 This has something to do with espionage, we had Nigel Dunkley, a spy, and I would have liked to have given over the work from him to another former spy because you also recently decided to move to Berlin and I would like to ask you what is different in the post-Snorin situation from whistleblowers I think it's a very interesting time for whistleblowers post-Snorin Obviously he knew the risks he was running because the US has been waging a war against whistleblowers anyway for the last six years Obama has tried to prosecute or successfully prosecuted more whistleblowers coming out of the intelligence agencies in the US than all his predecessors put together since 1917 So if that's not a war on whistleblowers I don't know what is and against that background Edward Snowden still took the steps he took which was to expose to the world this global panopticon surveillance state and I think post-Snorin is going to be even more difficult for whistleblowers so unless you're pretty much an Uber geek and can really work your way around internet security there's a very high likelihood that you will get caught now before you can actually make it to the media I was going to invite Jamie to come up and read a letter from Snowden so it's fresh news Jamie gonna read it Yeah we want to have an artistic intervention Okay we're keeping the mic back here for the rest of the ride I'm not sure why I'm reading this but I'll do it anyway After that we should sing a song It's been one year Technology has been a liberating force in our lives It allows us to create and share the experiences that make us human effortlessly But in secret our very own government, one bound by the constitution and its bill of rights has reverse engineered something beautiful into a tool of mass surveillance and oppression We've come a long way but there's more to be done Edward J. Snowden, American And then you have an email from your husband You're working on this on a daily basis too Can you say something about the specificity of working on this in Berlin? Why Berlin? Well because we had people like Waohaul on 30 years ago talking about informational self-determination and to protect your data public data open and then private private and they made this to a culture and of course the CCC was born and oddly enough after that KGB hack also 25 years ago the CCC moved to Berlin and then fomented this kind of culture here which meant that when this did happen when Laura Poitras was working on her film she happened to be in Berlin because she had less surveillance than Hassel in the States Jake used to come here and hang out with us at the Telecommunist in Stamthus or at the Republic and do talks so it was common for them to feel at ease in Berlin that culture, that community was already here it didn't just happen overnight, just to answer your questions Do you have a small problem? Yeah, we have a problem NSA is spying on your phone You need to destroy this phone right now I think in terms of why a lot of whistleblowers are attracted to Berlin it's precisely because of what we saw when we went to the Stasi Museum earlier today it brought back flashback memories for me because it was very similar to what MI5 was like even in the early 1990s when I was recruited so I think why people are attracted to Berlin because we have something called the Stasi Museum not the Stasi HQ and that is the simple answer that you got you managed to get rid of it by people power Actually you have to pay more attention to the back of the bus If we are going to talk about Rosa Parks you can't ignore the back of the bus This discussion of what makes Berlin comfortable for all of these people that are dealing with surveillance often tends to forget that there are actually people that have been surveilled not by the Stasi but by the BKA in recent years for using terminology like anti-dentification like that's still something that you can be surveilled for watched telephone, telephonically surveilled in Germany now, so like the West German archives have not been opened up but people still do get surveilled and charged with things like terrorism and that happens today in Germany and we should not forget that because this idea that's a paradise of freedom we cannot just talk about the Stasi and ignore what's happening in Germany today I'd like to ask Christian Humboldt of Transparency International about what does it mean that a secret service brands itself on transparency we're seeing a shift in the meaning of transparency in the post-Snowden world I think we see a big transparency discourse by many people in power you use this word, the word this is really on vogue but to me like the main difference first of all transparency and privacy are two sides of the same coin for me and the difference, the criterion is the criterion of power because those in power should be transparent and those powerless need the privacy and I think that's very much what we saw already at the Stasi Unterlagenbewerde the spirit of the law we have there that was a film clip by Simon Klose one part of his documentary project about the magical secrecy tour my name is Leslie, I was a co-producer of the tour and I wanted to tell you a bit about how the project worked and what we discovered by making this journey through Berlin on a bus we basically were making a trip through Berlin with a group of people who were included hackers artists activists ex spies a whistleblower a lawyer some of the people that you saw on the bus already a number of people coming together traveling through Berlin for a full nine hours traveling into the history and present sort of world of surveillance culture and having a discussion about it on the bus trying to learn from one another what is actually going on and whether we believe that Berlin deserves this right to be say the call itself say the global capital of processing and reacting to and resisting global surveillance so just to give you a sense here we are at Teufelsberg the former NSA listening station with Nigel Dunkley who was a passenger on our bus and gave the tour there with one other person he's a guy who was a former spy for MI6 he was working at Teufelsberg during the Cold War and as he was telling us a bit about his work there during the tour because I was standing next to a Russian guy and a tech person and a historian I was listening to what he was saying but I was also because of the heightened awareness state we were in doing this tour on the first anniversary of the Snowden leaks also paying attention to these other things like why is Nigel's hand roughly facing in the direction of Moscow and what about this graffiti what does it tell us about the volatile history of a place like this sector of Berlin and possibly therefore also the volatile future of this part of Berlin and what about that radome that radar dome up on the left what was that radome designed to conceal in terms of technology and which direction was that listening device usually pointed in when it was working there these are the kinds of things that happened because of who we were on the bus the fact that we came together to experience the surveillance culture of Berlin but also sort of listening to each other and maybe widening our usual perspective of things so I'd like to argue that Berlin has a history of surveillance that is more varied and complex and interesting I guess you could say in shorthand than that of any other city in the world today that makes it a very interesting place to consider what's going on in the global surveillance situations that we're in and also possibly to react to it in different ways it's not just the history of Berlin but also the current communities that are in Berlin and the current things that are going on in Berlin that give it this special stature so really our mystery tour was about this intersection between the past and the present of the dozens and I wish I could tell you if I had time I would tell you all the places we considered going on our tour because there are dozens and dozens of fantastically rich possibilities we had to limit it to a few that we could actually do with 60 people on a bus in one nine-hour period and therefore we ended up with this selection of destinations which are in shorthand but just to give you a sense the inevitable visit to the Stasi Museum and Archives in former East Berlin on the other end the TB stands for Teufelsberg where we just saw the former NSA listening station TM stands for Transmediale offices where the bus departed HQ times 2 that was just a shorthand I put up for capturing the fact that this was the address it happens to be the offices both of Google and Daimler so that's where we discussed some corporate espionage and also corporate spying on corporate surveillance we went up to the BND Bundesnachlichendienst Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service down to the topography of terror former headquarters for the Gestapo and the SS Nazi German times and then past the USA Embassy one of over 150 embassies in Berlin of course embassies are there to protect their citizens but are also legendary hotspots for espionage so that was a natural thing to include on the tour so this just to give you a sense of the map we gave some actually programmed tours in certain locations where we actually visited things very carefully with an expert usually actually every time with someone on our actual bus the whole day so we have a continuing conversation but we also had a lot of loose time on the bus itself to talk and process these things and get into debates I just showed the clip from Simon that was about being on the bus so I'll give you a flavor of that the bus I would say became another site in Berlin temporary yes, rolling yes but moving among these static sites it kind of created another moment in the history of surveillance culture hopefully what we were doing was bringing a higher level of consciousness of the surveillance history and present surveillance situation of Berlin by our combined forces and carrying that consciousness around somehow so for what that was worth it was filmed by Simon Klose and our mediator on the right was Christopher Gansing who is the artistic director of Transmediale who along with NK Project were my co-producers for this event while we were on the bus going out toward the Stasi archives right at the beginning Christopher said to everyone on the bus okay you guys don't forget this paradox of seeing which is that when you look in one direction when you focus on something and you're trying to pay attention to it and learn from it there's automatically going to be something you're not seeing there's going to be the inevitable blind spots and these aren't just the blind spots from the mechanical reality of our bus but the conceptual blind spots because I'm used to seeing something this way someone else usually sees it this other way and we all know that even as we're very sure that we're right often the more certain we are the less likely we are to actually understand something more completely so we also reminded ourselves that Snowden in his revelations revealed colossal blind spots which were very important not only for revealing the technological realities of our times and some of the geopolitical realities of our times and other things but also for giving us the sense that we are now able to see things that we were blind to before but we also wanted to be very careful not to let that be something we would take for granted but also make an effort on this tour to actually use Snowden leaks as a way to motivate ourselves to look anew at Berlin but also to not get too comfortable with the idea that we actually understood anything so we're trying to look in a fresh way so I just with the little time that I have with you I just wanted to mention two different ways of seeing that I think are valuable that we took away from this tour I think there's many many more and if I had an indefinite amount of time I would tell you about a lot of others but the first of the two that I will tell you about is captured by my slide showing Nike hindsight glasses just to stand for the concept of seeing behind you, seeing historically looking into the past so this is a really interesting thing about Berlin that history doesn't function the same way there I think that it does in other places but I just want to in order to kind of activate the importance of Berlin's history I just want to put a pin in a couple of moments I think everybody already knows what these moments would be you could probably name them already but let me just put a pin in these moments without elaborating and just so that they're on this conceptual map so that we can be aware of them I think maybe actually most people would say that the history of Berlin's surveillance culture really begins in the 20th century but I'm going to propose to you that it actually starts earlier than that when Berlin was the seat of the kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire and that there was a kind of authoritarian form of data collection of mass population under the statesman Otto von Bismarck and that this, I don't know what you would call it say a preemptively antisocialist state is actually maybe the first interesting place to look at the history of data collection in Berlin I'm going to flip forward here we're now in the Wannsee conference house this is in the Wannsee district of Berlin this is a building where on January 20th, 1942 Reinhardt Hedrich, then director of the Reich Main Security Office convenes a meeting with 14 other higher ups in the Nazi government to coordinate and plan out extermination of Jews in Europe and note that this document which I think now rates as one of the major documents concerning the datification of humanity was supplied to the meeting by one of its participants that's Adolf Eichmann and this details a number of Jews in each territory that is either occupied and controlled by Germany or not you see the total on the bottom line to zusammen over 11 million so all together over 11 million I'm now flipping fast forward to after the war we're now standing in East Berlin in the Stasi compound which is the headquarters for all of the Stasi in East Germany and we're facing Haus 1 which was among many other buildings in the compound this one is the office was the office of Eric Milke who was the head of the Stasi for over 30 years I'm assuming I don't have to say a lot about the Stasi everybody probably has a pretty florid set of ideas about it I'm going to move along to this image from 1985 showing Toyvilsberg NSA listening station in full throttle working 24 hours a day we heard an interesting talk about Toyvilsberg last night no need to make any kind of sexual pun about the three radomes to the right I guess Freudians and feminists will go to town on that but I wanted to say 1961 actually this is an interesting little detail it was in July of 1961 that this site was discovered by Allied spies as an interesting place to listen out for what's going on in the eastern block or at least that's what they claimed they were listening to so July 1961 the top of the hill of Toyvilsberg is discovered as a promising fruitful place to listen out one month later the Berlin Wall goes up August 1961 starts on August 13 but this picture is obviously from a bit after that November 9, 1989 the Wall comes down just want to quickly say that I think this is a really important moment in the history of the world and the history of Berlin but in particular with this topic about whether Berlin deserves to be considered a capital of reflection on the significance of mass surveillance in the global digital era and preparing responses to it it is interesting to see that the Wall comes down in 1989 really at the moment when the emergence of digital culture just starts to take off so just as it's healing itself from this split and restitching itself together Berlin has also got in its post-wall DNA if you like the beginning of the digital era so now we one year later the former offices of Eric Milka are now a museum which we visited and one of the passengers on our bus asked when was the NSA going to be a museum when is the head office of the NSA going to be a museum and while it's not yet a museum it is true that Toifelsberg the former listening post is a sort of museum like place where you can go and you can paint there you can visit it and it's a privately managed historic site reunification I'm going to go forward because I only have a few minutes left to get to a really interesting point this is just a display of the German constitution I think anybody looking at Berlin from the magical secrecy to a point of view can't help but notice first of all how hard it was for Germany to gain these incredible points that are made in its constitution and therefore how poignant it is to go and see an abbreviated form here in this public display you can read the articles of the constitution and see just how not healthy some of them are that we now realize thanks to the Snowden leaks particularly the one on the left there that looks really tiny it's sort of in the middle distance but the smallest one article 10 my personal favorite which says something like privacy of letters posts and telecommunications shall remain inviolable with the word inviolable normally meaning not to be tampered with under any circumstances so one other way of seeing that we really got to appreciate on our trip through Berlin is the artistic way of seeing and this is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of the human eye and sight lines and peripheral vision being kind of figured out for the first time I want to propose to you that artists whether they're digital artists or artists working in painting or any other art form can sometimes also supply incredible insight that help us to see into blind spots in ways that historians and more logical approaches to reality do not so this is incredibly valuable to supplement one way of looking with another for the purposes of this congress with its title being a new dawn I just wanted to go back to a painting first exhibited in Berlin 200 years ago still hanging there in the Art National Gallery and it's by Casper David Friedrich it's called The Monk by the Sea no one is really sure if it shows a monk it could just be anybody but I think post the magical secrecy tour he looks a lot more like a hacker than anything else and that this is a really interesting representation from today's point of view of the concept of a blind spot this is just mist and fog and clouds with maybe a hint of transparency and enlightenment in the distance so even artwork that is from a pre-digital era I think can be seen completely anew when we think about it in these terms and show us things that may suggest something about our own priorities and our own vulnerabilities maybe also provide some inspiration and another area that's very rich in Berlin of course is the performing arts I just want to note here one very interesting theater the Schaubrinne theater in in west part of Berlin this caption for this photo should probably be something's rotten in the surveillance state of Denmark this is Lars Eidinger the great staggeringly great I would say actor portraying Hamlet at the Schaubrinne and this is Shakespeare's great tragedy about surveillance and the toll it takes the toll that surveillance and self-censorship take on a person and a family and a whole society the existential and ontological crisis that results when someone is forced to ask should I change my behavior and pretend to be myself just act myself and perform myself and if I do that for a while what if I mistake that self for my real self and will I go crazy and if I'm crazy is life worth living and I really think that this is a great Shakespeare play about the very problem also this staging is extraordinary this is a Thomas Ostermeyer production with a lot of soil on the stage this is really Berlin production of Hamlet the soil is very thick every time they try to put something in it like a corpse or a symbol of power like the sword or the crown or just tears of grief or what have you it doesn't stay in there it just keeps popping up it just keeps coming back on the surface of the stage they can't get anything to go into the past I think it's a really interesting insight this is a peripheral vision from these artists what is really going on in Berlin is that the history of this place can't quite stay historically it comes up into the present so all of these things we were talking about earlier from the historical vision standpoint they are very much vibrant and febrile and alive in Berlin in ways that make it possible for them to serve a wider understanding just wanted to thank Lars also this great actor for serving as our for being in this photograph taken by a surveillance camera at the American Academy in Berlin and we use this as a publicity image for the magical secrecy tour on our tour we had some great artists as well who widened our perspective one was Michelle Teran she had an interceptor set up inside the bus we had these monitors and what happened was she was able to capture some private CCTV footage so that as we're going around Berlin thinking about government surveillance and corporate surveillance and the rest she was giving us flickering images of private surveillance happening around us wherever we were moving with the bus at Toyfelsberg we have in the Radome a special performance during the tour by Jan-Peters Sontag the sound artist he built some special equipment which was able to capture some electrical activity in the stratosphere so we sat and listened to this extraordinary crackling and whooshing really strange kind of music of this stratosphere which also through into perspective a completely different understanding of the history of the NSA listening post and how what normal listening would have been like at this location not so long ago we ended our tour at Seabase Space Station where we had an interesting discussion about the future of transparency and privacy I think the creative artistic environment that we were in helped to promote a really interesting playful discussion which was useful at that moment to sort of imagine different possibilities and it would have been a very different discussion had it taken place at say the Stasi Museum or someplace else next month at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin we will be talking about the magical secrecy tour in more detail and there will be a pretty interesting panel about it I hope if you're interested you'll come and see some of the further videos from Simon Close about this tour I personally I'm very interested in participating in order to talk about another thing that I think is very useful about this journey we made to apply to the current discussion coming out of the post and debates and questions about how to respond and that is I think we hear a lot use this term panopticon the global panopticon and he just used it in the video clip as well and without all due respect to everyone who uses this phrase it's really a problem because what's going on today is categorically different from a panopticon in ways that are actually unfortunately I think a lot worse but I think if we don't get the right name for what's happening we're going to be in trouble so it will help us to actually address what's really going on if we find the right language and if I do have more than one minute I will tell you do I have more than one minute one minute okay so I would love to tell you juicy detail about the panopticon idea but I guess you'll have to come to Transmediale and Berlin I don't have time here let me just wrap up by saying these are fast changing times we're moving ahead quickly and it can be heroic and feel good to have our focus firmly set on a particular goal and to be working toward that as we think about what's the right thing to do next and where do we want to head but I think if we learn anything from the magical secrecy tour which was sort of based on this very simple equation of Berlin in its current and former and peripheral ways plus Snowden what we learned is that it really does help to look at the past to look in corners of your field that you wouldn't consider necessarily initially to be useful and interesting and to try to see things in as varied a way as possible in order to work through that humongous blind spot separating the monk from the or whoever that is on the coast of the image by Kasper Friedrich to the relationship between that and the clear open sky that apparently is somewhere out there beyond thank you