Glenn Greenwald - Journalist HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDTalk. Thanks to Edward Snowden's leaking of American

intelligence secrets, the whole world now knows the extent of US and

UK surveillance of global phone and internet traffic. Have those

revelations flagged up a corrosive infringement of Civil Liberties or

undermined efforts to protect the world from terrorism? My guess is

Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story. His mission, he says,

is to hold power to account. But is this a journalistic crusade that has

gone too far? Glenn Greenwald in Rio, welcome to

HARDTalk. Great to be with you. Let me start not with the specifics of

the Edward Snowden story, but just asking you about the way you see

your role as a journalist. Is it fair to say that you don't believe

in the impartiality or the objectivity of the journalist? I

don't believe any human beings are impartial, I think we all view the

world through subjective prisons that are the by-product of a whole

variety of factors, cultural, socioeconomic and the like. The

question is not if we have opinions or not, the question is if we are

honest about the assumptions we have embraced or do we dishonestly

pretend we are something we are not? So, honestly, what is your own

subjective prism? I think individuals should not be monitored

and have DOS years compiled about them, or be analysed by the state,

unless there is evidence that they have done wrongdoing or if there is

suspicion to believe that they are planning to do so. That is what it

means to be a free individual. So a private realm of the state does not

intrude into it. That's an important point, we will come back to it.

Maybe an even bigger question, at the beginning, do you believe there

should be an assumption of trust between the citizen and those

responsible for national security in a democracy like the United States

or the United Kingdom? Absolutely not. If you look at the people that

have founded the United States, what they were most worried about was

having a system of government in which the power of leaders was

constrained, not by constitution, legal institutions or checks and

balances, or by simply citizens assuming that they were good people

and would not abuse the power, even if they were acting in the dark.

They experienced the exact opposite, as has the Enlightenment and

centuries of political sciences. That institutions run by human

beings cannot be trusted to exercise power in the dark, without

accountability, without abusing it. Your default position when it comes

to senior executives in positions of power, your default position is that

you do not trust a word they say? My default position is, as a journalist

and as a rational human being, is that when people in power make

claims they ought to have evidence to support those claims or they

should be treated with great scepticism. The role of the media,

journalism, is to investigate those claims for people in power, subject

them to critical scrutiny and investigate to determine if they are

true, rather than blindly assuming that they are true. Let's get to

specifics and the sense of investigation that now surrounds

Edward Snowden, everything he has revealed about the activities of not

only the National Security Agency United states but GCHQ and other key

institutions in the US and the UK. Just explain to me how Snowden

reached out to you and how you decided he was the ultimate credible

source. He reached out to me in December 2012, asking if I could

install encryption technology so we could communicate securely. We

talked for about a month about the prospect of doing so. I never

actually ended up doing that. He went to Laura Poitras, who did have

that. He spoke to her for a month or so and asked for me to become

involved. I asked him to provide me with documents that would verify the

authenticity of the claims he was making. He sent me two dozen or so

secret NSA documents, that work right shopping in what they

revealed. I flew to Hong Kong, I met with him and abetted him

extensively. I determined that he was who he said he was and that the

documents were valid. You vetted him extensively. You make it sound

forensics. But how on earth did you ultimately decide that this guy, not

just was giving you credible information, that is the relatively

easy part, and how did you decide it was the right thing to do, both for

him and for you, to press ahead with publication? Because I saw in the

documents shocking revelations about what is being done to people's

privacy. Not just in my country, but around the world. That this massive

system of suspicion and spying had been built without the people and

the countries whose governments were building it having any idea that it

was taking place. For me, it was a very easy call as a journalist to

understand that these documents are critically important for people in

democracies to learn about and to know about. We understood that they

had to be reported carefully. We have reported on them carefully. The

question of whether people around the world should know that all the

mutations are being collected by foreign governments and their own,

of course that is up for debate, we have a right to know that. I wonder

if it gave you pause, Bob Woodward, one of the famous investigative

journalists of the modern era, he looked at how you handle it and

concluded he would do things very differently. He said he would have

pretty much insisted that Edward Snowden remain anonymous. He said it

would be more effective and better for him if he remained a protected,

anonymous source. He also says, again, given the weight of

everything that was being revealed, that you should have taken more time

and more care, be more strategic about the way that you put

information to the public domain. If of Woodward approved of the

reporting I was doing I would be extremely alarmed. This is somebody

who has become very, very rich, probably the world's richest

journalist, by doing little more than spilling America's top secrets

in his books, fed to him by government officials designed to

venerate the US government and the policies it is pursuing. He has

become the ultimate establishment mouthpiece. There is no doubt Edward

Snowden thought you were the go to guy to this. What you have told the

world is that there has been extensive, globalised secrets

buying, engineered by the United States and the UK. In different

times, in different ways, it has involved some of the biggest web

taste and communications corporations in the world. It has

also, at different times, targeted key individuals, some of them key

individuals that are friends of the US and the UK. Fascinating stories.

Here is what Edward Snowden says about the import of what he has

revealed. What we show is a Dragnet, mass surveillance that puts entire

populations under an all seeing eye. It hits our country, it hits our

freedom to speak and communicate freely. Do you believe that to be

true? There is no question it is true. If you like a proper documents

reveal, what the ultimate point is, leaving aside the Independent

details and all of the individual stories, is that goal of the United

States government and the UK Government, its closest ally, is to

eliminate all privacy globally. By which I mean to make every form of

electronic communication between all human beings collected, stored,

analysed and monitored by the US and its four English-speaking partners

in the surveillance world. Let me just be clear. You are saying

important things. But they are not going through my e-mail, your e-mail

or any other citizen's e-mail and looking at the content? Apart from

anything else, it would be utterly impossible to analyse, your word,

analyse the content of all this data? What you just said is

completely factually false. They absolutely are looking at the

content of my e-mail. I know that because of the documents that were

filed by the UK Government. You may be a special case, I will grant you

that straightaway. You almost certainly are a special case now.

But I am thinking of my mother, my father, the millions and billions of

people across the world who now use the internet. They are not all, to

go back to Edward Snowden's words, they are not now having their

ability to speak, think and associate freely threatened by this

metadata analysis. You are absolutely wrong. If you look at

what communications experts say, they will say that metadata is a

more invasive form of surveillance and even listening to the content

because of what can be done with metadata at the moment. Think about

if your daughter decides that she once to get an abortion, if your

best friend has an HIV. If they listen to the telephone calls, they

will listen to them talking to the doctor, whose specialisations they

will not even know. If they collect metadata, they will see that the

woman called an abortion clinic, or a friend has called somebody

specialising in HIV treatment, or some body has called a drug

addiction or suicide hotline. There are comprehensive pictures that can

be assembled view by knowing who is e-mailing you who you are talking

to, how long you are speaking, these patterns that emerge are more

revealing than even the content. That is nothing to say having

internet history monitored, Google search terms collected, everything

that gives an indication of what you are interested in, what you are

reading, and incredibly invasive picture. Let's talk about the

process about how it was decided what to publish and what not to. He

worked particularly with the Guardian newspaper, you are no

longer with them but you worked with them for a long time. You talked

about a process involving editors, outside advisers. Was there absolute

consensus on what to publish and what not?

There was ultimate consensus. We sometimes began with different views

on which parts of documents should be withheld or published, but at the

end of the day, we met with editors, journalists, consulted with

experts and reached a consensus about the most responsible way to

report. Let me insert one critical fact. We have in our possession many

many thousands of documents we got from Mr Snowden. I believe the grand

total of documents we published so far is 250, a tiny fraction of the

amount of material, which shows how responsible we have been.

That raises important questions. You have only published a tiny fraction

of the huge number of top-secret documents that you have in your

possession. So, question number one, who owns those documents

intellectually, who has ultimate control? You no longer work for the

Guardian, Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow. Who actually controls this

top-secret information which has yet to be published?

The journalist who he trusted. You? Myself, Laura Poitras, the

Guardian, the Washington Post. The world's largest and most respected

Western news poppers -- papers. But, you were the first he turned

to. Do you have most of the documents?

Myself and Laura Poitras have the full set of documents, others have

portions of them. Do you believe you have the right, you no longer work

for the Guardian. Do you believe you and Laura Poitras have the right to

decide going forward what further to publish?

We are working with media outlets in making those choices. Even though I

am no longer at the Guardian, we have started our own media outlet

with the most experienced and respected editors and journalists

already working with our organisation. When I reported in

foreign countries, I worked with some of the largest and most

respected media establishments in those countries. I worked with their

editors, lawyers, to make these decisions collaboratively. There has

never been a single document published because I, myself, have

decided. We worked in a journalistic structure.

On your own admission, you have, in your possession, thousands and

thousands of top-secret documents which you believe at least for now,

you believe are so sensitive that they should not be released into the

public domain. If they were, it would harm the security of key

countries, even the US. If they fell into the wrong hands, could be

extremely dangerous. That puts you in an extraordinarily difficult,

some would say vulnerable and exposed, position. Do you

acknowledge that? Sure, when you do journalism, you

are in difficult positions, you challenge powerful factions, you go

to war zones. It is a dangerous profession. It isn't about you as a

journalist. You control information which is of

vital national security interest to hundreds of millions of people who

live in the US, UK and other countries. Surely the wisest course

of action for you as a human being and journalist, is to return that

information from where it came? You have decided the information is so

sensitive it can never be published, so should you not get it

out of your possession and return it?

No, first of all, the people who can't be trusted to safeguard the

security of that information are called the NSA and GCHQ, who are so

reckless they put it on systems accessed by tens of thousands of

people, and lost control. We have maintained tight control. Secondly,

I never said all of the documents which have been published should not

be published. There is a lot of reporting I intend to do in

publishing these documents. How much more? I don't have an exact

number but I can tell you if I had to guess, we are still in the first

half of the reporting, the majority of reporting on these documents.

I asked so much about the security and ownership of the secrets that

you possess, because the argument of the security chiefs in the US and

here in the UK is that they have to assume that the secret you now

possess are no longer secure. They point to things, for example, you

have told the New York Times, I am borderline illiterate on matters of

computer encryption you said in summer. You said you have someone

well regarded doing your computer for you. When they hear that, and

see your partner David Miranda carrying flash cards with thousands

of secrets on airlines, pass words on paper, they assume that the

secrets you have cannot be regarded as secret any more, do you

understand that? No, I don't understand that and I

will tell you why. Everyone can toss around all sorts of inflammatory

accusations. Instinctively attacking journalists who in any way to find

what it is they want. I can make all types of accusations as well, but

ultimately the wake national people decide what is true is through the

evidence, reality. As I said, the reality is there is only one group

of people whose security measures were so reckless and sloppy that

they caused these documents to be lost, those are the NSA and GCHQ.

The journalists who have worked on this case have never lost control of

a single piece of paper, because even though it is true six months

ago when I first began I didn't have a very good grasp of encryption, I

consulted with experts, which is the responsible thing to do. Just like

the New York Times and Washington Post. We used the most sophisticated

forms of encryption to ensure that there would be no way to access

them. Let us talk about trust. You do not

trust the security chiefs who have said what you have done has

fundamentally undermined security and aided and abetted terrorism.

Oliver Robins, deputy national-security adviser for

intelligence in the UK Cabinet office who says, in written evidence

in court, it is known in the seized material there is personal

information which would allow intelligence staff to be identified.

He says the government has had to assume copies of information held by

Mr Snowden may now be held by one or more other states. You are saying he

is not telling the truth? There is this thing called the rock

war, in which the US and UK governments persuaded their media

outlets and populations to support an aggressive attack on another

country by making one false claim after the next to scare the

population into believing there was a security threat which did not

exist. That they had to go to war to stop it. What journalism is about is

based on the premise, when people like Mr Robbins and others who

exercise power in the dark, make those kinds of claims to justify

their own power, they are often lying, they often tell things to the

population which turn out to be untrue. The job of a journalist is

not to investigate other journalists, it is to try to be

responsible when telling their readers what government officials

are saying, and to assess whether there is evidence. That is my role

as a journalist. I have two challenge that, you are

accusing the most senior intelligence officials on both sides

of the Atlantic or routine and systematic lying. What is your

evidence? You say look at the rock war. What is your evidence, when the

head of MI6 says there is real evidence that since your

revelations, the sorts of communications conducted by

terrorists have changed because they have adapted to what they have

learned from you, where is your evidence there is intelligence

chiefs are lying? First of all, I think the rock war

is a pretty insignificant collection marked the rock war is a pretty

significant example. If you want to scream at me, I can disconnect. If

you want to ask the question, you need to give me time to answer. The

evidence government officials lied is found in history with things like

the rock war when the government is destroyed 26 million people based on

lies they told over the course of two years to their population. If

you look at countries where there are constitutional guarantees of

free which includes most western democracies, you find all sorts of

people who have created those perceptions, have done so based on

the recognition people in power will routinely lie to their population.

The evidence I have is three Democratic senators two weeks ago in

the US on the intelligence committee with access to classified ads --

information, said the claims of NSA officials that these programmes have

stopped terrorist plots, that there is no evidence for that.

You are backed by peer media, worth billions of dollars -- Pierre

Omidyar. You say you will conduct journalism

in the future which is far from the glaring subservient super political

powers. So, should we expect that you will use most of the material

Edward Snowden gave you, ultimately? I am going to use most of the

material which is newsworthy. How much of that is part of the pile, I

cannot quantify right now. But there is a lot more reporting to do. We're

not the journalists who repeat what the government says and demanding

everyone accepts it without evidence. We believe the way you

hold power accountable is reporting on the truth, and the documents

reveal that. Glenn Greenwald, thank you for

joining me from Rio, thank you for being on HARDtalk.

IQ, my pleasure. -- thank you.