 I'm really glad to be here and to be speaking about this important topic, as most of you know, but perhaps someone who is watching us and is still not a DM member, does know, from the very start of PN25, we have been involved in advocating transparency in the sense that the decisions which are made behind closed doors, which are of interest of the public, should be public. And let me remind you that one of the co-founders of DM25, which is not this idiot, but another one, as we call ourselves privately, actually is a whistleblower, you know, what Yanis Varoufakis did at the beginning, even before DM25 existed, was to record, as finance minister, the meetings of a very secretive institution of the European Union, the Eurogroup, and he leaked these recordings and all these recordings are published and they made an impact. I mean, one of the impacts is definitely a movement with more than 100,000 members of DM25, but it also launched a debate in which way the most powerful institutions of the European Union work and well, manipulate our lives. The recent leaks, the Pandora papers are definitely important. They have definitely shed light on some shady dodgy details about the powerful elites of today. But as someone who has been following leaks for, I would say, at least a decade, I must say that we have to look at the Pandora papers as part of a much bigger picture. I mean, before the Panama papers, of course, we had, before the Pandora papers, we had the Panama papers, before the Panama papers, we had the Paradise papers. What is, you know, what is in common with all these leaks is, of course, a tax evasion. And honestly, we didn't really need a lesson that the most rich of the world are actually evading paying taxes and putting it on offshore islands and so on. But still, what this kind of leaks and this kind of collective investigation by journalists and whistleblowers, what it achieves is that people like us, people in governments, political parties, movements have tools to put political pressure and to change politics today. But I think it would be insufficient. It wouldn't be fair to talk about the Pandora papers without mentioning, well, someone who started actually this trend of leaking important material, whether it is war crimes, corruption, tax evasion, healing, tortures, buying surveillance. One of the first was, of course, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, who actually started precisely with this kind of method that you bring journalists on board. Like now, similar in the Pandora papers, you have The Guardian, Washington Post and many others who work together and then published at the same time and so on. This was, this is something what WikiLeaks was already doing until, of course, because of fear, corruption, some of the media turned the back to WikiLeaks and also Julian Assange and actually some of them actually participated in the character assassination. And a step further and then I conclude, I think this, the Pandora papers would be incomplete without mentioning not only WikiLeaks but also other whistleblowers, Chelsea Amenning, who revealed United States war crimes, Edward Snowden, who revealed a massive surveillance program of the United States and that so-called Deep State, but also Daniel Hale, who revealed the drone warfare of the United States. And when you put all of this together, Pandora papers, Panama papers, Paradise papers, WikiLeaks, Daniel Hale, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Amenning and many others, you will really get a picture of how our world is functioning today. And I think it's definitely not enough to just propose progressive taxation, as we can hear, tax the rich, taxes, taxes, taxes, blah, blah, blah. I think it's definitely not enough for a movement like DM25 but also for any other progressive movement. I think what, when we have this whole picture in mind, what we have to work on hard day by day, night by night, if systemic change, because taxation will definitely not solve the problem. There will always be another island where Djokanovic, Tony Blair, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or someone else can put their money there. And it's definitely not going to change the very system which is based on extraction, exploitation and expansion. I stop here and I'm looking forward to what others have to say. Thanks, Rich Kerr. Beral, Beral Madra. Thank you, Mehran. I think we should add another profile from Turkey to whistleblowers. And he's now a very famous whistleblower, but he's actually a mafia boss. Now he's living in one of the Arab countries. For two months, he sent videos to the large public through social media, of course, about the most mysterious affairs that happened in Turkey since 20 years and even before. So he really opened the Pandora box before the big Pandora box in Turkey, I think. And now the Turkish public looks at him as a hero because many, many mysterious political issues now very clear after he really, he really talked about these issues with documents actually. And I think social media played a very positive role in this issue because of Turkey since maybe, I don't know, since the 90s was very dark for us. And among other problems which are really breathtaking in Turkey, suddenly these Pandora papers came to the agenda but it was not a surprise because all the most of the cases and profiles mentioned in these documents were already a common knowledge for us. We knew who was making tax evasion or who was sending black money and it was open to most of the journalistic work. So it wasn't a surprise. And now parliament is discussing this issue true because Mr. Garopayla opened a question, he's a HDP party member and probably this week it will be discussed in the parliament. Until now we didn't hear anything from the ruling power from the government about Pandora papers. They didn't respond. Only the opposition party leaders are talking about it in the televisions and in the social media. But today probably you will know that the problem in Turkey is USD dollar and AU are really shock people because one dollar is 10 lira now. This is the problem in Turkey, not the Pandora papers. The money is already stolen and it will not come back. Thank you Beryl for giving us the perspective from Turkey. Would anyone else like to jump in to give some more context to the topic about whistleblowing in your countries? Or anyone else got any specific comments? Thinking about it? Yanis. Thank you madam. What do you do when all power is concentrated in the 1% of the population? Who control the corporations and the state? Who control our data? Who wage genocidal wars? Who ensure that the planet remains to the trajectory towards climate not emergency but catastrophe? Who will demonize anyone who threatens with the kind of information that the public could use in order to gain a little bit of autonomy from this global oligarchy? I think Julian Assange had the right answer a long time ago even before he introduced WikiLeaks which is to turn a mirror onto the face of the big brother oligarchy and to reveal their secrets. We live in a world where you, me, all of us are made of glass. We are totally transparent. The NSA, the CIA, Google, Amazon, even tiny little outfits that have the money to buy an Israeli app know everything about us and they don't even have the self-restraint to keep it from us that they know about us. Google tells me every time that, oh, by the way, last year, this very moment, you were doing this. You were scratching your head talking to your wife or whatever. Julian's idea was really very simple to make it publicly available so that everybody knows what they know and what they've been up to. And for that, they're killing him in Belmarsh prison. For that, they tortured Chelsea Manning for years on end. Absolute torture. This is going to go down in history as a liberal democracy willingly, knowingly and purposely torturing one of its citizens day in, day out. They are criminals. We're looking at you folks, the so-called liberal Democrats, parading in front of congresses and cameras and so on, speaking the language of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of John Locke, of Adam Smith, when in reality, you are nothing but outright criminals and torturers. That's what you are in the interests of creating a monopoly, not in the interests of capitalism or the market, not even that, in the interests of keeping all the power in your filthy, very few hands. This is what you've been up to. And we know that whistleblowers are going to be persecuted. And even worse than killed, what they're doing to Julian, as we speak, is worse than murder after all those years. The assassination of character. Remember that even our comrades in the United Kingdom in Sweden and so on were convinced that Julian was a rapist, that he deserved to burn in hell. And all that so that they wouldn't, so that they would forget that it was here that allowed them to know of the crimes perpetrated by the British government and the American government and other governments in their name in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, we are talking, we have a tendency to talk, and we over the death of Grady Beral, because we live in an imperialistic, western dominated white male imperium. So even the whistleblowers that we talk about are white and male, like Julian. That's not against Julian, but there are whistleblowers and very courageous people in Turkey, in Iraq, in Syria, in Nigeria, in Ghana, in China, in India, in Hong Kong, in Latin America, in the developed world that we don't even know about. People who have blown the whistle and who just been killed and buried along with their families sometimes. And we don't even know about the names. So it's important to place it in its broader context. This is war. It is not peace. It's not democracy. It's war. It's war against exorbitant power. And whistleblowers are these tiny specks of light that provide hope that this war has not been lost for humanity. In Greece recently, our party, Mera25, the M25's electoral wing, we stood by one of those whistleblowers, Maria Fimova from Malta, who was hounded all the way to Crete where she resides. The European Union itself is implicit and complicit in attempts to have her or her husband extradited, persecuted and so on. Make no mistake, Brussels, the European Union, the British government, the American government, the Greek government, the German government, the French government. You are not liberals. You are part of the problem. You are part of the oligarchy that is destroying liberty in the name of liberty, that is causing war in the name of peaceful coexistence, destroying the planet in the name of the green transition. Whistleblowers are the only hope we have that this mind-numbing asymmetry of power can be redressed. Thank you, Iannis. Okay, let me put something perhaps to all of you, if not to put in the hand up yet to add a comment. Last week, the Pandora papers were sort of knocked out of the headlines by this former product manager at Facebook who went public about how the social media giant puts profit before people and hurts children and so on in terms of psychological development. Frances Haugen is her name. There was some commentary I read on Jonathan Cook's blog that this is that she's not a real whistleblower at all and the fact that the Democratic Party is celebrating her right now and she's coming down in favour of more censorship and doesn't want to break up Facebook demonstrates that she's not a whistleblower at all. Whereas people like Manning and Snowden and Assange who challenge the very basis of how the powerful run the world, terrible things happen to them and they're thrown into dark dungeons and exiled and so on. So what would you guys say to that? Would you agree with Jonathan Cook or how would you interpret it Rosemary? I would agree with Jonathan Cook. I think it's very interesting you see it all over the place that when they finally get to expose the treatment of children in Catholic detention centres in Ireland that's when you suddenly get all the information about what really went on for years. So when you get to a tipping point you'll suddenly find there are a whole load of people who are willing to come out and tell you things you've never thought you'd hear from such people. But they do things like Haugen has done. They end up concluding that the state's got to get a grip on the internet and make damn sure that this sort of mess you know doesn't carry on. And she was being welcomed to the club of other people who have denounced Silicon Valley from within Silicon Valley that I'm not all saying that they're in some vast plot just to calculate how much to give us but I am saying that we're being given a sliding scale of whistleblowing now as if that were the issue and really it isn't the issue. There is an issue here of us and them the thing that everybody fears is that ordinary people will begin to understand how little they care about and what is being done to them. And that you are not allowed to say and you're not allowed to say that it's the system that's doing it. The people who say that the people get places to say that they are suffering terrible long jail sentences, deaths, torture, goodness knows what. We need to know that that is what underpins this issue because otherwise we will get confused by a lot of people who come out and give you everything that you wouldn't have thought you'd ever had here from anyone and yet they don't give you the crucial analysis and the crucial implications of that. There was a marvellous article in The Guardian explaining the sliding scale of whistleblowers on Hogan's subject and how really the most interesting ones were the ones who are unsure they wanted to participate in that particular celebrity announcement of knowledge who thought it was more important to work with the workers, to work with users, to get them to understand the issues involved. So I do think there's something we have to ask ourselves about what we do with this stuff and when we do it. Thank you Rosemary. Any other comments and Rosemary makes an important point? What do we do with this stuff when it's out there? How can these revelations make more of an impact? Johannes, fair. Thanks Madan. Thanks also for what has already been said which really speaks very close to me so I don't have to add anything. I want to emphasize that and also add one story that I wanted to share with you since DM25 has been very active on helping whistleblowers as they have already been mentioned now. I wanted to mention someone else. This person is called Esteban Servat and I'm going to read a short article or a short paragraph so I make no mistake in who he is. In March 2018 using nothing more than a Facebook page and the rudimentary website a 33-year-old Argentina American biologist named Esteban Servat launched a protest that has mobilized tens of thousands of people in Argentina. Servat published a secret Argentine government study of the environmental effects of fracking in the mountainous region of Mendoza, a report that had been provided to him by a whistleblower inside the government of President Mauricio Macri. The study revealed that the Macri administration knew about the contamination of aquifers due to fracking operations but lied to the public about the scope of the risk and this person is Esteban. How do I got to know him? He just came to one of our DSC, DM spontaneous collective, our local groups in Berlin to one of our meetings and introduced himself and told his story and it was silent afterwards in our group because we couldn't really believe what he was saying but I think it was very good for DM as an organization that he thought that we are a group where because he had to leave Argentina and seek refuge in Germany that he could come to and we tried of course to help him a little bit in our kind of little ways as a group how you can help a person and he has later on also joined our protest that we were organizing in support of Julian Assange and I think this is a way of how we all can try to help and support whistleblowers that are under attack, that are under threat from the people and power and I think our whistleblower fund supporting Maria Efimmova is of course one example but also I think everyone of us can try to help people that are attacked and that need to be protected. Something else I wanted to mention in terms of the comment on the Pandora papers I read a little bit more about topic today and I actually tried to find out so what about my country, which politician was involved, I didn't really get so far and when I was thinking and trying to go to as close as I could to the actual original data and search myself I was missing something that WikiLeaks provided to us which is full transparency of course media can make stories about it but nowadays these leaks they are not real leaks because you don't get the original documents you get what journalists write about it which is great of course summarize you know try to put a story together that's great but I think something else that we really need to emphasize always and try to put pressure on is that we also can have a look into the original documents like we published them when we published the EuroLeaks documents. Thank you Johannes and important point there the tension between just dumping everything out there or curating it I know it's something that we ran into with our EuroLeaks leak I would encourage everybody to check that out EuroLeaks.dm25.org I think it was quite an innovative use of web technologies to have a good story but also have all the content there for people to search and peruse. Anybody else have any comments? Judith, Judith Mayer. Just a quick note because Johannes said you can't actually access these leaks directly yes that's true of course but what most newspapers don't tell you and which is in fact possible is to go to the source this consortium of journalistic organization ICIJ which has been leaking the well they not the ones who leak but they have been organizing this whole thing with the Pandora papers and before the Panama papers and so on and so on and if you go to their website the ICIJ website you can in fact search a database of which politicians industrialists and other people from your country have been involved in any of these previous leaks not the Pandora leaks yet I'm hoping they were added but the previous ones have been accessed indexed by country and so on and you can see in much more detail than the newspapers are likely to cover it you can do your own research on who is involved in which way and how. Thank you Judith anyone else some discussion in our chat here about who benefits from the leaks and whether that matters any other comments from anybody yeah yeah Maya go for it Maya. Yeah well whenever we we have this topic of leaks I always think of what we can do to actually protect the whistleblowers because you have to of course see all the countries that have really really bad corruption have a problem to protect people that are leaking things that are concerning this corruption and of course we on the Balkans have have these kinds of issues all the time and now with the Pandora papers we were on the list of corrupted the you know people we had a lot of people that were revealed in the Pandora papers and some of them also the president of Montenegro that Sretko mentioned Mila Djokanovic and also our minister of finance Sini Shamali it was all over the papers for a couple of days everybody was talking about it of course all the social media were full of it like okay they're going down now we have proof there are leaks that are really our proofs of the corruption but nothing actually happened of course our president Vucic he just said that it's not true that these are not actual papers that it's always you know the opposition that is leaking these kinds of papers blah blah blah and of course all of this these fake news that these kinds of governments are always perpetuating the media so then I was thinking because of course we had the WikiLeaks on our territory we had this famous worker that some of you may be know about that leaked corruption from a big arms company factory called Krushik his name is Alexander Obradovic and he was arrested and in jail for leaking documents that were that were also where we had also the involvement of the minister of defense at that time and he was of course arrested and after a petition of 25,000 signatures he was released but of course not he never never got his job back and he's just still doesn't have a job so then I was really thinking how can we encourage someone in countries like my country and like a lot of countries on the Balkans to actually be a whistleblower when we cannot in any way protect whistleblowers and paradoxically when I was talking to Renata Avila she told me that Serbia actually has a really good whistleblower law on paper but we never used it when you see it on paper it says all of these things that of course protecting the whistleblowers but it's not it just never happens and of course we have the problem of media what how can we do all of these things in a country that doesn't have free media so I'm just interested and maybe we can talk a little bit about it how can we actually help whistleblowers all around the world but also having in mind the specific countries that these leaks are coming from thank you Maya does anyone have any concrete responses suggestions to Maya's question what can we do to support whistleblowers around the world more than what we're already doing what can the people out there do apart from just join dm25 anything any thoughts stretch go stretch go yeah I mean that there are many organizations out there which are dealing with the protection of whistleblowers besides dm25 there is courage foundation then there is the freedom of press foundation there are many others which were either started by former whistleblowers or by lawyers or by those people who actually know how to help whistleblowers unfortunately what we have seen is that those who who went into the biggest risk also had the biggest sacrifice I mean from Julian Assange to Danielle Hale now Chelsea Amendington was tortured to ever snow them who cannot return to the United States so there is always a risk involved but that's why I think you know to come back to some things people here already mentioned is that I don't think you know the basic principle of whistleblowing was nicely expressed precisely by Julian when he said that if wars can be started by lies peace can be achieved by truth well I think what we have to do is to go a step further and to actually deconstruct the fetishization of truth this is something also I think connects to what Rosemary was has been saying you know I don't think that you know as many good stories you have or journalists summarizing the leaks or even politician you have seen what happened in Czech Republic where the Prime Minister who was actually campaigning on tax reform was revealed in Pandora papers and actually lost the reelection so actually you can see a direct effect already these days but I still think this is also not enough I don't think that telling the truth or revealing the dirty secrets about tax evasion war crimes is definitely not enough look what WikiLeaks revealed since collateral murder and revealing the war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan who ended up in prison you know what about the war criminals themselves who was in court you know who was accused who had any kind of effect because of the of the leaks they're still in power you know the same faces the same people who were saying that we have to drone or assassinate Assange some of them are actually presidents today so I think you know this brings me to a crucial conclusion you know if the truth is not enough if you are witnessing what Norm Chomsky is calling manufacturing consent and if immediately after Pandora papers we will be already occupied by another scandal or whatever then the question is you know what do we do and I think that the crucial step we can do is actually to organize and mobilize on the one hand to protect the whistleblowers themselves but without building up social movements which can use the truth which can use the information either not just in the sense of putting political pressure or asking someone to resign but in the sense of systemic change I think that's the most important thing because if just a politician resigns and then this you know former prime minister minister becomes a president and then in cells another one to become a prime minister which happens in many countries or they are like in the case of Austria now resigning but still you know governing actually from the shadow then not many things change and then in this sense that the revelations themselves become a mean actually for everything to change but everything to stay the same so I think what is what is definitely necessary is besides protecting whistleblowers is to organize and mobilize and not to fetishize truth or revelations by themselves I think the revelations are just the first step and the rest depends on us it depends on you well so it's Richko and there's a comment in the chat that relates to what you said I'm shocked that most people don't care about any of these leaks says Lalinsky by my count there's only been well I think fewer than 10 convictions resulting from the previous Panama papers and the Paradise papers so if everything's just going to stay the same what concretely can we do and Richko says develop social movements do you does anybody else have any other thoughts about this I quote the New York Times when they said about these latest revelations that it's it's wearying to hear this I mean it's unbelievable to say that about these kinds of revelations about the powerful that people are just tired already just to hear about it how do we make people care how do we connect it with impact well you know Mara if I if I can have the floor go they have a point about this you know if you keep telling people out there how you know the oligarchy they've stashed trillions and trillions away in the Cayman Islands after a while they get desensitized by this you're not offering him them a way out you're not telling them what they can do to change what it means for them to begin with so we need to do two things firstly to explain to them that their wealth is your poverty their wealth is the reason why you can't go to sleep at night with a you know with a clear head and why you know you have sleepless nights worrying about you know your health insurance worrying about you know your kids education worrying about climate change worrying and worrying about all the disasters that you worry about there is a direct link between the height of the stash of dollars and yen and euros and so on that they have put away and your woes that's the first thing that's all you know second thing is you have to build them an option and this is why let's let's let's be with the orthodox we do not need more zoom groups in the cars now we need political action and we need people to have an option when it comes to organizing their neighborhoods in their regions in their countries and their contents and also have to give them something to vote for in elections and that's what we're doing here at dm35 right and on that note perhaps amir would like to come in to talk about what we're doing in terms of transparency proposals and the the green paper that's currently making the rounds within dm25 and how people can out there out there can help contribute to it okay absolutely thanks mehran and on this on this point you know the dm25's policy positions are developed from the grassroots up and on transparency issues we in fact have a green paper and the link will be coming to the audience now on the chat we're touching everything from costing light into EU institutions looking at political party funding monitoring and disclosure of course looking at the issues related to the revolving doors of the EU commission unmasking lobbying and expert so-called expert groups that exist that push certain agendas of course and and and and we you know that policy paper is available for the members of public to view and as part of our policy update process of course we're going to be making some changes to it and if any members want to get involved please get in touch with us at volunteer at dm25.org and we'll be happy to get people who want to get active on this issue to work on the policy positions of the of the movement thanks thank you amir for detailing that any other comments thoughts anecdotes responses to anything you've heard so far no thinking okay well in that case we can wrap it up for today i think a lot has been said and all the links that we've discussed here are in the chat including to the green paper that amir just mentioned again the email address to get in touch with us and and be part of this creating these proposals that we will take to the ballot box in future elections is volunteer at dm25.org and the web address dm25.org slash join thank you very much for watching and see you again same time same place two weeks from now oh sorry i i know in the last minute i'm really sorry i thought it was an hour after that's really last minute okay so i just wrapped it up and now here's renata and we're still live and we're that's our whistleblowing expert who's who's crashed in at the last moment so that's fantastic totally unscripted renata why don't you have the floor just to discuss whistleblowing and more importantly what can be done a to protect whistleblowers and b to make sure that revelations actually have an impact because i don't think that the even the latest pandora papers leak is is connecting with people on the ground and changing actually something very perverse is happening and it is the separation of good whistleblowers with bad whistleblowers and whistleblowers that are celebrated by media and whistleblowers that are like thrown under the bus and the closer you touch the interest of empire basically the closer do you touch the really powerful the your debt your burn you know they're they're like in the case of julien sansh clear you know loud and clear to the messenger and to the message and and to the whistleblower torture and infliction of brutal treatment to some other whistleblowers i don't want to say that whistleblowing is not great it's great but it's different treatment by the forces that we that the forces that we should be paying an ion you know like the press mainstream media organizations that enable a culture of censorship and a culture of cancellation basically and and and and and that refuse to amplify very relevant messages while amplifying other messages that are convenient to the present narrative what can we do i think that the problem goes deeper and we need that first we need to go back to the very burdensome task of rescuing public public media public interest media uh second we need to rescue political the political uh and by rescuing the political i mean joining uh initiatives like the end right because the the the system is so rotten that even if the message is so loud as such as the you know everything that we saw before our eyes unfolding of the tragedy of Afghanistan uh the the reward that you get is not the Nobel Prize is uh is uh even that attempts at your assassination of the heart in the heart of london silenced by the mainstream media and demonization massive active demonization uh before the i mean using actual public media like uh institutions like the bbc so uh the message is like we really need to cultivate critical thinking get engaged in in politics and the political put public the rescue of public media and public interest media at the core of the agenda and and stop this division that some whistleblowers are nice and some whistleblowers are not because whistleblowing the act of elevating alerts about the powerful is is is uh part of our uh uh of free speech is a part of our rights and we need to defend it regardless if we like the message or we do not like the message if we like the messenger or we do not like the messenger and and we need to push uh for those uh uh not to fall into the temptation of uh getting into too much into the messenger they should be protected and celebrated because they exist as they are right but we should get into the message and what what that message is uncovering and getting into the political task of fixing uh uh the the parts of the system that are broken or simply replacing that system that is exposed by the whistleblower in the case of facebook i will say like uh it's time to get rid of in the case of uh the the massive abuse uncovered by julian i will say uh it is structural and is global and in this case in particular saving the messenger from this brutal abuse is is is now is not a matter of choice it's a matter of principle and we should all be rallying behind i i guess that the stretch cover is shared that we will be like uh in next week and the 22nd in london at the Belmarsh tribunal by the progressive international and we will tell you more about and sorry about taking too much of your time but i was at work and i really wanted to come and convey this message right that's brilliant thank you so much uh for joining that was our epilogue our encore and i will not repeat the the sign off but i i give you guys just before ranata joined but um thank you for joining and uh