 Hi everybody, I'm Tom Woods. Well, this has to be the easiest crowd to please I've ever addressed. Daniel finished unexpectedly early, so I guess I have a little extra time to talk to you in greater depth about our next speaker. I've been following our next speaker since reading his book, How Would a Patriot Act? And that was a long time ago. And heading over here from the hotel, I was explaining to my daughter Veronica. My daughter Veronica Woods is here, by the way, right up front. I pointed that out the way I did because I knew if you cheered my name, there was a good chance you might cheer hers also. But as we're driving over here, I'm here with probably my least political daughter. And not that she doesn't care about these things, but she trusts her dad. And, you know, whatever, you know, more or less what what dad says is probably more or less correct. I appreciate that. She has a mind of her own. It's true. But she has a respect for what I do and I appreciate that. And I'm trying to describe for her who Glenn Greenwald is. And I said, he's the kind of guy who says to his own followers that they're wrong and that they're hypocrites who says, why were you up in arms when Trump did A, B or C? But silent as a church mouse when Biden does D, E and F, which are worse than A, B and C. What's going on here? Why are left liberals in love with the FBI and the CIA? There's something wrong here. I might add, by the way, Glenn, that most of these so-called respectable libertarians love the FBI and the CIA, too. So we share your pain. But he asks these kind of questions. How is it possible that with the massive media institutions we have that's something like Russiagate could go unquestioned for so long? If the media is what it really claims to be, this tremendous watchdog for society telling the truth for us. I've watched Glenn particularly over the past couple of years, because I follow him very closely on Twitter. I'm telling you, Twitter has a lot of problems, but Glenn Greenwald's account alone is worth being on it. It's just fire day after day. He gets to the heart of things day after day, reminding left liberals of the principles they used to believe in, or I guess we now know pretended to believe in. And I find myself saying, why can't libertarians, particularly of the DC variety, say any of these things that Glenn Greenwald has the guts to say? And to me, Glenn is better than almost all the DC libertarians put together. Glenn Greenwald, one man. Glenn, if you can hear me, I'm sorry for that extremely faint praise. Now Glenn and I once had a little bit of a Twitter spat, and I don't even remember what it was about, but it was about one of those areas where we do disagree. Glenn is one of those people who's able to say, such and such person is terrible on issues A and B, but really, really good on issues C and D. Remember when society was capable of doing that? Now it's, these people are terrible on A and B, so they're not even really human. And Glenn is still able to be that old fashioned kind of person we once knew like six or seven years ago. He's still able to do that. But I hope that our, whatever, I don't remember what it was about, but look, Glenn, whatever it is, I'm sorry. I just want to be your friend. You were one of the coolest people I know, because I consider what he's done to be extremely brave and heroic at a time when most people I find just want to say what the establishment wants them to say, say what's comfortable, tell their followers what they want to hear. That's the opposite of what we need. So ladies and gentlemen, joining us right now is our friend, Glenn Greenberg. Hey everybody, can you hear me? Well, first of all, thank you so much for this event for inviting me to speak here at a conference designed to examine a lot of issues that I regard as extremely important. And thank you as well for those nice introductory remarks. I can assure you that whatever Twitter spot we had will not preclude my positive future interaction with you. If I marked off my friendship list, every person with whom I've had a Twitter spot over the years, I would have a very lonely life. So I consider Twitter spots to be kind of a prerequisite in some ways for me to be able to engage with people. It's just that kind of a venue. So, you know, I spent the moments leading up to the event kind of reflecting on the movement that had been galvanized by Ron Paul and the events that it in the dynamics that I think that it reflected not even necessarily created but kind of shown a light on that was already there. And obviously the importance of independent media, which is something that I've been asked to speak on has been central to my entire career and a lot of these, a lot of ways for me these two topics seemingly disparate topics really do converge. Certainly in the work that I've done, but also just in our political culture in general. There's a lot of talk now about the importance of independent media because primarily because there obviously is an increased in level of aggression and repression on the part of big tech social media companies to censor and restrict and control our political discourse. The first, the fact that this censorship comes from these big tech monopolies, these corporations that are more powerful than any in human history, not just because of the wealth that they've amassed or because of the data that they collect on us the ability to buy up most of the brain power of artificial intelligence, like this book and Google have done and to start exploiting that in ways that have almost no transparency and that are beyond democratic accountability and of course the ability to control and police are discourse in in in January of this year. They united these Silicon Valley companies did to remove the sitting president of the United States from the most influential internet platforms that people use to communicate that was I think the pinnacle of their assertion of power to make clear what has long been obvious but not particularly an acknowledgement which is that in many ways these corporations have become so powerful that they're actually more powerful than a lot of nation states and people are starting to really maybe all nation states. I mean, obviously people I think are starting to really question and become very concerned about what it means that so much power is centralized in the hands of a few unaccountable corporations to be able to dictate what ideas are and which ideas are imp permissible and on some level even more alarmingly to dictate what is true and what is false so that quote unquote disinformation becomes prohibited and by disinformation what they mean is ideas or opinions or dissent or questioning that somebody that has invested their credibility and competence in determine truth and amazingly he bristic and arrogant power for human beings to believe that they are competent to exercise that these institutions that have invested witness power can actually understand what is true. And that not only means that we're told these ideas are false but these ideas become prohibited from being expressed on the most significant and influential communication platforms on the internet. And that is to describe that I think is to demonstrate why it's incredibly alarming. And you know I think one of the often overlooked components of this dynamic is that typically it is assumed that what this means is that the executives of the Silicon Valley Silicon Valley companies have become power hungry that they have seen the potential of the machines that they created of the technology that they develop to constrain political discourse and to control what people think and are kind of power hungry or power mad with power and are now trying to use it to censor the internet in accordance with their ideological preferences. And while there is perhaps some truth to that framework. I think it's a very simplistic assumption and it's actually one that is less accurate than people often realize If you go and look at how the internet was conceived of when it first emerged as a pervasive technology in our lives in the mid 1990s. It came from this new sector in Silicon Valley that I would describe and politically more than anything else is being libertarian It's not necessarily libertarian in the classical economic sense in the sense of your Institute or the Cato Institute or classic libertarian economic theory but libertarian in the sense in the in the ethos that what made the internet so exciting what made the internet so potentially revolutionary was that it would empower citizens to communicate with one another and organize and disseminate information without having to be mediated and controlled by centralized corporate and governmental authority that was the vision the triumphalist vision that Silicon Valley pioneers who created these companies almost unanimously embrace they never in a million years set out to try and create a regime of censorship. And when I say that sometimes people say that that seems like I'm romanticizing or downplaying the corrupt nature nature of Silicon Valley executives that perhaps they didn't begin with that intention but power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and they've kind of become corrupted But the reality is even if you talk to them now and you can hear this in some of their public pronouncements Mark Zuckerberg and the executives the founders and current management of Google obviously Jack Dorsey who just left Twitter but for a long time have been resistant to this idea that they ought to be deciding what is truth and falsity that they ought to be exercising assuming this role to police our discourse. I remember there was a controversial interview with Mark Zuckerberg that Kara Swisher can switch her conducted the New York Times journalist who has been around Silicon Valley for a long time, in which she kind of was pressing him on what she regarded and what a lot of people regard as the failures of these companies to censor enough. That's the amazing thing is that for a lot of us, we view the danger, the grave danger that these corporations that are unaccountable that are accountable to nobody are exercising so much power and censoring more and more but to many people in media, especially journalists that's the most bizarre part. The real criticism is not that they're censoring too much but that they're not censoring enough. And it's not just the media that believes that the Democratic Party, all but explicitly says that in fact there's now been four times four times in the last 12 months, when the Democrats who control both houses of Congress have summoned before them, the executives of the three leading social media companies Facebook, Google and Twitter. And each time they do they become increasingly explicit about their demands that they want these companies to censor not more scrupulously or meticulously or with greater caution but quite the opposite they want them to censor with much greater aggression almost more indiscriminately and are now explicitly threatening these companies that if you do not censor more in accordance with our worldview to remove what we the Democratic Party and Democratic Party politicians regard as disinformation or if you don't remove what we regard as harmful political opinions what we call hate speech. We will begin to punish you using our majoritarian control over both houses of Congress and the executive branch by imposing legal and regulatory retaliation against you. Okay, so when Kara Swisher interviewed Mark Zuckerberg I believe it was in 2017 and it was really at the kind of the start of this idea that Silicon Valley was at fault for not censoring enough they the Democrats did blamed Facebook and Twitter and virtually everybody else in the world for Hillary Clinton's defeat they blamed everybody in the world, except Hillary Clinton herself for the fact that she lost to what basically was a game show host and a very unpopular one at that they instead of engaging in self critique or asking why they in their neoliberal ideology or so were repulsive to so many people they instead look for everyone to blame and they said oh who's to blame James Comey is to blame. Jill Stein is to blame with the leaks is to blame, but they also keep a lot of blame on Silicon Valley and said oh you allowed too many people to be heard you allowed too much what we regard as disinformation meaning criticisms of the Democratic Party. And so when Kara Swisher interviewed Mark Zuckerberg in this interview the kind of the climate was very much anger at Facebook for not censoring enough and she challenged him on that he basically said look. I went to Harvard and and undergraduate school and then I created Facebook how am I competent to dictate what is true and what is false about complex political and scientific and sociological and cultural debates why why would anyone want me. Engaging in that kind of an incredibly powerful role who irrigated that power and to me to do that. And she said so even when it comes to for example history. You aren't capable of saying oh look this person is engaged in holocaust revisionism and therefore that's obviously disinformation and therefore should be removed from your platform. So actually I don't think I'm competent to assess claims about history to the point where obviously I have an opinion about them I think holocaust denialism or revisionism is grotesque I'm a Jew he said I my family parish in the holocaust. So it's not like I don't have opinions but I don't believe I should be playing that role. And it was incredibly controversial. The fact that he said that. And so if you talk to people who know Silicon Valley executives or if you talk to them themselves a much more complex and I think more disturbing vision arises about why there is so much censorship increasing censorship. When it comes to our political speech it's not necessarily because these tech executives want to be censoring. I mean even if you don't believe what I argued which is that their ethos and their impulse is more libertarian they believe in a free internet not one that's controlled. Even if you think that's naive of me just on the basis of self interest alone. If you're someone who runs Facebook or owns Google or runs Twitter and founded Twitter you don't want to be in the business of arbitrating political disputes and kicking people off your platform. It's a thankless task you never make anyone happy that way whenever you censor someone you're making someone happy but someone angry. And if you're a big corporation all big corporations want to avoid angering people they want to have everybody be welcome to use their service. But also they don't want to be people off their platform they want to be growing the number of people who who are their users. So I think a big part of why we now live under a regime of such crossing crushing censorship. When it comes to what was supposed to be this emancipatory technology which is the internet is not necessarily because these tech giants wanted to censor but because this obligation was foisted upon them. By a mixture of corporate journalists who use shame and all kinds of coercive tactics to pressure these companies to censor more. So somebody goes and engages in a terrorist act or who does it engages in political violence and immediately they say oh Mark Zuckerberg has blood on his hands because he allowed. This extremism to take root on his platform or Jack Dorsey does or or Google does and you know billionaires despite being billionaires are also human beings who live in our society and they don't want to have that kind of shame attached them they feel that they feel when the New York Times and CNN and NBC News use their gigantic megaphones to disparage and destroy the reputations of these corporate executives on the grounds that they're not censoring enough. That shame is a strongly felt emotion human beings were all tribal and you know as recently as 5000 years ago if we were cast out of our tribe it meant that we wouldn't survive we would die. So belonging to society is an important impulse just instinctively that we have and that's why shame is such a powerful tool so it's amazing that it is journalists or more accurately employees of media corporations I think it's their job title as journalists I think what they really are our employees of media corporations that you think about them that way it all makes more sense have really taken the lead in pressuring these companies to undertake this role. And the Democratic Party has used its power has abused its political power in order to force these companies to censor in accordance with their ideology let me just give you one example that I think illustrates this really well. So for a long time, whenever I and others would argue that Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple had become classic monopolies and violation of the antitrust laws that their powers were too great to allow a free market to thrive that no competition was possible. The answer was to those of us saying that that's not true if you want to go and create your own social media platform that allows more permits to free speech and Facebook and Google and Twitter you can just go and create your own social media company that you like more. And there were people who heard that argument that who were complaining about political censorship on Twitter and Facebook and Google and who heard that that that kind of dare look if you don't like what is being done on these platforms go create your own. And they did they they said you know what that's that's true we should go do that and they were actually not people despite the media narrative who are Trump supporters who did that they were actually more libertarians people would actually worked in the Ron Paul movement the rant with Ron Paul, mostly libertarians who said you know what let's go and do that let's go just create our own company instead of whining to the government or whining to the media about how we don't like what these private companies are doing. And we'll prove that we can, there's a market for a platform that doesn't censor and they called that competitor parlor. And in January of 2021 after the January 6 riot after there were so much censorship in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election where Twitter and Facebook banned banned any discussion of reporting of the New York Post that reflected poorly on Joe Biden based on a lie concocted by the CIA that those emails from Hunter Biden's laptop or Russian disinformation Twitter banned any posting of the Lincoln and Facebook algorithmically suppressed the spread of the story, despite what was obvious at the time and what has since been proven which was those emails were totally authentic. When people saw that, and then saw Silicon Valley uniting to ban the sitting president in the United States the person who was elected president by the American people through the constitutional electoral process, basically banned from the internet for all intents and purposes, because he was banned from the sites most people use. Parlor became the number one, most popular, most downloaded at more popular than Facebook and tiktok and Instagram and Twitter. And it proved that there was this huge anger about the fact that there was no longer a free internet. And people were migrating to parlor in droves to the point where they really did become the single most popular down number one downloaded platform on both the Apple and Google stores. And when that happened, it really scared parts of the liberal app. And Alexandria Ocasio Cortez went on Twitter to her 12 and a half million Twitter followers. And she said, Apple and Google, how is it possible that you can allow this app to continue to be downloaded through your stores when so much of the extremism that led to January six is percolating on this platform. Now, what she said was a lot. As it turned out, there was a lot more planning of January six on platforms like Facebook and YouTube than there was on parlor. But that was her argument. She said, they're responsible for January six and by allowing them to be downloaded on your stores. You basically are having butt on your hands and then other prominent liberals, Democrats, who are prominent on social media like Ro Khanna made the same argument. And within 24 hours, 24 hours, Apple and Google use their monopoly power to kick parlor off of their stores so that it became impossible to download parlor from the Apple Play Store or Google. So if you had an Android or you had an iPhone, there was no longer any way to download parlor. And if you had already downloaded parlor, there'd be no way to get the updates that you need for it to continue being functional. And once Google and Amazon obeyed the demands of AOC and other Democrats to use their monopoly power to destroy parlor by preventing them from being downloaded any further. AOC went back onto Twitter and said, OK, congratulations, Google and Amazon Apple rather for having done the right thing. But Amazon, what about you? You're hosting parlor on your web services, which is a dominant company that hosts 80% of websites. Why are you allowing parlor to continue to operate on the web? The only place that you could continue to use parlor now that you could no longer use them on your phones within 24 hours after that, Amazon announced that they had removed parlor and canceled their contract. So within 48 hours at the behest of Democratic Party leaders, the combination of Apple, Google and Amazon, which the Democratic Party itself says are classic monopolies using anti-trust laws, had essentially completely destroyed parlor. The free speech alternative to Twitter, to Facebook and Google. So this idea that, oh, don't worry, there's a marketplace where you can go and compete with these companies where you can go and create a more free, positive free speech platform if you don't like is a myth. Because the Democratic Party and its allies in the media, which applauded the destruction of parlor by the Silicon Valley monopolies almost unanimously applauded it. Very few of us were actually denouncing it. So for me, the question of independent media is, you know, it's something that I've always regarded as crucial and that probably goes back to the way that I began my writing career. Some of you might know, it's a long time ago now, it feels like 10 lifetimes ago, but in 2005, I was not a journalist. I had no public platform to talk about politics. I was a constitutional lawyer working in New York. And by early 2005, I had moved to Brazil because I met my Brazilian husband and kind of had to have a career change. I obviously couldn't keep being a lawyer if I was living in Brazil. And so in late 2005, I created my own blog. At the time there was free blog creation software from Google called Blogspot. And I just went and I just hit create blog. It was literally that easy. And suddenly I had my own blog and I had a blank screen every day and I could fill it up with whatever I wanted. I had no editor. I had no corporations, no advertisers telling me what I couldn't say. I just was saying whatever I wanted to say. And my motive at the time was that I had, I really believed and obviously still do that civil liberties in 2005 were under grave assault, grave assault by these very radical theories of executive power that had been implemented in the name of the war on terror by the Bush Cheney administration. They were secretly spying on Americans, not just foreign nationals, but Americans without the words required by law, asserting the power to ignore Congress. Obviously engaging in new wars without congressional approval, just trampling over the Constitution and basic rights. And I did not believe that there was anywhere near sufficient attention being paid because the corporate media was largely on their side. And by creating a blog to focus on these issues and using my expertise as a constitutional lawyer to be able to do it. I developed a large audience very quickly, in part because liberals and Democrats and they love to forget that this was the case, but were the main supporters of my work, because I was very harshly criticizing George Bush and Dick Cheney, and they were pretending at the time to care about civil liberties. But I also had developed really early on a large component of my audience and readership, which were libertarians, because some of the leading and most vocal and most insightful voices against the war on terror against the war in Iraq. Were really not on the left, but were people like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and the Kato Institute. And within I think maybe six months of my creating a blog I had written a book, I was asked to write a book on the civil liberties abuses and the first place that I went to present my book was the ACLU and the second place I went was the Kato Institute. And that was possible this kind of construction of an audience that was focused on the abuses of civil liberties by the war on terror which the media was petrified of questioning. And the ability to create an audience that really was ideologically diverse and mixed it really wasn't left or right. It was a huge group of people who had come together on a common concern for civil liberties that was possible only because independent media had finally begun to have the technology the tools to reach large audiences without having to go to work for the New York Times or NBC News where you could never have done what I was doing. So independent media has been central to my work since the time that I began working as a journalist. And one of the things that I noticed that was a very formative formative factor or episode in my career was the fact that from 2005 to 2008 the popularity of my writing and I eventually after about a year and a half got invited to go work at salon which was this less liberal online magazine one of the first it was a pioneer of internet journalism because of the popularity of my blog. It was in large part because so many liberals and Democrats had come to love my work because they saw it as a criticism of George Bush and Dick Cheney a cudgel that can be used against them. And when Barack Obama campaigned on the grounds that he was going to reverse the civil liberty assaults reverse the abuses of the war on terror citing the fact that he was a constitutional lawyer because I was still kind of naive I was only two or three years into writing about politics actually took that seriously I thought he meant that and I know it sounds preposterous with hindsight but at the time he was very convincing he's a very good politician. And a lot of liberals were applauding him with such passion because they had convinced themselves that they cared so much about civil liberties. And then when he won and then in early 2009 he sent his lawyers into court under Eric Holder to argue in favor of the very Bush Cheney war on terror policies that he had spent the campaign bowing to a brute. And then eventually began expanding them even beyond the point where they were to the point where he even claimed the power to target American citizens for assassination by drone. Without even bothering to have to go to a court to charge the person with a crime let alone present evidence of their guilt as the Constitution requires. It became obvious to me that he was at least as great of a menace to civil liberties as George Bush and Dick Cheney were, and in many ways worse because he had cultivated this image that he was somehow so sensitive to civil liberties as this kind of softer more cerebral president who had this constitutional lawyer pedigree and in some ways he was a lot more dangerous to the civil liberties cause then Bush and Cheney were able to be because of how kind of blunt they were in their attack on it. And my ability to then continue to criticize harshly Barack Obama and maintain some of my audience but also find another one is, you know, essentially only was a possible because of independent media because I wasn't being forced into the left wing or the right wing camp. And then I was able to start asking liberals who claim for so many years to care so deeply about anti war issues and civil liberties issues. Why it was if they were so devoted to the Democratic Party, which was starting new wars in Libya and elsewhere which was running roughshod over civil liberties under Obama when you had a presidential candidate and Ron Paul who although he has some positions and the ethical to the Democrats into the left had many, including being one of the first and most vocal opponents of the war on drugs and the punitive criminal justice system that it engendered and speaking so forcefully against war and against civil liberties abuses and defense of privacy rights and basic constitutional guarantees where I was able to ask freely, why is it that he's not more appealing to people on the left than given what it is if they pretend to believe in and so independent media was crucial to my whole trajectory. And I think that, given what Silicon Valley is now doing independent media has never been more important. And so, ever since I left the media outlet that I created, which ironically tried to censor me for the first time in the week leading up to the election when I wanted to report on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's emails and what reflected about Joe Biden China and Ukraine. I've been able to be much freer than ever before my journalism. And what you're seeing now is this kind of emergence of an independent ecosystem in the media. You see it with the immense popularity of people like Joe Rogan who's captive to nobody and who doesn't have any corporate backing and yet has five, six, seven, 10 times the audience of even primetime cable shows with all of their corporate backing. You see it with the emergence of platforms like substack and rumble, which is a free speech competitor to YouTube and to and now a new podcast app that I've been working with it called Colin. I think you're going to start to see an even further migration a disappearance of the audience that had paid attention to and trusted corporate media slowly realizing that neither large big tech platforms nor corporate media can provide a reliable way for people to communicate with one another or disseminate information and that only truly independent platforms that vow when there's an idea you just like or disagree with not to try and delete it or censor it but to engage it in reason discourse. So these are the only platforms that are going to restore faith and credibility in journalism and in political discourse in general and so actually am very optimistic that I think the attack and corporate media and the Democratic Party have gone so far, have been drunk with power so inevigorated with the righteousness of their cause especially once they began fighting Donald Trump and convince themselves that they were defending democracy against the fascist takeover when once you start believing that your cause is that noble and lady historically anything becomes justifiable I think they've become so extreme that they're generating a backlash that has been very helpful in fueling the rise of independent media and for me that has become my overarching cause is to work with and promote and fortify and use my platform to strengthen those platforms that are truly devoted to independent media because I think therein lies our salvation the ability to engage in free inquiry and free discourse without that. We're just kind of serfs being propagandized without any means of combating it so you know I think that covers a lot. Like I said I think all of these issues are are integrated in my work but also in the political culture generally. So let me thank you once again for inviting me here and I'll try and leave as much time as possible for questions. Alright well thank you Glenn very much we have microphones out here I think we have those portable ones maybe we can throw around the room or do we have the old fat we have the old fashioned kind of better not throw these. Glenn just want to thank you for your courage. You and I probably are completely opposite in our world view and yet we are completely united in our willingness to speak freely and I just want to thank you personally for that I am curious my first interaction with you many years ago was with Snowden and I'm curious just on a personal note how you landed that how did that go are you still in touch with Snowden and just want to hear your thoughts about that. Yeah so you know interestingly I mean I'm glad you brought that up because the reason Edward Snowden came to me once he decided that he had discovered something that he couldn't in good conscience allowed or a main hidden which is at the NSA had unbeknownst to everybody converted the internet into the most extreme tool of social coercion and political surveillance ever known to humanity. The reason he came to me with that archive that he wanted to work with me was because he had been a reader of mine. Over the course of the last several years and he had I think it's well known had donated money to Ron Paul's campaign he had at the time Libertarian ethos. And he's talked to about before how he also thought that you know Barack Obama was going to reverse a lot of these abuses and was so disappointed when he didn't. And so the reason he came to me a lot of people assume is because I shared his antipathy to mass surveillance but the reality was it was much more because I always was a critic of excessive journalistic deference or subservience to the security he was worried that he was going to unravel his life to present this archive to a paper like the Washington Post of the New York Times and they would publish one or two documents collect their Pulitzers and be intimidated or persuaded by the government not to publish the rest and he knew that that wouldn't be my case so he contacted me in late 2012 anonymously it took a few months to kind of create a climate of trust. And by the time he was ready to meet he was already in Hong Kong which was a place he had chosen because he felt like it was safe for us to meet where the United States couldn't get a hold of us while we were working together. You know and the rest journalistically is history we were able to do the reporting freely we got threatened by the government for a year with prison. But it won a Pulitzer and a Polk and a film was made about our work that won an Oscar and so the government's hands were tied to really persecute us. Snowden unfortunately did get charged with multiple felonies and he saw the asylum in Russia. A place he never wanted to be they kind of forced him to to to remain there when he was trying to leave to get to Latin America where he intended to see refuge. So he's been there for the last eight years. It's a disgrace that our government forces him to stay in Russia because the second he steps foot outside of it they will nab him and put him in prison for the rest of his life. But on the other hand you know he was able to marry his longtime girlfriend who we had at the time who we met in the United States Lindsey Krause who he married they now have a baby. He lives in Moscow he's able to do interviews and speeches he wrote a book he's able to participate in the debate that he helped galvanize. We talk all the time where we're good friends to this very day. We both founded a group to defend press freedom called freedom of the press foundation and so look you know it's not great that he's trapped in Russia and can't leave but compared to what we thought was going to be his almost certain outcome which was being apprehended by the United States and put in a maximum security cage for the next 50 years of the rest of his life on national security crimes. What he's been able to do with his life is infinitely better than what we ever imagined that outcome would be. And one of the things I always say when people ask is the person I know in my life who is the most kind of at peace with who they are. And the most content with what they've done with their lives despite all the threats despite the limitations is Edward Snowden because he gets to put his head down on his pillow every night knowing that when forced with the choice of being brave and sacrificing his own liberty and his own life for the public good or being a coward and kind of going along with the crowd he chose the former option and I think there's no substitute for having a clean conscience when it comes to being happy in life. Glenn Glenn has a hard finish in just a few minutes so can we take one more quick question. Okay back in the all the way in the back. Glenn. What has happened to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They used to be a very sincere friend of free speech. You know I think that what has happened to them is the same thing that has happened to so many groups which is on the one hand, there is a huge sector of American political life that got caught up in this insane mania that Donald Trump was this unprecedented threat to all things decent. The conspiracy that consumed the American media and our political life for four years was something that's going to take years to realize how insane it was the idea that the Kremlin had infiltrated American institutions and basically controlled the government through clandestine blackmail for over Donald Trump but they kept feeding on this mania with each other that he was the new Hitler that he had sold the United States out to Russia that they basically relinquished all of their previously held principles I don't mean just EFF but I mean, a lot of these institutions were affected in general including the ACLU, because this group think led them to believe that they could no longer afford principles that they had to, they were involved in a war on the front line to protect everything decent and that meant you couldn't afford principles that were a war of power. I think the other problem with the EFF is that they always have been very close to Silicon Valley funded by Silicon Valley and so as Silicon Valley became more aligned with the Democratic Party and liberal politics and started doing more EFF lost his ability to be this kind of independent force to be a bulwark against the kind of censorship they once would have condemned when we created the freedom of the press foundation that I just alluded to at Edward Snowden. One of the founders was Barlow who was crucial to the founding of EFF and was an outspoken proponent his whole life for a free internet a free and an open internet and to watch EFF kind of fall into the same group bank as so many other groups is kind of sad but I think that's what explains it. Okay we are going to let Glenn run so let's have one more round of applause for the great Glenn Greenwald. Thank you everybody really appreciate it. Thank you very much Glenn. Good talk to you.