my kids told me I was completely dressed wrong for a hacker convention.
[24:38.020 --> 24:41.620]  They said, you're wearing your lawyer uniform to the hacker convention?
[24:43.820 --> 24:46.680]  But, yes, call your members of Congress.
[24:46.940 --> 24:51.560]  They have to keep track of every call like that.
[24:51.680 --> 24:59.980]  You can ask Jane Hampshire, who's also here in the audience, who is the best whip I think we have in this country for Congress.
[25:01.080 --> 25:10.020]  In terms of the courts, that was another branch of government that's been completely shut down during the last decade.
[25:11.060 --> 25:15.680]  Cases challenging surveillance and torture would try to go through.
[25:16.000 --> 25:28.480]  And they were often blocked with assertion of either a state secrets privilege by the government, that if this stuff were made public, the sky would fall, literally.
[25:28.960 --> 25:30.320]  Lives would be lost.
[25:30.560 --> 25:37.420]  And these accusations have not escaped being put onto my clients.
[25:37.880 --> 25:47.260]  The government saying that Tom Drake would have the blood of soldiers on his hand, or Ed Snowden is informing terrorists of what we do.
[25:47.260 --> 26:00.800]  And it's been a year into the Snowden disclosures, and it's been four years into Tom Drake and Bill Binney's disclosures, which had actually been made right after 9-11, shortly after 9-11.
[26:01.620 --> 26:03.980]  And the sky has not fallen.
[26:04.280 --> 26:12.860]  What has fallen, I submit, is our democracy and having a free and open democratic society rather than a police state.
[26:12.860 --> 26:19.760]  And I think we need to decide, as a country, where we want to go.
[26:20.180 --> 26:24.960]  But there's also something important that Ed reminds me of.
[26:25.120 --> 26:33.360]  Which is, if Congress doesn't fix it, and the courts don't fix it, tech will.
[26:34.140 --> 26:35.500]  And that's you guys.
[26:35.860 --> 26:45.300]  And I owe you a huge debt of gratitude, because without you, I would not be able to do my job as an attorney these days.
[26:45.820 --> 26:55.720]  I think and I hope, as Ed said the other day, that all people who have confidential, privileged relationships are using encryption.
[26:55.720 --> 27:05.480]  And I appreciate you making it more widely available, even in the last year, improving it so it's easier to use for people like me.
[27:07.780 --> 27:10.420]  Making it...installing it, even, for people.
[27:10.620 --> 27:13.340]  The way Freedom of the Press Foundation has.
[27:13.580 --> 27:17.920]  The way Tom Drake has helped people out pro bono at no cost.
[27:18.120 --> 27:19.080]  Teaching people.
[27:19.220 --> 27:21.000]  People who are hosting crypto parties.
[27:21.000 --> 27:21.740]  All of you.
[27:21.880 --> 27:22.320]  Everyone.
[27:22.620 --> 27:24.580]  We really need this.
[27:24.740 --> 27:33.560]  I think this has to be not a fallback for Congress and the courts not working, but proceeding on a parallel track.
[27:33.940 --> 27:42.580]  Because I feel like our democracy is in that much trouble right now, that I'm not confident we can right ourselves.
[27:42.580 --> 27:51.960]  I hope we can, or else we need to please stop calling ourselves a democracy and call it what it really is.
[27:53.240 --> 27:56.060]  But anyway, I appreciate what you're doing.
[27:56.440 --> 28:04.060]  I know other lawyers and technophobes and people who are trying to protect their privacy appreciate what you're doing.
[28:05.560 --> 28:11.800]  Everyone fighting on, you know, fighting and playing to their own strength is what it's going to take.
[28:12.020 --> 28:27.460]  So if you're a lawyer representing people who the government hates the most, and is conducting a worldwide witch hunt for, and for whose death the government calls, it's crazy.
[28:28.020 --> 28:30.920]  If you're a journalist, write about this stuff.
[28:31.140 --> 28:33.940]  If you're an artist, do art about this.
[28:34.080 --> 28:35.900]  And if you're a hacker, keep hacking.
[28:36.460 --> 28:37.120]  Thank you.
[28:49.990 --> 28:50.510]  Thanks.
[28:50.970 --> 28:56.230]  I know people have questions, and I'm supposed to keep an eye on the time and how we're doing.
[28:56.530 --> 29:04.990]  But there's a microphone in the middle of the room, so I would be glad to try to answer some questions in the remaining time we have.
[29:04.990 --> 29:24.270]  And please be understanding if there's something I can't answer because of attorney-client privilege or because of proceedings and the procedural posture that we find ourselves right now in a number of different cases, both public and private, stymie how much I can comment on them.
[29:24.370 --> 29:24.990]  But I will try.
[29:27.610 --> 29:29.170]  I can't see out there.
[29:29.170 --> 29:30.450]  You guys are...
[29:30.450 --> 29:32.290]  So someone else...
[29:32.290 --> 29:35.190]  Whoever's at the microphone, go ahead and step up.
[29:35.370 --> 29:38.890]  And if someone else can help man that process, that would be great.
[29:40.070 --> 29:41.550]  I want to preface my question.
[29:41.570 --> 29:46.390]  It's going to sound like it's coming from a place of government apologism or being conservative, and it absolutely doesn't.
[29:46.390 --> 29:52.950]  I'm consulting in a technical capacity for the Defense Council on a number of the CFAA indictments you named, so I'm very sympathetic to everything you said.
[29:52.950 --> 29:53.970]  But I have two questions.
[29:55.610 --> 29:59.610]  One is whether your beef is with the Espionage Act specifically.
[29:59.870 --> 30:07.650]  Because I take it it's a part of the structure of an act of civil disobedience that it's the principled commission of a crime and the facing of those consequences.
[30:07.930 --> 30:15.810]  So my question is, is the beef just the playing field isn't as level as it should be and there is no due process for Snowden to come home and face?
[30:15.810 --> 30:19.350]  That like the trial is classified, et cetera, et cetera.
[30:19.610 --> 30:32.850]  And I guess the second part of my question is whether you think the task that our government has given our foreign signals intelligence directorate needs to be rethought, if that's a part of the process?
[30:32.850 --> 30:47.450]  Because I take it in Snowden's case, maybe more so than in Benny's and Drake's, while he leaked a lot of information that's, you know, relevant to this, all this domestic activity that they're not supposed to be doing, therefore, the foreign signals intelligence agency,
[30:47.550 --> 30:47.670]  right?
[30:48.470 --> 30:55.490]  He also leaked a lot of, like, their capabilities against adversaries like China and Russia that are deployed now.
[30:55.710 --> 31:05.010]  And so I'm wondering, do you think a part of this whole process is rethinking whether foreign signals intelligence needs to occur or should occur in the same way now that it used to?
[31:05.470 --> 31:11.650]  Okay, well, for your first question, yes, I have a beef with the Espionage Act.
[31:11.650 --> 31:15.730]  But I have a problem with the Computer Fraud Abuse Act.
[31:15.750 --> 31:17.690]  I have a problem with CISPA.
[31:17.910 --> 31:36.970]  I have a problem with any laws that are being abused to go after whistleblowers, journalists, hacktivists, and people who are revealing information that exposes the government's ineptitude, incompetence, or you're really in trouble if you reveal its illegality.
[31:36.970 --> 31:45.210]  So my beef with the Espionage Act is to the extent that it's being twisted and used as a bludgeon against whistleblowers.
[31:45.670 --> 31:52.270]  In terms of the task of SIGINT, yeah, I'm in charge of changing that.
[31:52.490 --> 32:01.050]  Because the way it works right now, it is not effective in stopping terrorism, and it's probably illegal.
[32:01.050 --> 32:03.550]  And that's not my conclusion.
[32:03.890 --> 32:05.370]  I agree with it.
[32:05.470 --> 32:09.710]  But that's the conclusion of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
[32:09.890 --> 32:12.530]  That's the conclusion of a federal judge.
[32:13.010 --> 32:17.930]  That's the conclusion of Obama's own handpicked review panel.
[32:17.930 --> 32:39.650]  All of them found that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which provides for bulk collection, is probably constitutionally dubious and has not thwarted 54 terrorist plots, much less, as Alexander revised his testimony, even maybe, maybe one that could have been thwarted by other means.
[32:39.650 --> 32:55.670]  So, if I could task SIGINT, I would tell them to go back to their pre-9-11 mission of using foreign intel on people for whom they have probable cause to believe are involved in terrorist activity.
[32:56.210 --> 33:02.290]  As we witnessed tragically yesterday, an airplane ended up blown up.
[33:02.910 --> 33:18.890]  I'm not sure if, well, now we're, you know, heading on, you know, coming up on almost a day that we've known about this, and maybe they do know who the perpetrators were, but the fact that they didn't know who they were instantly, the fact that they didn't know about this,
[33:19.370 --> 33:29.030]  surveillance, with all the surveillance we have, it has not been able to stop the Boston bombing or the downing of the Malaysian airliner.
[33:29.030 --> 34:00.330]  So, I think SIGINT needs to go back to its roots, focus more on human intelligence, and use the algorithms that I know it bastardized from people like Bill Binney that would provide for collection on people that we have probable cause or reasonable suspicion to believe are trying to hurt our country rather than surveilling innocent populations of our own people in the U.S. as well as people worldwide.
[34:11.160 --> 34:15.800]  Jesselyn, thank you very, very much for everything you've done and continue to do about whistleblowers.
[34:15.960 --> 34:25.040]  And I'd just like to remind everybody that encryption is great, but not if there's some sort of key logging device on your PC or whatever, and that's become an increasing problem.
[34:25.040 --> 34:31.740]  My question is, really, the only whistleblowers we hear from are U.S. government whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Chelsea Manning.
[34:36.640 --> 34:55.280]  And what about people in the private sector who become aware of horrible misdeeds, obviously it's not as severe as spying, who face retribution or recriminations for either speaking out or just knowing something that somebody does not want to have made public?
[34:56.980 --> 35:09.940]  Interestingly and counterintuitively, corporate whistleblowers have far more protection than national security and intelligence whistleblowers who are deliberately cut out of whistleblower protections.
[35:10.900 --> 35:20.760]  So if you're working for a corporation, if you're anybody thinking of blowing the whistle, I would consult an attorney ahead of time.
[35:20.980 --> 35:28.740]  I would say 95% of the traffic that comes my way involves people who have already blown the whistle and are being retaliated against.
[35:28.740 --> 35:37.320]  But on the corporate side, you have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Dodd-Frank, which can help protect you.
[35:37.620 --> 35:41.860]  People who are unprotected right now are contractors.
[35:42.400 --> 35:54.720]  And contrary to what President Obama said, that Ed Snowden could have gone through his executive order, which is called Presidential Policy Directive 19.
[35:55.260 --> 36:12.600]  That was Obama either being completely misinformed or lying, because PPD 19 is not retroactive and does not apply to contractors, at least at the time that Snowden made his disclosures.
[36:13.320 --> 36:17.260]  So contractors are very unprotected.
[36:17.260 --> 36:27.760]  There are laws in the works right now that we are working on to get better protection for contractors and to get them covered by the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.
[36:28.240 --> 36:34.200]  And that is something that recently, meaning just a couple days ago, the House approved.
[36:34.260 --> 36:47.560]  And it still could get quite butchered, but we're hopeful to have better protection for contractors like Ed and like Tom Drake, before Tom worked at NSA.
[36:48.180 --> 36:56.200]  Tom and Ed both worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, which seems to be a breeding ground for whistleblowers.
[36:57.900 --> 37:04.700]  But if you're in the private sector and you want to blow the whistle, give me a call and we can talk about that more too.
[37:08.760 --> 37:10.020]  Thank you very much for coming.
[37:10.740 --> 37:23.020]  I wanted to ask you, as a creative artist myself as well as a citizen journalist and someone who works with the media a bit, we see things like you and Mr. Drake on The Daily Show and the whole thing being played for laughs by comedians, which is great.
[37:23.160 --> 37:30.200]  But I wondered if you could speak a little bit about the place of just purely getting the word out about how ridiculous these things are.
[37:32.480 --> 37:50.140]  Like Drake's case was eventually whittled down, I guess, when people started realizing how ridiculous it was and when it was in the media, but if there's a Snowden trial, if such a thing ever happens, will it actually matter to those in charge, even if every single person is laughing at the ridiculousness of it all?
[37:51.100 --> 37:54.020]  Yeah, will it really matter to the people in charge?
[37:54.300 --> 38:01.160]  It's kind of an overarching question that hovers over everything Snowden.
[38:01.160 --> 38:05.840]  Snowden, because nothing about the government's reaction is rational.
[38:06.720 --> 38:19.060]  Snowden clearly has started a debate that has been of huge public importance, has been covered in newspapers around the world that have won major prizes, including here in the U.S. with the Pulitzer Prize.
[38:21.060 --> 38:24.280]  And Snowden himself has won countless awards.
[38:24.580 --> 38:32.760]  The Courage Foundation is keeping track of all of this and also providing funding for legal defense of Ed Snowden.
[38:33.120 --> 38:40.020]  All of my clients, I have represented pro bono, because by the time they get to me, they're usually bankrupt.
[38:40.480 --> 38:50.980]  I think when whistleblowers face this kind of retaliation, they end up bankrupt, blacklisted, and broke, because not only have you lost your job, but you're running up legal fees.
[38:51.420 --> 38:55.200]  In terms of the media, the media is very double-edged.
[38:55.200 --> 39:12.340]  The media has been horrible to whistleblowers in terms of stereotyping them and allowing caricatures to be drawn every single day of my clients that are unrecognizable to people who actually know my clients.
[39:12.560 --> 39:25.940]  And I fault lazy media and mainstream media when they keep resurrecting and recirculating the same lies and the same factual inaccuracies over and over again.
[39:26.560 --> 39:29.360]  But media has also been the saving grace.
[39:29.980 --> 39:38.220]  Jane Mayer did a long-form investigative piece for The New Yorker on Tom Drake's case, followed by a 60 Minutes piece.
[39:38.220 --> 39:51.200]  And shortly after that, we had two editorials in The Washington Post in the backyard of the NSA talking about overcharging and talking about going after leaks.
[39:51.440 --> 39:59.260]  So the media, especially a huge shout-out to alternative media and independent media, they've been great.
[39:59.260 --> 40:00.920]  And it's very important.
[40:01.160 --> 40:04.980]  I rely on them a great deal in terms of getting the word out.
[40:05.360 --> 40:21.300]  In terms of the mainstream media, there are probably five journalists that I would take a whistleblower story to if a whistleblower strategically wanted to go public or be more public about what was happening.
[40:21.300 --> 40:29.940]  As Ahmed mentioned in the previous talk, when you're a criminal defendant, you're pretty locked down and gagged.
[40:30.080 --> 40:33.360]  So other people have to be your voice for you.
[40:33.840 --> 40:37.580]  And Tom Drake can talk about that to you more in the next session.
[40:38.180 --> 40:45.100]  But the rule is always silence is golden, which puts you at an extreme disadvantage because the U.S. holds all the cards and can have all the flashy press conferences it wants and paint you as a traitor, a spy, a turncoat, a naive 29-year-old.
[41:00.520 --> 41:03.140]  The list goes on... a Russian spy.
[41:03.860 --> 41:10.500]  I could create all kinds of colorful... I should make a list sometime, but it's too strange... of all the different names my clients have been called when we're out to...
[41:15.660 --> 41:19.080]  Or the U.S. government is out to kill the messenger rather than listen to the message.
[41:23.720 --> 41:26.180]  So I look around and I see a lot of students here today.
[41:27.080 --> 41:32.700]  Would you recommend going to law school as a way of, like, affecting change in this sphere?
[41:32.840 --> 41:37.380]  I mean, we're all... you know, we all know the technology, we all know cryptography and everything.
[41:37.500 --> 41:41.560]  Would you recommend working inside the system to try and change it, like moving forward?
[41:41.560 --> 41:45.640]  Yeah, I mean, it's a bad time to go to law school right now economically.
[41:45.640 --> 41:47.860]  It is a shitty time to go to law school.
[41:48.920 --> 41:51.580]  Hiring is really bad right now.
[41:51.780 --> 42:05.740]  But having a legal degree, especially with technology, we're in an area right now where the law lags behind, and that's a gross understatement, but completely lags behind the tech.
[42:05.740 --> 42:18.980]  And everyone in Congress on the hipsy and sissy are sitting there reading encryption for dummies and trying to understand the Internet and calling their kids about, how do I even get on the Internet other than, you know, Facebook?
[42:19.600 --> 42:21.460]  How do I do any of this?
[42:21.760 --> 42:30.460]  I think having a law degree is incredibly helpful when looking at and having the conversation where law meets tech.
[42:30.460 --> 42:36.260]  And we have section 215 of the PATRIOT Act that's been completely bastardized.
[42:36.800 --> 42:41.380]  Sensenbrenner can say, I wrote the PATRIOT Act, and this is not what I envisioned.
[42:41.860 --> 42:45.720]  But lawyers can detail the problems legally with it.
[42:45.880 --> 42:53.660]  How mass bulk surveillance completely circumvents the Fourth Amendment that you need to have probable cause.
[42:53.660 --> 42:59.660]  I mean, strangely, luckily, I'm hopeful, the Supreme Court just ruled unanimously.
[42:59.680 --> 43:01.300]  How often does that happen?
[43:01.520 --> 43:06.940]  In a case that during a traffic stop, the government cannot search your phone.
[43:07.540 --> 43:10.760]  Well, I think that's pretty huge because it telegraphs.
[43:10.840 --> 43:27.660]  I think that if they can't search your cell phone on a traffic stop without getting a probable cause warrant, then they sure as shit can't be mass surveilling everything you do on your phone and on the Internet and on, you know, every day to the tune of billions and trillions of times.
[43:27.980 --> 43:30.060]  So I do think a law degree helps.
[43:30.760 --> 43:38.440]  I know it's a bad time in the economy, but we're definitely at an intersection where there's almost a failure to understand.
[43:38.440 --> 43:43.300]  There are people speaking different languages in terms of legalese and tech.
[43:43.300 --> 43:47.740]  And the more people we have who understand both sides, the better.
[43:48.940 --> 43:49.680]  All right.
[43:49.740 --> 43:50.000]  Thank you.
[43:50.500 --> 43:50.900]  Thanks.
[43:59.320 --> 44:00.200]  Anyone else?
[44:00.480 --> 44:03.440]  I can't see folks out there that well.
[44:07.090 --> 44:08.250]  It's all mine.
[44:08.490 --> 44:08.730]  Okay.
[44:09.070 --> 44:10.670]  I hate to talk more.
[44:11.490 --> 44:15.630]  Please support the Government Accountability Project.
[44:15.630 --> 44:27.330]  I know you have probably never heard of us, but we've been representing Tom Drake and Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis.
[44:27.450 --> 44:29.510]  Now, Tom's going to talk to you right after me.
[44:30.330 --> 44:36.870]  And Bill, many of you probably know of Bill Binney, one of the leading crypto mathematicians in the NSA.
[44:36.870 --> 44:58.170]  There was a great article the other day about how mathematicians don't want to be working for the NSA right now, which I think is a good move, but also sad for our country, because if we were going in the right direction, we would want to recruit talent to do actual smart surveillance.
[44:58.170 --> 45:01.650]  People accuse me of being against secrets.
[45:01.790 --> 45:03.590]  I want everything to be open.
[45:03.910 --> 45:07.850]  Look, I get having sources and methods be classified.
[45:08.070 --> 45:12.130]  I don't want troop movements to be public.
[45:12.130 --> 45:29.510]  I don't want covert identities of undercover agents necessarily to be public, unless they're completely breaking the law, as another speaker will talk to you about the unmasking of Alfreda Bukowski, whose name there I said it out loud.
[45:29.810 --> 45:33.290]  I think under the Espionage Act I could technically be prosecuted for that.
[45:35.330 --> 45:43.670]  But I think secrecy has been used way too much to do really, really dark things in our government.
[45:44.270 --> 46:12.010]  And while it's fine to protect sources and methods, spying on innocent populations using the most popular and widely available groups like Microsoft and Google and Apple and the big tech out there to do your dirty work is clearly problematic and antithetical to what we are as a country in terms of being free and open democratic society.
[46:12.370 --> 46:17.870]  The people are supposed to control the government, not the other way around.
[46:17.870 --> 46:26.370]  And I feel for the last decade, since 9-11, any time you have a national security crisis, the pendulum swings...
[46:26.370 --> 46:27.950]  No, no, left for you guys.
[46:28.210 --> 46:29.590]  Well, it swings to the right.
[46:30.330 --> 46:31.190]  Right to you.
[46:31.390 --> 46:36.210]  It swings towards broader executive authority.
[46:36.210 --> 46:47.690]  And I thought after, you know, 10 years later and upon the election of Barack Obama, that he would keep his promise and bring the pendulum back to some point of equipoise.
[46:47.890 --> 46:49.990]  And that obviously hasn't happened.
[46:50.190 --> 46:52.050]  Instead, the pendulum has gone further.
[46:52.310 --> 46:56.150]  We're no longer torturing, but we're droning the crap out of everybody.
[46:56.510 --> 47:01.590]  You know, we're no longer, you know, having as, you know, as many secret meetings.
[47:01.590 --> 47:03.490]  We're just spying on everything.
[47:03.770 --> 47:04.870]  We're collecting it all.
[47:05.630 --> 47:13.410]  I'm getting the five-minute warning, so I can continue on my diatribe against secrecy a little bit more.
[47:13.650 --> 47:19.690]  But I don't know when we've gotten good things out of secrets.
[47:20.170 --> 47:31.130]  Tom Drake will talk about the fact that I really do think NSA has a diagnosable, at least from my armchair hoarding disorder, in which they need to collect everything.
[47:31.650 --> 47:38.230]  You know, and if you're trying to find the needle in the haystack, I don't think anyone would want to make the haystack bigger.
[47:38.790 --> 47:45.390]  I also have never seen, as a lawyer, so many people test a lie without any consequence whatsoever.
[47:45.990 --> 47:53.790]  These are people like James Clapper and Keith Alexander who've lied to Congress under oath with complete impunity.
[47:53.790 --> 48:05.230]  In fact, it boggles my mind, as it should bother you, that there is not a single congressional investigation of NSA going on right now.
[48:05.630 --> 48:15.370]  I went to Germany with two clients last week, with Tom Drake and Bill Binney, to appear before the Bundestag, because they have an investigation of NSA.
[48:15.930 --> 48:24.530]  And as soon as we testified, we learned that actually the BND that was spying on behalf of the U.S. government, on the very investigation to which we were testifying, which was looking at the U.S. spying on Germans.
[48:33.490 --> 48:36.230]  I mean, it's got to stop at some point.
[48:36.410 --> 48:38.570]  We're in theater of the absurd right now.
[48:38.570 --> 48:47.990]  And I really do think the work that each and every one of you is doing is really helping to put the nail in the coffin of the surveillance state.
[48:48.230 --> 48:49.830]  And I encourage you to keep doing it.
[48:49.950 --> 48:51.170]  Please be in touch with me.
[48:51.330 --> 48:58.910]  Please be patient with me and other people in the legal field who lack the breadth and depth of understanding that you do.
[48:58.910 --> 49:05.910]  And thank you for trying to help us do what, unfortunately, we have to do right now to do our jobs effectively.
[49:06.930 --> 49:10.490]  So unless there's any... I see a few other people now at the mic.
[49:11.630 --> 49:14.870]  So I think we have, like, one more minute, two more minutes.
[49:16.350 --> 49:16.830]  Okay.
[49:19.450 --> 49:24.930]  First, thanks for taking an unpopular position with a lot of people by defending Thomas Drake and others.
[49:25.830 --> 49:33.150]  It's important to add friction to that system because it adds cost and that tends to self-balance the system.
[49:33.750 --> 49:45.430]  Third, I'm not an American and I don't understand how executive laws can get passed sort of around the standard legal system.
[49:45.630 --> 49:47.430]  Could you take a moment to explain that?
[49:49.730 --> 49:51.430]  Or is that a really long one?
[49:52.510 --> 50:03.370]  There have been interpretations of laws made by an office called the Office of Legal Counsel, which has absolutely no accountability to you all or any of the people in the U.S.
[50:04.310 --> 50:11.350]  Secret interpretations of law that started with Bush having signing statements, which basically said, we don't have to follow the law.
[50:11.470 --> 50:14.130]  I'm going to sign this bill into law, but we don't have to follow it.
[50:14.130 --> 50:21.610]  So that's how we ended up with secret interpretations of the law that I think would not survive before an actual federal court.
[50:21.750 --> 50:25.730]  An Article III federal court, a real federal court, not the FISA court.
[50:25.930 --> 50:41.910]  Not a court of people who rubber stamp every single thing the government wants to do, who hear only from the government, and who have denied maybe a couple handful of petitions out of the thousands that they've gone over over the years.
[50:42.870 --> 50:43.630]  Next question?
[50:45.210 --> 50:46.930]  Since there's only 30 seconds left...
[50:46.930 --> 50:47.250]  All right.
[50:47.710 --> 50:49.010]  So thank you so much.
[50:50.190 --> 50:51.070]  I'll get right to it.
[50:51.150 --> 50:53.610]  There's a little bit of an undercurrent of...
[50:54.430 --> 51:01.090]  For some of the whistleblowing and for some of the legal discourse around it, of it's okay as long as it was foreigners, not U.S. citizens.
[51:01.870 --> 51:02.470]  It's unconstitutional.
[51:02.470 --> 51:12.010]  Could you talk very briefly about international law and transnational legal strategies for fighting the expansion of the surveillance state?
[51:12.130 --> 51:12.770]  Ten seconds left.
[51:13.010 --> 51:13.050]  Yeah.
[51:13.310 --> 51:14.850]  International law is great.
[51:15.830 --> 51:18.590]  Violating privacy is a human rights violation.
[51:19.350 --> 51:20.190]  It's prohibited.
[51:20.490 --> 51:23.890]  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not allow this.
[51:24.110 --> 51:28.870]  Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Amnesty have all come out and condemned surveillance.
[51:28.870 --> 51:37.390]  International law on this is far better than our law in the U.S., but the Supreme Court discounts international law, as do a lot of federal courts.
[51:39.030 --> 51:39.870]  There we go.
[51:41.430 --> 51:41.910]  Thanks.
[51:54.350 --> 51:57.770]  Tom Drake is on deck next, so don't stray too far.
[51:58.670 --> 52:00.550]  Tom, I know you're in here somewhere.
[52:00.590 --> 52:01.430]  I just can't see you.
[52:01.430 --> 52:02.590]  I'm off.
[52:30.010 --> 52:31.410]  Margaret Watch is on deck, too.
[52:45.870 --> 52:48.670]  We'll be right back.
[53:24.110 --> 53:26.930]  We'll be right back.
[53:44.890 --> 53:46.710]  We'll be right back.
[54:30.230 --> 54:30.350]  We'll be right back.
[55:06.430 --> 55:07.270]  We are gonna check it out.
[55:35.630 --> 55:37.250]  Everyone, as you might have noticed, we're a little late at this time.
[55:37.250 --> 55:39.330]  A little bit crowded today, which is very exciting.
[55:39.530 --> 55:39.830]  Welcome.
[55:40.670 --> 55:45.030]  And we need to remind you to please, please keep the aisles clear.
[55:45.250 --> 55:47.830]  We have, you might have noticed, we have fire guards on site.
[55:48.170 --> 55:51.590]  We have the lovely fire marshal paying us a visit today.
[55:51.730 --> 55:55.390]  So we want to make sure we can continue on as expected with the conference.
[55:55.670 --> 56:00.670]  So please, if you're standing in the side, make sure you're not in the aisle, but in the red tape area.
[56:02.090 --> 56:03.670]  And we'll get started momentarily.
[56:15.170 --> 56:17.950]  We'll be right back.
[56:21.190 --> 56:36.050]  We are back.
[56:51.440 --> 56:51.680]  We'll be right back.
[57:09.400 --> 57:10.120]  Wow...
[57:10.120 --> 57:11.260]  Wow...
[57:19.100 --> 57:22.920]  Yes That is good
[57:51.500 --> 57:52.900]  Check the ... of button, and this is the second to pull up.
[58:17.560 --> 58:19.900]  Hi, I'm Vernon, who is here?
[58:20.220 --> 58:21.000]  Tell me right there.
[58:21.000 --> 58:21.420]  Nope.
[58:23.040 --> 58:24.400]  Okay, great.
[58:25.720 --> 58:26.280]  Yes.
[58:26.760 --> 58:28.840]  We all know that we think we're really back.
[58:29.900 --> 58:34.300]  Look, I'm sitting on a lawyer on the side.
[58:34.300 --> 58:35.460]  I'm sorry, they didn't say that.
[58:35.640 --> 58:37.940]  If you want to just draw down...