 we know and we know they know and they know we know they know and in turn we know they know we know they know except until quite recently us We we mortals didn't know they knew they knew until mr. Edward Snowden let us know he knew Whether we call it eavesdropping or spying or signals intelligence The very nature of electronic monitoring has radically evolved over the past few decades And we are still trying to wrap our monkey brains around what it all means Let's begin at the beginning We're here to talk about field station Berlin and Anyone who's been to Berlin has looked up at the skyline and Somewhere between the fun term and the fans a term Has seen a vaguely phallic shaped whitish structure silhouetted against Berlin's slate-grace guy It's abandoned now the only things that live there now are ghosts and untold secrets It was my home for two years in the 1980s And as I stand before you today, I still don't quite understand how and why I ended up there But I can't tell you that if I hadn't started there. I certainly wouldn't have ended up here So bear with me and let Zen navigate our way back in time and into that strange building Officially, it was the radar station But Berliners knew better they called it the go so or Big ear. I'm a lucky man I now have the coolest job in the world I get to travel around the planet is one of the few security experts in public relations Putting out buyers fixing people's problems and launching and developing their companies I'm a PR cipherpunk There's really no career path for what I do But if I had to start somewhere it had to be my completely accidental unplanned career as an intelligence officer working for the National Security Agency and Not just as any random analyst But as the US Army signal is intelligence analyst at Field Station Berlin at the height of the Cold War I had never even planned on joining the army But Ronald Reagan had done an excellent job in destroying economic opportunity for all but the very rich and And let's nice round for Ronnie And for those of us straight out of college there was next to nothing to do out there I was once rejected for a job as a waiter because I didn't have a graduate degree So my life choices came down to moving back home with my parental units Committing suicide. Oh, it's this way, right? Or joining the army Really? And so that's how I found myself in the US Army uniform studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California It's important to remember that the National Security Agency was and is primarily a military agency You should look at it as a fifth branch of the US military Its head has always been a two or three star general and While its budget has always been several orders of magnitude greater than that of the CIA It's always spent its money on equipment rather than people Running a global intelligence network required a lot of cheap labor and we Soldiers airmen and seamen were the worker bees that collected and processed the pollen Before sending it back to the mother hive at Fort Meade, Maryland Thank God I don't have to look at that picture So after learning the language du jour would be shipped off to good fellow Air Force base in San Angelo, Texas Where the only things to do besides learning the dark arts of crypt analysis was the occasional armadillo race and the regular consumption of margaritas and nachos lots of tequila So enough about me Let me tell you a little bit more About me because I found myself after all of this landing at Tegeler port on a Pan Am jet in what was then West Berlin You could tell from the flight in from Frankfurt that this was no ordinary place to be living For once you hit the intra German border the plane dropped drastically to about 3,000 feet and the flight attendants knew exactly when to scoop up the glassware Which was almost to the minute of when your ears exploded from the rapid drop in air pressure The air transit agreements with the Soviets dated from the late 40s. So that's how they flew Now without exhuming all the white and bones of the Cold War, but just so we know what we're talking about I was working on the second floor of that phallic shape top secret intelligence facility Located on a mountain of World War two rubble, which was the highest point in Berlin Which was in the middle of a forest in a city of two million people Surrounded by a concrete wall with guard towers and machine gun nests at regular intervals Which was in turn surrounded by 23 Soviet motorized rifle brigades and tank regiments and not to mention a very large very well armed East German military the NVA There were three roads in three air corridors out and the duty train ran once a day I was fresh out of college had just graduated from an intelligence school of an army I never wanted to join and I knew how to say don't shoot. I know secrets in several languages. So station Berlin It's difficult to explain just how hard it is to even talk about working at such a place in It's day Toifelsberg the Devil's Hill was one of the most secretive intelligence facilities in the entire world The feds really put the fear of God into you about the penalties Thus severe penalties that would result if you ever told stories out of school This makes it difficult for me even now a quarter of a century later to talk about my experiences You know what the Cold War is long over and I know a lot of you were were born after the Soviet Union collapsed But I feel on pretty safe ground talking about this for one good reason and His name is Jim Hall Meet Jim Jim got to field station Berlin just a few months before I did he too was an analyst Now Jim was a pretty friendly guy He used to come up and pay me a visit and talk to the other analysts about what we were up to and Would go down and hang out with him in his section of field station Berlin where he was busy tracking Soviet spetsnaz units You know that there's special forces and Jim was always good for a drink and a laugh and a couple of years after I left he was busted for espionage and treason it turns out that Jim Was found with a duffel bag full of cash in the trunk of a very nice Mercedes Because Jim had been selling secrets to the Russians for a very long time He went to jail for 30 years or so and anything I could possibly tell you he sold to the Soviets a long time ago Because we knew they knew that we knew they know they we knew and If you're wondering why this is the first time anyone has ever given a serious talk about the inner workings of Teufelsburg This talk should give you a pretty good idea why Let me take you into the compound We called it the hill and I worked on the hill for a little over two years At any one time there'd be about 200 people working up there 24 hours a day 365 days a year I Celebrated New Year's there in 1984 a bunch of us went up to the fifth floor and looked out in the city awash in fireworks at midnight You could even see the borders between East and West Berlin and not just because of the wall and the illuminated death strip But because the fireworks celebrations stopped where the wall began in the beginning as I understand it Field station Berlin was just a collections point where signals were intercepted and recorded and then the tapes would be sent back to Fort Mead for processing Sometimes the backlog would get severe and it would take months before the tapes would be listened to an Old story on the hill says that what brought about real change to field station Berlin was the fact that we had advanced warning About the building of the Berlin wall But because the tape containing this intelligence was listened to almost six months later It was ultimately too late Construction had already begun So from the 60s onward there was an early warning element to our operations by the time I got there We not only had operators rolling up on frequencies to record them, but actively listening in and making notations These recordings were then sent off to the processing shop where the scanners would transcribe their contents The transcripts would then be sent over to the analysts who would then write up a report and send it off to Fort Mead And I was one of those analysts The hill was a joint forces base. There were elements from the US Army the American Air Force the British Army and the RAF There was only one way to get on to the hill The gate was guarded by German local nationals We called them LN guards and backing them up was a company of military policemen You typically came to work on the duty shuttle Which was a bus that ran from the field station barracks in Lichtenfelder And if you lived off base or you missed the shuttle, you could just take the U-Bahn to Theodor Heusplatz and then walk If you timed it just right the duty shuttle would stop for you or someone with a car would pick you up The bus would drive you through the gate and stop right at the front steps and you'd walk up Show your electronic blue badge to the MP and then pass it over the electronic reader and proceed down the main corridor To the immediate right you would see a metal door that led to the area that the Brits used Now the English were our poor cousins When we disposed of our old equipment they'd go outside and scavenge our thrown away racks Their intercept gear was almost all off the rack Whereas ours was almost all bespoke And I don't want to go into too deep a dive into the the Technology we had if you have any questions, you'll find me at the bar afterwards But suffice to say that Teufelsburg was beyond state-of-the-art And I know there's some old guy out there in the audience who worked for IBM the 50s that remembers using Skype when Adina was Bundeskanzler, but up on Teufelsburg back in the 80s We were using instant messaging and we'd already started Transitioning in the early 80s from mag tape to hard drives So enough now about toys Continuing our journey through the inside of field station Berlin Passed the Brits area going down the corridor on the left was the paper shredding and pulping area known as Jaws if you annoyed the wrong people you would find yourself working at Jaws for a shift It was a loud wet and disgusting job that involved pulping and bailing the many untold reams of paper Generated by field station Berlin Weirdly the pulping paper bails were supposedly sent to a disposal site in East Germany So the security guys were regularly unbailing and rebelling just to make sure everything was properly destroyed At any rate you would continue down the corridor Where you would find a set of elevators which would take you to the area where you worked And I worked on the second floor which was where the analysis section was The European Communist section which looked after the East Germans and the Poles was also there as well as where the air force air Defense and operations interceptors worked in another area on the same floor behind a rather flimsy door with the crypto lock Was la Fox which was our data center And that's where all the racks and intercept recorders were kept and maintained in very very large racks. I Did a little bit of time back in la Fox Where my job was to explain to the technical guys what the operators on the floor meant a job? Kind of the reverse of what I do today, which is to explain to mundane's what technologists are really up to Moving on behind the analyst section was where the watch officer sat Responsible for the oversight of all operations of that shift behind him were 10 to 15 teletype printers Constantly pumping out intelligence reports from around the world We would of course only get things that related to us in Central and Eastern Europe But also hourly reports about what was happening all over the world There'd be somebody assigned to separate and collate these reports into daily read files And one of the great things about working as an analyst was that you got to read the read file Now what the intelligence community considers super secret or very valuable is a very strange thing If you bought a copy of today's paper and looked up to see what the weather was in Moscow that day that would be unclassified Now if you brought that paper that same paper into field station blend as part of a report it remains Unclassified but gains a classification because you know you were using it to bolster your information about the weather in Moscow But if you pointed a dish at the group of Soviet forces Germany's weather information line in red or heard The weather was going to be cloudy in 19 and red square tomorrow Then all of a sudden this becomes highly classified codeword information because We don't just know from reading the newspaper You know the Kremlin knows that it's going to be 19 in cloudy in Moscow you live in this you live in this ethereal world where you know things and then You really know things and You feel like you have an insight and I believe one does have a true insight into what's going on in the world or more importantly What the most important people on earth are basing their decisions on Because this is considered definitive information for working the analysis desk for the national security agency I Knew what they knew that I knew that they knew My favorite section of all was located diagonally across from the analyst section just over from treadmill Which was the Russian processing area? It was an unassuming area full of shelves and cabinets filled with books and binders and videotapes It was it was the library Now I've never been able to walk past a bookstore library without exploring and a library in an NSA field station Well, that's just too good to pass up When things were quiet, I'd bury my head in the library and read the real history of historical events Yes, because there really are classified accounts of historical events Two things I remember well were watching a talk by the man who was then CIA station chief in Tehran when the embassy was taken over in 1979 The CIA station chief was one of the 51 hostages held by the Iranians for over a year The talk he gave was in the form of an interview before an audience of spies and the the one part I'll never forget was his answer to the question What did the Iranians get? He said after a very long pause They got everything Turns out that no one initiated destruct procedures and so all of the classified material you'd expect to be inside a CIA station And and so what wasn't given to the Soviets ended up in an Iranian museum of American imperialism So we knew they knew we knew Another historical event I learned about was the incident of the USS Liberty which was an NSA ship in the Mediterranean staff by US Navy sailors That was repeatedly bombed and strafed by the Israelis in 1973 Scores of Americans were killed The Israelis claimed that it was a case of mistaken identity But the real history was clear in its verdict. The Israelis knew exactly whom they were killing They just didn't want the Americans to know what they were up to in the Sinai before they invaded Egypt We field station analysts when we weren't busy reading the read file browsing through the intelligence library Plane pranks on people are taking in the air up on the fifth floor spent our time writing reports and Every report was addressed to one man and one man only Dernseh Director NSA everything was to Dernseh We called him Big Daddy As in a scandal did you get that third shock thing QC than off to Big Daddy or Yeah, it's important, but it's not worth waking up Big Daddy Big Daddy knew everything He was the hive queen to whom we brought the Intel Nectar Now NSA listening posts are neither pretty nor comfortable inside Everything is pretty much gray or white Field station Berlin's interior looked a lot like mission control at Cape Canaveral a real glamorous, right? But instead of people sitting in movie theater style rows in front of monitors Field station Berlin was set up with bays of workers in front of monitors and racks of Demultiplexers and receivers around the edge of the room or in pods in the middle of the room Think harshly lit arcades like from the movie war games, but with all the screens and black and white All the metal was battleship gray from the racks to the covers of the receivers to our main computer la Fox screen Which was originally built as a fire direction control system for recommission battleships Every room was built on raised flooring that provided tempest proofing as well as ample space for cable It was cold Purposely so because of the electronics we'd cut the fingers off of our wool gloves so we could keep Typing well at the same time keeping our hands warm Within the context of the Cold War Working in a building full of spies on top of the highest point in an island city Surrounded by a quarter million troops of your adversaries does not make you feel terribly safe In fact a gallows humor sets in sort of a distilled version of the kind of humor everybody else and then West Berlin develop in response to wall fever But while the working environment could occasionally be harsh and stressful it didn't mean it was all work in no play I mean what happens in a tightly contained environment full of smart 20-somethings is the same that happens everywhere else people play jokes One of the things that would be done would be carbon papering somebody's headphones Now when typewriters were still common you'd make a copy by taking a piece of carbon paper And sticking it between two sheets of paper What we'd do is would take a piece of carbon paper and rub it on the inside of somebody's headphones And this would leave an extremely large very big black mark Around each of their ears that would be very difficult to remove Because that's what you get when you take your headphones off If you're foolish enough to take off your tunic and work in your t-shirt It was not unknown for someone to soak their shirt and water and fold it perfectly and put it in the freezer And by the end of shift it'd be a perfectly frozen rectangle Never happened to me Some of the jokes were jobs specific For example in signals direction finding each line of direction is called a lop So you take three bearings from three different positions and where the three lops intersect is the location of your target Lops new people would be sent back to engineering for a box of them They'd be directed to pick up a scary badly weighted box full of broken glass and nuts and bolts So even the slightest movement would make them think that they're broke something. You broke the lops And every new intercept operator eventually found themselves unintentionally taking copy from West Berlin taxi drivers No, I didn't want to see 34 in front common No, I can see if they take it They'd eventually get overwhelmed with all the traffic and more than one would eventually come to believe that we were under attack Once they realized the signals were coming from inside West Berlin There was also a very heavy element of fetishizing our enemy our targets To brighten up the otherwise white and gray surroundings the walls of workspaces would be typically decorated with Soviet flags East German propaganda posters and other bits of communist regalia Would intentionally speak like communist politicians, you know, you're with a freedom leave a little bit of a folk or a little bit of a German public with with watch they dare fencing and and I knew a couple of people who even dressed in their private lives In clothes they bought in stores in East Berlin They get inside your head There was on if there was an unofficial rule that if the German scanners the the people who wrote up the tape transcripts For the German section when they were called into work an extra shift because of heightened activity They would show up wearing free German youth uniform shirts The local German guards at Field Station Berlin loved posting the new guys at the front gate when a dozen or so F They would successfully enter the facility The European Communist section was also home to the station's best collection of propaganda posters They raised money for their parties by running a cafe out of an old wooden footlocker Cafe your calm would sell us overpriced capris on potato chips and candy bars in order to fund their off-duty debauches Our Air Force counterparts also had their fun They ran something called the ghoul pool whenever the Soviets trained in the air Now the Soviet pilots were infamous for their recklessness in the air during training exercises So our spies ran an in-house gambling book You placed bets for the ghoul pool and to win you had to name the type of aircraft involved in a crash and where it happened I Remember someone winning quite a bit of money when they successfully called the mid-air collision of two hind-b-helicopters Over the Utebog permanent restricted area Sometimes we German-speaking Intel types would be called out to assist in training the infantry units from the Berlin Brigade There was an urban warfare training center in Seilendorf called Doboy city complete with Espawn and buildings and everything we'd pretend to be punks. Well, some of us had to pretend less than others To give the soldiers a good and proper hard time so they wouldn't react badly in an actual crisis Now one evening we were sent into Doboy city to pretend to be anarchist German house occupiers Voln's physics, you know house physics, and the American soldiers were to evict us Now these soldiers did not know that we were also soldiers Now this made for a lot of fun in the beginning when we got to drop balloons full of urine on them and throw pieces of wood at their heads But it became a lot less fun when the German riot police showed up They were a secondary force called in because the American soldiers failed to evict us I I'm still not sure if the German cops didn't know it was an exercise But they came in and beat the crap out of us. I Personally received three stitches over my eyebrow from that Let me tell you a little bit about the people I worked with And at a time when the US military had very few women Over 30% of field station Berlin was female when I was stationed there It was considered at the time that women had better natural faculties for foreign language learning But at the same time women were equally scattered throughout the chain of command Field station Berlin may have been progressive on the sex front, but racially it was very very white There were only five black people Five in an intelligence unit of around 750 Other groups were overrepresented a Surprisingly large number of Toyfuelsberg workers were either Mormon or Seventh-day Adventists It's true I'd later been told that this was because of the ease of which they were granted security clearance because all good Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists not the drink nor smoke nor indulge in physical pleasures This would all be fine and well if this were only about their personal morality But is it good for a nation when groups that hold moral positions out of line with the mainstream populace? Start making decisions about war and peace and what is right and wrong? I'm not sure Many of the people who worked at field station Berlin were smart misfits We got out of college couldn't find a job and were crazy or stupid enough to join the army There were at least two PhDs in my unit and a number with graduate degrees and Just going through NSA's crypt analysis course really does do something to your brain Just as lawyers have their brains rewired in law school the crypto course Absolutely remap sections of your brain and gives you the strange But very real ability to predict the future in very very limited ways Which is a useful skill? Whatever you do in your life We sighing worker bees were almost all better educated than our officers And this was something that all accepted for the most part and it made for a pretty good working environment but There's always one that just doesn't want to work within the system in my case There was a new captain by the name of Mooney who was the watch commander of my shift He insisted on calling me into the watch office when I could have been doing something more useful Just to discuss with him the big picture Mooney was a bit of a conspiracy nut in training He was pretty sure there was something really big going on out there But we just hadn't spotted it hence the big picture discussions And on one very very slow night after being called in about the big picture One too many times. I went back to my section and found a small news article in the army daily newspaper Stars and stripes probably know it That mentioned that several military bases in West Germany had gone on heightened alert for unspecified terrorist threats So I took this unimportant snippet of news and paired it with some routine radio training for the East German border guards for their new guys in the guard towers and So I wrote this up as a very short report merely reporting the facts and giving it the appropriate levels of very high classification and Turned it over to Captain Mooney He was ecstatic This is clearly the big picture. He was looking for So right at shift change just as I was leaving on a Sunday Captain Mooney put field station Berlin on red alert battle stations This meant that everyone that came on duty could neither leave nor be relieved Soldiers coming to work wearing clothes for a normal shift found themselves in the middle of winter Station in the cold with m16s They didn't know how to shoot on the roof with a building on lockdown No food or drink all the auto-destruct gear was put in a hair trigger It was ma'am and the last words that man ever said to me were scant all You're gonna get a medal for this And I told him that the credit was all his And I'd prefer to just have my name left off the report He told me he'd never forget this day And unfortunately a lot of people never quite forgave me for that one Including all my commanding officers We humans have the useful ability to look back in times of trouble and remember the funny the amusing the good times But the world of field station Berlin could quickly turn deadly serious One Sunday I came on watch in total chaos was going on in the analyst shop Multiple alerts had been sent out from our stations around the world about a pending Soviet attack Tactical nuclear weapons were on the move and chemical units were gearing up for battle We were all gonna die This was it. It was the big one and all because Ronald Reagan in Preparation for his weekly radio address decided to test the mic Not realizing it was live with the words of signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever We begin bombing in five minutes. I Don't think to this day anyone realizes how close we came to total nuclear destruction Because of that ignorant man's actions Fortunately we knew they knew and so we let them know so they knew and And so in the course of the eight-hour shift Soviet military activity gradually returned to normal and we all lived to spy another day Looking back. I think I may very well have been working during the golden age of SIGINT a relatively short period in history When there were hard and fast rules over what was legitimately a target and what was none of our business Collection was highly targeted There was no wholesale vacuuming of data not only because the world was still very much analog But because it was illegal under US law In the 1970s the NSA committed a number of crimes against the state that were exposed by a US Senate Intelligence Committee led by Frank Church The church committee set down hard and fast rules about what the NSA could and could not do The most important of which being they absolutely positively could not spy on Americans This was codified in an intelligence directive known as USID 18 When I worked on the hill and you had the grave misfortune to intercept the US person all Hell broke loose Tapes were wiped brains were degaussed papers were shredded you were expected and you did To delete whatever it was that you don't remember that you just deleted You no longer knew You knew I Realized that NSA not spying on Americans gives little comfort to her friends and allies But it's an important thing because it demonstrates that there was Once upon a time a culture of rules and behavior that codified an almost fundamentalist level of Privacy and respect for the people that you were sworn to defend you did not spy on your own The power and might of the SIGINT community was so great and so powerful That even in the 1980s it was self-evident that these powerful weapons should never Ever be pointed at one's own people That's not to say that some spying isn't good Knowing what your adversary is up to and how your adversary is thinking prevents war and Minimizes poor judgment Field station Berlin's ability to intercept and analyze information quickly Meant that the West could be more deliberate in their foreign policy One such example was the day a high-level East German functionary based in Moscow called his mistress in East Berlin Telling her that he was so sorry Shotzi But he wouldn't be coming home this weekend because constant chain Constantine Charnenko died and he'd need to stick around in Moscow into the funeral Whenever that would be Now if there's ever been an example of loose lips sinking ships The Soviets did not announce the death of their general secretary of the Communist Party for several weeks Charnenko's death set off a massive power struggle inside the Soviet Central Committee a fight that generally resulted that Eventually resulted in the appointment of Mikhail Govachev as general secretary But for three weeks We knew they knew And they didn't know that We were then able to keep calm and not overreact while the Soviets solved their own internal squabbles Now that's targeting being selective smart spying Yet the wholesale vacuuming up of everything that serves only to confuse We used to joke that if we wanted to destroy the KGB All we had to do was empty all the contents of all of our intelligence facilities Onto the front steps of their headquarters on the Jinsky Square They'd choke on the information They'd then know everything which would mean they'd know nothing and we'd know that an Intelligence community that treats everyone whether friend or foe as a suspect It's not a tool of war prevention, but a means of control To collect everything on any to collect everything on everyone is a totalitarian act So here I stand a Lucky man. I Got a front row balcony seat inside one of the strangest most curious theaters of the Cold War Field station Berlin did a lot of good It had a very targeted mission and the work we churned out helped cooler heads prevail at a time when the world was at Three minutes to nuclear midnight and today Field station Berlin stands empty a derelict The big year here's nothing but the wind Its intelligence purpose is past But there it stands an off-white Valic shape between the funk to him the fancy to him against the slate gray Berlin sky It may now be a derelict, but isn't it also a monument a monument to the good things that knowledge can provide Hey, we didn't blow ourselves up the cold war never turned hot and If we didn't know what we knew we knew because of signals intelligence It could have heated up pretty fast Field station Berlin Stands as a monument and a memorial to the power of knowledge and learning over brute strength But it's also a warning a Big white phallic symbol reminding us that if we use these intelligence weapons on our own people We're all literally screwed Let's save Teufelsberg Let's preserve field station Berlin at least the outside as both a monument and a warning German is such a descriptively specific language the word is mon mal a warning monument Teufelsberg state a symbol for the macht des Wissens und einen Krieg zu verhindern Aber in a modern in context can it's an under the bedeutung haben Heute gibt es keine große red a schüssel die sie ins visie er hat Kann in click or red sad seal Is passiert nicht mehr von der spitze eines hügel's? Es ist in einen rechten centrum ihre telefone gesellschaft begraben versteckt oder in eine netzwerk cloud Or the malware off your computer order But we're still humans We still are trying to wrap our monkey brains around what it all means We still need the pictograph So I ask you to preserve field station Berlin We need to know that they know We know Thank you. So thanks for your great talk We do have enough time for a Q&A session so you may line up of the microphones if you leave before please do this at quietly as possible And not like you do now Please be quiet so we have a Q&A just meet in the bar. We don't need to do a Q&A. We can just meet in the bar As you wish Okay, if it gets more quiet we may start the Q&A as such Conductors. Yeah, I have a question. No, not a question a statement I don't really trust you If I put on my tie will that help Okay microphone to please Yeah, hello, and it's really strange because you remind me of the old Stasi officers from our family and all around and the old same stories of oh We are so great guys and we know everything about they they know, but they don't know and I don't know why is James Hall or mr. Carney your reason to spoke here and not mr. Edward Snowden. It's really strange that you not Spoke and your friends of the NSA spoke about things what matter and not histories and funny stories from your military career It's such strange that they use this thing like an intelligence agency is defended by yeah It can go to make good things and everything else. It's I don't know you disgusting Were you at the same speech I was? Okay, Mike from one, okay. Hello And first I wonder it whether it might be the wrong place for this talk, but later I realized that this talk really gave me an insight into how things work out within signal intelligence and how people think and how they reflect on their Work and the problem was I didn't got the impression that you reflected much about what you've done Because you told us in the last part of this talk that the world has been nearly into the the hot the hot moment of the Cold War and before you told us that you fake some kind of document for Have some kind of impact to your paranoid officer or I don't know so Have you an idea what? Responsibility was within your job when you're telling us all these jokes, you know what? I mean this this responsibility in faking a document when you know that there's a cold war going on and There are there's a chain of commands Taking action, maybe you can't control later Certainly, you know 30 years on you can think about that sure I think that you bring up an interesting point which is which is that you have a Group of people that that can select documents and create pretty much whatever they want. I mean we saw that With the buildup to the Iraq war that it didn't matter what the intelligence showed because The the then American vice president went and sent some of his cronies over to cherry-pick documents and create a series of facts that weren't facts at all Sure Hi Even before Snowden the NSA was already spying on Friendly governments have you guys ever discussed amongst your group what this actually means for democracy or was this just daily business? I mean first of all was 30 years ago. I I I don't think well. I know that we weren't at all interested in in Spying on our friends because that's a waste of time think one of the great problems Right now is that if if you take in everything, you know nothing So it's a colossal waste of time to be listening to you know a consulate Merkel's telephone or or yours or or mine My point is maybe more specific. I Mean I understand you guys were all in your 20s, but did you have in that area when you were working there? Did you have political discussions or did you just do your job and don't think longer and deeper about what you're actually doing as? the NSA I think I Think like a lot of things in life that there's sort of this this mental break between who you are and what you do and I most of us I'd say we're politically, you know to the center of the left And didn't really think About this is some global thing that we're doing if anything we looked at it as well Doing this is a lot better than people shooting at one another and it was it was obviously a very very different world at that time I mean it it's strange to think now that that people were Absolutely terrified about this this monolithic communist thing coming in to you know eat eat their grandmother's baked goods But but it was a great fear Nuclear war was a great fear. So so being in a in a position where you're gathering information And in good faith I think to your point the the other the other thing is that things hadn't been politicized that there really was a Serious pretty hard and fast rules and and people weren't weren't thinking about politicizing the work that they did So you thought you were doing the good thing basic. Sure. I think so sure absolutely, okay I'm from four, please Thank you for a talk. I I I don't know I have a problem with your claim that typhus bug is a is a symbol for the good sides of surveillance because this is The surveillance you describe is made for a world where you can differentiate between your friend and your enemy And it's a bit difficult to listen to you to your talk because from the American perspective today Everybody who's not American is an enemy. Well, actually anyone who's also American is an enemy Citizens themselves so so your emphasis is on we can't spawn our own people But we are all being spied on by the American government and the second thing I wanted Wanted to say is it's I finally quite I was happy to hear a talk because It's quite scary to see that 20 20 some 20 something myself the 20 something year olds are in charge of such powerful weapons And there are today as well. So thank you for this insight. No sure welcome to two things one I Think the important part about not spying on your own people and that they were in fact very hard and fast guidelines Back then is relevant to today because we need to figure out a way we being all of us need to figure out a way that we can Not point these things at us and and at the same time hold on and at the same time accept that You need to be looking for bad guys at some level, but treating everyone as a criminal is is Is absurd? I mean if there's a crime scene you put a piece of tape around it and you look at it What's happening now is that NSA is is treating the entire planet as a crime scene and wrapping the whole planet and You know, please line do not cross tape which makes absolutely no sense Okay microphone to yeah, so I also found the talk very interesting and my question goes along the lines Of this last question like even during this answer you kept talking about us We have to the to decide this thing and it's okay to listen to them and I will ask who is asked and who is done that that's a fine question and and if you drink Come and have a drink with me And if you don't then you can watch me drink like because I think that that's a very interesting question I mean I spend time in in various places around the world and and this idea of them and us and us and them gets very complicated, but I think that we can all agree that there are Some elements that don't like other elements and and that keeping a general look on what those elements are up to and being able to take appropriate measures is Is a lot better than wholesale wanton destruction It's it's horrible I'm not here to defend this that did did you listen to my speech? Okay, we have only three minutes left for more questions, so we continue with microphone five I Have a question about your security clearance. You told us that you didn't tell everything because you're You're not supposed to What would happen if you If you tell us all I would I arrest you tonight or kill you tonight or what what happens to to someone Telling telling 30 year old stuff. I I have no idea I mean, I feel on perfectly safe ground talking about everything I've talked about tonight. I Mean I mean the things you didn't tell If so so the security you mean about you mean about the you mean about the aliens No, I mean there are people people working in jobs like you did today if they would go out and Tell us what would happen? Would they? I believe I believe one guy is currently living somewhere outside of Moscow with his girlfriend Okay, when we've got a question from the Internet Do you really believe that you ever prevented anything? What justifications do you have for that? Or can you give any examples? well, I think that the example of of finding out that that The leader of our adversary had died and there was an internal power struggle going on that they didn't want us to know Certainly helped all of the the Western countries keep a cool head because At the time people you know when a politician said something then The other side reacted to it I mean you saw with with Reagan saying something completely evil into a into a microphone He didn't realize was live, you know caused a massive overreaction But because we saw the massive overreaction We were able to at least engage in discussions if we didn't know That they knew that we knew then wouldn't be able to have that kind of a conversation if if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes It's difficult to to you know, take a measured response or to remain You know cool cool headed when things get heated up. So I think that sure I think that that intelligence in general Does a lot of good in keeping the peace sure Okay, we've got only time for one more question. So if you don't get your question asked meet bill later at the bar microphone six please Hi, I think no single ill the vigil in the room and the hall is a bit confusing But I am trying to come but say it About the toys did you use back systems from did you cut the Audio is confusing I Was an analyst I I you know wasn't Involved in running the technology. I mean I I couldn't tell you what flavor of a lot of things were okay. I mean it's Okay, thank you, Bill, please give him another warm round of applause. Thank you