>>>>Ben Wizner: 00:14:01 Snowden is justified because he provided to journalists and through them to us information that we had a right to know and that we had a need to know. The government had not just concealed this information, it had lied to us about it. 00:16:06 Wyden had asked, did the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? Clapper's answer was, "No, sir." Now, this brazen falsehood is most often described as Clapper's lie to Congress, but that's not what it was. Wyden knew that Clapper was lying. Only we didn't know. And Congress lacked the courage to correct the record -- allowed us to be deceived by the Director of National Intelligence. 00:18:00 The government's argument was, we couldn't prove that we had been surveilled. Therefore, we had no standing to even raise these challenges. And in a 5 to 4 decision last year, the Supreme Court accepted that rationale and dismissed the case withouteven considering the legality of these programs. Edward Snowden was watching that too. Now, when critics say that Edward Snowden should have gone through the system, that's the system they're talking about. Courts and a Congress that had abdicated their constitutional oversight role. Now, what's happened since Edward Snowden's act of conscience -- since he brought the public into this discussion? Well, two federal judges have now considered whether the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone data is legal. One said it's almost certainly unconstitutional, almost Orwellian. Another disagreed, but the key point is that both of these judges heard the challenge. They both agreed that we had standing to challenge the program, which was a remarkable development in itself. 00:19:03 -- the number two at the CIA -- concluded that the NSA had allowed its technological capabilities to dictate its surveillance practices, rather than ensuring that its practices conform to our laws and values. None of this would have happened without Edward Snowden. For that reason alone, he was justified. >>>>James Woolsey: 00:24:05 I'm going to mention five cases that have come to light from Snowden materials and printed in the blogs, about what the consequences are of dealing with international relations in this way, and forcing your country to do it by the leaks that you have sponsored or undertaken... to 00:27:10 >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 00:28:03 I don't know the details that Ambassador, former DCI, James Woolsey, has told about. And I'm not sure how you know, actually, unless you are privy in a way that has not been announced here. I do know what has been released by the papers so far. Snowden, of course, has not released a single page by himself. He has explicitly said, over and over, that his own -- he doesn't trust his own bias in terms of transparency here. He wanted a judgment to be made of public interest by journalists that he trusted, and I think with right. And that is what has come out so far. I think that he was justified to the same degree, and in the same way, that I believe I was justified in releasing 4,000 or 7,000 pages of top secret documents 40 years ago, the Pentagon Papers. 08:29:15 I believe that I had been mistaken earlier to keep silent about what I knew to be lies by my president, Lyndon Johnson, and later the president Richard Nixon, for whom I'd also worked, about what they were doing, what was happening, what the costs were, what the prospects were in Vietnam. I was concerned at that moment not so much about the Constitution, which had clearly been violated in terms of lying us into that war, but I was concerned at the people who were dying on both sides wrongly, I thought, by our escalations and by those lies. I'm saying that Snowden, I believe, did what needed to be done, what the public needed to know. I think there was no other way -- no better way and almost no other way -- for that information to get out; that it was worth, as he said, taking the utmost risks to his freedom and even his life. 00:30:05 -- but if I'd believed that he had done this for some other country, for Russia, for China, to their benefit and -- or even to major benefit to them, outweighing any benefit to the public interest -- I would not be supporting him now. I believe firmly that Edward Snowden is no more a traitor than I am or that I was. And I'm not. 00:31:05 I was called that by the president and the vice president at the time, 40 years ago -- 43 years ago. Many -- I was called every name that has been called, virtually, to Edward Snowden or for that matter to Chelsea Manning earlier. In terms of blood on hands, as to what would be the benefit -- the cost of this, none of that came out in my case, which is, I think, why I'm seen somewhat differently now, 40 years later. Nothing in Chelsea Manning's trial actually came out to justify the statement that people had died as a result of his revelations, and I think you should take with more than a grain of salt the descriptions right now that much worse will happen from Edward Snowden, revelations. The fact is that, I think, what he revealed was not just what NSA was doing, which I will make a premise -- I will stipulate -- was essentially with the knowledge of the president, at the orders of the president, desire of the president, and the knowledge of key figures in Congress. 00:32:08 But, as Ben Wizner made the point, that to me reveals his greatest revelation, which is that the reforms that came in after earlier revelations of abuses by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Army Intelligence, 40 years ago and 35 years ago, that led to the Church Committee and the current reforms, like the FISA Court and the intelligence committees, I think what Snowden has revealed is that those reforms, which were very necessary, failed. And they need to be not only redone, but better reforms are necessary, and I hope very much will result from what Snowden has revealed. As a matter of fact, I'll have mentioned already that Ambassador Woolsey has said that he thought there should be due process, there should be a trial for treason -- that's something I'd argue with -- which implies that he thinks that Snowden adhered to an enemy of the United States -- that's the definition in the Constitution, which I know he knows. I certainly disagree with him on that, and I think there's -- that's absolutely wrong. 00:33:09 But he believes then as a result he should get the maximum penalty for that, which is to be hanged by the neck till he is dead. Now, actually one American was hanged by the neck for giving secrets to Americans. Actually, he was the first American to be charged with giving secrets to Americans. I was the second, 200 years later. His name was Nathan Hale, and it was a name that used to be known to every American school child as I know, and I've found sadly that, that's not -- seems not to be the case today. And he was an American spy for George Washington during the American Revolution, hanged by the British, and the reason he was remembered during my growing up was for his words on the gallows: "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." ... When Snowden said there were things worth dying for, I agree with him. That's the mood in which I gave the Pentagon Papers, and I think he was right to do what he did to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. >>>>Andrew McCarthy: 00:40:01 I don't like the laws the way that they've -- the way that they’ve finally played out. The NSA program, the metadata program’s a perfect example. There's no question that it's constitutional ... the Supreme Court precedent that holds that. Whether it's legal or not under the statute that Congress imposed is a closer question. It turns on what the legal definition of relevance, as applied to this national security question, is. Is it legal, is it not legal? You can make the argument that it's not, but 15 federal judges who've looked at it have upheld it. And nobody has repealed it yet for all the talk about doing that. But here's the thing: We actually set up this system with exactly the checks and balances that were at issue during the Bush days, the bad old Bush days when too much power was reposed in one person. And now where are we with Edward Snowden? We are right back to one person who's judge, jury, lawgiver, one person who decides what American secrets get kept and what gets exposed to our enemies ... And that person's not the president anymore. That person is a person who had access to this information because he violated his oath. The last time I was here, the audience told me that could never, ever be justified. >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 00:51:06 They revealed, of course, and it's the only way we know, that Clapper, director of National Intelligence, Clapper, gave a false statement to - - we know it from Snowden ... Now, I do not believe, as Ben Wizner says, that actually he meant to deceive Congress. I don't believe he did deceive Congress. I believe that he, unchallenged by Congress, meant to deceive the public and did so effectively since Congress didn't challenge it ... Congress has been willing to deceive the public along with the NSA and the president regularly here, and that's the problem, that Snowden revealed ... Why are we talking only about metadata entirely here? First of all, there's a lot of text messages that are not metadata, 200 million a day, that get brought up. But what makes us believe that we were not listening on a different program -- I don't mean listening, I mean collecting recording for later retrieval -- all the content of the emails and all the content of the audio of the telephone? And the answer is the president and the others keep saying, "We don't do it." Why should we believe them? Why would you believe [inaudible]? 00:59:00 Actually, the president and others -- many others -- have spoken about -- there was a better way, the way it was done was sensational, more heat than light. There were better ways to do that. I think that's clearly wrong. I really whether the president is so misinformed about the situation as actually to believe that. There were four NSA high officials -- senior officials -- I'll name them: Kurt Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Bill Binney, and Thomas Drake, who have among them an average of 30 years in the NSA -- one is 28, another is 32 -- who left the NSA because it conflicted with their conscience eventually. They left it because it conflicted with the Constitution. They had tested the proposition -- that is, there are other ways to do it -- in every possible way. They had complained to their superiors that the then warrantless surveillance that was going on since 9/11 was unconstitutional, was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Let me go a little further. It wasn't just unconstitutional. The warrant with surveillance I think was blatantly illegal and criminal actually -- They did everything -- they went to their superiors, they went to the inspector generals and NSA and at the DIB. They went to congressional staff and asked to testify. They asked to testify in open court under oath. 01:01:07 They got nowhere. Every one of them was subject wrongly to an FBI raid which took their computers without charging them ever with anything. Thomas Drake as a result, has got a spurious investigation and so forth. They have each said, in contrast -- without endorsing everything that Snowden has said -- they have said the path he used was the only way to do what they had tried to do, was to bring this to the attention of Congress and the public and that there was no other way to do it ... Thomas Drake was saying at the time, within NSA, and has said since, they were collecting content. And he said it's a secret -- >>>>Ben Wizner: 01:03:09 He [Snowden] certainly has told Barton Gellman of the Washington Post that he did complain regularly internally. But it's interesting that you think he should have gone to the same Congress that you say knew everything that he was going to report. Congress did know. He was supposed to tell -- Senator Wyden was on the floor of the Senate with his hair on fire saying, "If only the public knew what I knew, they would be outraged, they would be furious." Well, we didn't know because he didn't tell us. We only know it because Edward Snowden gave it to the press, and the press told us. Now the rules are changing ... One time when he reported concerns to superiors in a posting in Geneva, he was reprimanded and punished for it. This is the experience of people who complained in the intelligence community is that they either get ignored or they get crushed. >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 01:06:02 The experience of going to IGs is simply a way of being -- and to your superiors is a way of identifying yourself as a troublemaker who will be suspected of being a leaker if there is a leak. That's why the four NSA people who had not been a leak to the New York Times -- which in my opinion, they should have been and certainly would have been more effective, that's why they were raided by the FBI and the computers, because they identified themselves as somebody who already thought the system was unconstitutional 01:07:06 I want to make one last point here. Russell Tice -- well, first Thomas Drake has said -- the one I'm talking about -- has said the secret they're trying to hold onto desperately is to talk about metadata and not reveal how much content they are already recording. And Russell Tice has said, I, in the NSA, had phone records of Justice Alito, of journalists' sources, of Congress people, including Feinstein and her staff and a great deal of content. Now, maybe he's wrong -- maybe he's wrong, but he has asked to testify under oath to Congress. And not one committee has asked one of them to testify because they don't want to know. >>>>Ben Wizner: 01:09:02 The number of documents that Snowden has disclosed is zero. Snowden provided a great deal of material to journalists. He entrusted it to journalists, at The Guardian, at The Washington Post. It's since expanded to the New York Times and other newspapers. His instructions to those reporters were that they, in consultation with their own editors, using their own judgment of what was in the public interest, and inconsultation with the United States government, should publish what the public ought to know and should withhold what the public should not know ... the reporting until now has been extremely responsible. There has not been an article published that didn't give at least the government a chance to weigh in. There have been redactions ... If you look at the last decade, what we would not have known without leaks and investigative journalists, we wouldn't have known about torture at Abu Ghraib, we wouldn't have known that the CIA had set up a network of secret prisons across Europe and the Middle East, we wouldn't have known that the NSA had engaged in warrantless wiretapping before this was legalized by Congress in 2008. 01:11:02 Now, what Snowden did was on a larger scale. He gave a large amount of information to journalists, and those journalists include journalists around the world. I think part of what he wanted us to understand is that this is not about demonizing the NSA. The threat of mass dragnet surveillance, of collecting information about all of us in case one of us comes under suspicion, is a threat to all free society ... We don't know what has still to be published. And it's possible that the most important revelation that Snowden provided to journalists has not yet been published. Do I think that the reporting so far has been in the public interest? I think so, profoundly. >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 01:13:03 The statement that NSA has lost those programs is as reliable as the statement by NSA that he's released 1.7 million documents. Snowden has said publicly and to me it so happens on encrypted line that, that's an absurd estimate and has no relation to the much, much, much lower amount that he released in terms of this. And the reason that does make a difference is that obviously 1.7 or one million or five -- half a million -- can't be read by him. He learned from Manning to avoid the charge that he was releasing anything he had not read himself ... Maybe it happened [four important peograms lost]. But to take at face value the statement that NSA has not been able to replace that, that it doesn't have substitutes, that it got -- that it actually caused them harm [inaudible] -- 01:14:06 What I'm saying is that this sort of thing can't be decided by you or me or by the press, it has to be decided by intelligence committees in a court that have an entirely different technical capability and backup and access -- technical access to NSA programs that does not exist now. And I've been trying to give one specific example of that, when Russell Tice has said numerous times and in public that he had evidence, personal knowledge, of targeting of every member of the Armed Service Committee, every member of the Intelligence Committee, including Feinstein, her staff, and home, prepared to testify that under oath -- when he said that he wanted to testify, NSA immediately sent him a letter, which I've seen, saying, "You are --" this is to the Armed Services Committee, your old committee -- and he said, "I want to testify to Armed Services." And they said, "We remind you of your oath under NSA, the Armed Services Committee --" and they didn't distinguish between staff and members -- "the Armed Services Committee is not cleared for that information." ... This is an absolutely broken system. 01:16:01 I trust [Snowden's] judgment as to what the public ought to know or not know about NSA more than I trust the judgment of anybody who said, "None of this should be known to the public." I don't think their judgment is to be trusted at all. And I do trust -- subject to analysis. It's the Congress and the courts, and it's the four people in NSA -- plus Tice -- have all said it is essential that there be a group of technies, nerds, hacker types who have the technical knowledge, reporting with full access to NSA data, reporting to Congress and to the judiciary, and that's the only way we will get this system under constitutional control. >>>>Ben Wizner: 01:19:04 I think that we may be slightly on the wrong track here. Sometimes the scandal is something that is illegal that's going on, that people don't know about, that Congress doesn't know about. And what the proper channel is, to go to Congress and alert them -- sometimes the scandal is that a whole regime has been created in secretthat the system deems legal. And that's what we're talking about here. I believe that these programs were briefed to the committees. I believe that the intelligence committees routinely approved this and were briefed on this, that they were taken to General Alexander's lair ... I believe that they knew what was going on. So, a 29-year-old contractor calls up Congress and says, "Excuse me, I need to really tell you what you have wrongly approved in secret" -- no. 01:21:02 But look, we're not just talking about protecting ourself from a threat of terrorism, which, although severe, is not a common occurrence. We're talking about protecting our republic. And sometimes our republic is more threatened by what we don't know than by publication of things that also alert our enemies. That detention that we face in a democracy, but the cost of democracy is that our enemies have to hear this too. We have to strike the balance in the right way. My view is that the balance was way tilted towards overclassification and secrecy before Edward Snowden ... I think with a long term effective, Snowden's revelations will make us safer in a critical respect. They will have an effect on the infrastructure of our communications, that -- one of the effects is that we will begin to prioritize defense, securing our communications over offense, manufacturing vulnerabilities in order to facilitate surveillance, this is a tension that exists within the NSA right now. I think that the spies have won out over the cyber defenders. And I think that it's in all our best -- all of our best interests to put more of our resources into defending the security of our communications rather than being sure that we can listen to every conversation in the world. 01:26:08 If you could show me, with evidence and not classified innuendo, that what Edward Snowden did was more damaging to our national security than healthy for our democracy, I would take a different position. Nothing I've heard pushes me there. >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 01:27:06 Senator Wyden and Senator Udall in fact felt that it was outrageous, that it was shocking to the American people if they knew that, if they knew this stuff, and it was probably unconstitutional. This is part of the intelligence committee. They knew that Clapper was lying when he said that. They could not put it out, supposedly, because the rule of the committee was to keep that secret. I would say they made a very poor judgment there. I'm critical of them. Obviously I'm on their side on many aspects of this. But I think they were not justified in choosing to stay in the committee, the price of which was to keep that secret from the American public that they thought should be public in order to keep that -- to cooperate in keeping that secret. The fact is that keeping your mouth shut -- and we are talking here about communications intelligence matters here, which were covered by 798. I had clearance for that at the time. I did not put out anything. >>>>Ben Wizner: 01:30:03 Now because of technology, for the first time in our history, it's technologically and feasibly possible, financially possible for governments to track all of us on a massive scale and to collect and store the majority of the world's communications. We now know that the NSA has built that capability and has used it in ways that are profoundly troubling to many of us ... We should have debated this issue before the NSA deployed a global dragnet surveillance apparatus. We didn't but it's not too late to debate it now and to impose strong democratic controls. >>>>Daniel Ellsberg: 01:36:08 When it comes to 9/11, if anyone here in the audience -- or at this table -- believes that Edward Snowden -- or any of us -- wants to increase the risk of another 9/11 or is indifferent to that, I think they are being very foolish. When it comes to having gone to Congress, I think he learned from the example -- specifically of the NSA four people that I've talked about, plus Tice -- that that would be a foolish thing to do.