Citizenfour Page #11

So...

So as you know, in June,

Snowden was charged

with three legal violations,

felonies, principally under

a World War I-era criminal law

called the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act

is an extremely broad criminal

prohibition against the sharing

or dissemination

of what's called

national defense information.

It was only used to,

uh, prosecute people

who had been accused of acting

with a foreign power.

Spies, not whistleblowers.

And it's a very unusual

legal representation, I think,

not just for all of you

but for me as well.

The Espionage Act does not

distinguish between leaks

to the press in the public interest

and selling secrets to foreign enemies

for personal profit.

So under the Espionage Act,

it's not a defense

if the information that was

disclosed should not have been

withheld in the first place,

that it was improperly classified,

it's not a defense if the dissemination

was in the public interest,

that it led to reforms,

um, even if a court determines

that the programs

that were revealed were illegal

or unconstitutional,

that's still not a defense

under the Espionage Act,

the government doesn't have

to defend the classification,

it doesn't have to demonstrate

harm from the release,

um, all of this is irrelevant.

So when we say

that the trial wouldn't be fair,

we're not talking about

what human rights lawyers

think of as fair trial practices.

We're saying the law,

the statute itself...

eliminates

any kind of defense that Snowden

might be able to make,

and essentially would equate him

with a spy.

And of course those

three counts could be increased

to a hundred or two hundred

or three hundred.

They could charge him separately

for each document

that has been published by a journalist.

And I think that...

that we all recognize,

even though we sit here

as lawyers in a lawyer's meeting,

that it's probably 95 percent politics

and five percent law

how this will be resolved.

Mr. Snowden has been charged

with very serious crimes,

and he should be returned

to the United States

where he will be granted

full due process

and every right available to him

as a United States citizen...

facing our justice system

under the Constitution.

No, I don't think

Mr. Snowden was a patriot.

I called for a thorough review

of our surveillance operations

before Mr. Snowden made these leaks.

My preference, and I think the

American peoples' preference,

would have been for a lawful,

orderly examination of these laws.

A thoughtful, fact-based debate,

uh, that would then lead us

to a better place.

Oh, my God. David.

Hello, my baby, how you doing?

- I'm okay.

- You okay?

Let's go.

I just want to go home.

Okay, okay, you just have to walk.

How are you?

Good, I'm totally fine,

I didn't sleep at all,

- I couldn't sleep.

- I know.

"Brazil Demands Explanation

from UK Government"

Recent reports have

revealed that the NSA

have access to encryption keys

and they paid tech companies

to introduce back doors

in encryption protocols.

So we're going to talk about

ways in which we can defend ourselves

against governments spying on us.

So Mr. Jacob Applebaum is an encryption

and security software developer

and journalist.

Ladar Levinson is the founder

of the encrypted email service

Lavabit, used by Edward Snowden.

You have the floor.

Thank you.

Lavabit is an email service

that hopefully one day will be able

to stand on its own without

any references to Snowden.

My service was designed to remove me

from the possibility of being

forced to violate a person's privacy.

Quite simply,

Lavabit was designed to remove

the service provider from the equation.

By not having logs on my server

and not having access

to a person's emails on disk,

I wasn't eliminating

the possibility of surveillance,

I was simply removing myself

from that equation.

In that surveillance would have

to be conducted on the target,

either the sender

or the receiver of the messages.

But I was approached by the FBI

quite recently

and told that because I couldn't

turn over the information

from that one particular user,

I would be forced to give up

those SSL keys

and let the FBI collect

every communication

on my network without

any kind of transparency.

And of course...

I wasn't comfortable with that,

to say the least.

More disturbing was the fact that

I couldn't even tell anybody

that it was going on.

So I decided if I didn't win

the fight to unseal my case,

if I didn't win the battle

to be able to tell people

what was going on,

then my only ethical choice left

was to shut down.

Think about that.

I believe in the rule of law,

I believe in the need

to conduct investigations.

But those investigations are

supposed to be difficult for a reason.

It's supposed to be difficult

to invade somebody's privacy.

Because of how intrusive it is.

Because of how disruptive it is.

If we can't... if we don't

have our right to privacy,

how do we have a free

and open discussion?

What good is the right to free speech...

if it's not protected...

in the sense that you can't have

a private discussion

with somebody else about

something you disagree with.

Think about the chilling effect

that that has.

Think about

the chilling effect it does have

on countries that don't have

a right to privacy.

I've noticed a really

interesting discussion point.

Which is that what people used

to call liberty and freedom,

we now call privacy.

And we say, in the same breath,

that privacy is dead.

This is something that really

concerns me about my generation.

Especially when we talk about

how we're not surprised by anything.

I think that we should consider that

when we lose privacy,

we lose agency, we lose liberty itself.

Because we no longer feel

free to express what we think.

There's this myth of the passive

surveillance machine.

But actually what is

surveillance, except control?

This notion that the NSA

are passive, this is nonsense.

What we see is that they actively

attack European citizens,

American citizens, and in fact,

anyone that they can

if they perceive an advantage.

And then there's the key

paragraph that says

it was the SCS that intercepted

Chancellor Merkel's mobile phone.

We have the number.

What will you tell the German people?

I'll have to give that in testimony.

- What are you going to tell?

- Everything I can, truthfully.

What will you talk about?

Whatever the questions they ask me.

- Yeah, I think it's over there.

- Okay, all right. Thank you.

Hello, Mr. Binney.

Hey, how are you? How are you?

Good to see you again.

Nice to meet you again, yes.

It is my pleasure to be here.

I feel that it's important to testify

about what's really going on

behind the scenes

in the intelligence communities

around the world.

Not just in NSA.

All those programs that

Edward Snowden has exposed

fundamentally are ways

of acquiring information.

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