 Thanks very much. It's really great being here. The CCC and I go back almost as far the same years. My first book, The Puzzle Palace, came out in 1982, and the first CCC was in 1983, so it's really great to have sort of a reunion here. One of the things that I really noticed lately since Edward Snowden was how many people know about NSA? When I first started writing about NSA, the first book I did was The Puzzle Palace in 1982. Virtually nobody had ever heard of NSA. There was a Senator, Senator Bill Bradley, one of the most prominent senators in the U.S. Congress. I was in a car with him going to a speaking engagement, and he said, what's your book about? And I said, it's about NSA, and he said, what's that? So we got on a TV show, and the host asked me, how secret is NSA? And I said, well, even Senator Bradley had never heard of it. So he got up and went back to the hotel by himself. He didn't want to ride in the same car with me after I thought I insulted him. So that's how little-known NSA was back then. And last summer I spent with Ed Snowden. I hung out with him for three days in Moscow for a cover story for Wired Magazine. And it was really quite amazing. We had pizza together and hung out for three days, and really amazing being with him. And one of the things that has changed now, back in the old days, NSA, the old joke was it stood for no such agency or never say anything, and now it stands for not secret anymore. Which Ed got a big kick out of. So I really never talked about my background, and it was the same way with Ed when I was talking to him, because he just never wanted to give me anything about his background. I was pulling teeth to find out how he got into this whole thing when he was growing up, when he was reading that kind of thing. So I never really talked about it. And then when I was with Laura Poitras last year, I told her I'd been a whistleblower at one time with NSA, although I never made any, really never mentioned it before. So she wanted me to write a cover story or write a big piece for her publication, The Intercept, and I did, so I began talking a little bit about it. So I thought it might be interesting to give a little background before I get into my main talk. Anyway, in the Navy I was really lucky during the Vietnam War. I got number one on the draft. You know, it's the only thing I've ever won in my life, and I don't really consider that winning. But anyway, I spent three years in the Navy, and like Snowden, I got sent to a NSA, a secret NSA place in Hawaii for three years. I did a few other things, like fishing, but I also did this work for the NSA. But it was mostly focused on Vietnam and so forth. And then after that, I was in law school. That's a picture of me, I have more here. So when I was in law school, I had to think about what I was going to do, and one of the things while I was there was still in the Navy Reserve, and so the Navy, I had to do two weeks active duty once a year. So the Navy sent me down to another listening post. It was called Sabana Seke in Puerto Rico. And it was a big listening post. They were mostly focused on Cuba and South America, Central America, the Caribbean. And that's a big round circle. They're nicknamed elephant cages, because those are antennas, those huge things going around about a quarter of a mile wide. And the people working that little central square box there, that's where all the interceptions done. And not many people have ever seen the inside of one of those, but I'll show you what it looked like in there with all the people listening. There they are. That's what it was in there. You can see Barack and George down there. They got their training down there. Anyway, so we were in the... I was doing the work in the listening post. I was mostly trying to avoid work. I was just down there for two weeks active duty, and then someday I went out drinking with an IP4, saw me, and said, hey, you want to listen to something. So I said, look, I don't really speak Spanish much. It's not going to do me much good. So he said, no, no, it's English. I say English. Well, okay, I'll put the earphones on. What do you know? It was Americans talking to each other. I thought it was kind of odd. I was supposed to be listening to the South Americans or Cubans or somebody like that. So this is sort of what it was like inside. They were doing all the eavesdropping on different telephone calls. And I was very surprised that the Americans were on the other side of the communication. So I decided when I got back to law school, it was at the same time the church committee was doing their investigation. And so I decided to be a whistleblower and I called up the church committee. I said, did you know that the NSA is doing eavesdropping down in Hawaii or rather down in Puerto Rico? And they had heard from NSA that they had been doing this eavesdropping, but they stopped it a year and a half earlier. And I said, well, I was just down there like last month doing it. And at the time, it was a program that was known as Minaret. And they were focused on really the most serious criminals and hardened terrorists in the United States, like Jane Fonda. Another one was Dr. Benjamin Spock. He's hiding the weapons behind the baby there. Mohammed Ali. And then Dr. Martin Luther King. So this was Project Minaret. There were eavesdropping on U.S. communications and all these hardened targets here. So after I told Frank, the church committee about the NSA, they were, like I said, doing their hearings at the time. They said, come down to Washington as soon as you can. So the next morning, I flew down to Washington. And they had me brief Senator Frank Church in executive session. It was off the record kind of a quiet little briefing in his office. And when I told him that the NSA is still doing what they said they stopped a year and a half earlier, he practically flipped. He was really angry. So he decided to send his staff on a surprise visit down at Puerto Rico to check out what was going on. And again, the people at the listening post had no idea that these people were coming down. So what happened was they did the surprise visit down at Sabanaseka. They flew down there. And when they got down there, they really caught these guys by surprise. I mean, the station chief started running away. All the people, they started really hiding out wherever they could. So anyway, when the staff got back to Washington, they told Senator Frank Church what was going on. All of a sudden he found out the NSA was lying. I mean, who knew the NSA would actually lie? That was a big shock. The NSA had been telling him for a year and a half we stopped it and all of a sudden they're still doing it. So it was a big shock. It was a shock to me too. I was surprised NSA would do something like that. So at the time I was in law school and when I graduated instead of handling divorces or doing something in law, I decided to become a writer. And because of what I saw with NSA and all that, I decided to become the writer of the first book on NSA, The Puzzle Palace, which was a really interesting thing. I spent three years on it. Nobody had ever done a book on NSA. It was like exploring a brand new continent. One of the things that I discovered in doing my research was this document here. It was a document I got under the Freedom of Information Act from the Justice Department. It was an extraordinarily interesting document. Nobody ever knew that this document existed. There were only two copies of it ever made. And what it was was the criminal file of NSA. In 1975, the Justice Department actually began a criminal investigation of NSA. The first time a federal agency had ever been subject to an actual criminal investigation. But it was top secret. They wouldn't tell anybody that this investigation was going on. And then by the time the investigation was ended, they felt that everything was too secret to actually bring anybody to trial. But they actually read the Miranda rights to the senior officials at NSA. They considered the whole agency a potential criminal entity, like the mafia. And they found 20 different areas where they could prosecute. But they decided, including eavesdropping on Jane Fonda and all these people. But because of the secrecy, they said they couldn't bring it to court. But what happened was that the Justice Department had released that document to me under the Freedom of Information Act. But NSA had no idea that they released it to me. So when NSA found out, they reclassified it as top secret and demanded I give it back, which I wasn't about to do. But they were really insistent. And they were threatening me with the espionage statute. There is a part of the espionage statute that says, if you come into possession of classified documents and refuse to return them to the proper custodian, you can be charged under the espionage statute. But regardless, I decided not to give it back. And they eventually went away. But when I did the piece for the intercept, the Glenn Greenwald and the intercept people put it online so it's now available. If you go to the intercept and look at my article, you could read that top secret report. So that's what happened. They threatened me with prosecution. That's what was going through my mind at the time when they were threatening me with prosecution there. I could just see myself being arrested and so forth. But what they wanted to do actually was stop the book from coming out. They had to threaten me twice with prosecution. I wouldn't give the documents back and once before the book came out because they said the book is going to contain all kinds of secrets, but it came out. And there were a few unhappy people at NSA. There were a few people that weren't very happy that my book came out. I took some pictures of a few of them there. They just overreacted a little bit to the fact that I was writing this book. Anyway, now let me get back to what I was going to be talking about here was the NSA and its relationship with the corporate world, with the telecom companies and all that. I mean, this is NSA. It's the largest intelligence agency on Earth. More than 37,000 cars are registered there. It has its own post office, 70,000 pieces of mail a day, 32 miles of road. You can't see that whole complex from the road. It's all hidden. But it's just one gigantic agency. The headquarters itself, the U.S. Capitol Building can fit in there four times over. So it's a monstrous agency, but it didn't start out that way. This is how it started out. That's 141 East, 37th Street, New York. That was the original NSA. It was called the Black Chamber in 1920. It was a four-story townhouse in Manhattan. The first floor was a cover. It was they made supposedly commercial codes. The top floor was where this guy lived. He was in charge. His name was Herbert Olyardy. He was the first head of the Black Chamber. It started in 1920. Prior to that, there was World War I. And during World War I, the U.S. had censorship so they could get access to everybody's communications during wartime. But after the war, censorship was ended. So they had the... Once again, it was time for privacy and communications were not allowed to be intercepted by anybody, including the government. But the government came in every once in a while and did some eavesdropping. And that was the way Herbert Olyardy found it when he created the Black Chamber in 1920. He found he had no way to get access to all that information he had during World War I. So the whole idea was he had to make relationships with the telecom companies. This is the very first origin of the NSA, NSA's predecessor, having secret agreements with the telecom companies. And what Herbert Olyardy did was he went to New York City. He decided to knock on the doors of the telegraph companies. This is back in those days. That was the email of the day telegrams. It's how people communicated electronically with each other. So he wanted access to everybody's telegrams. Just the way the NSA gets access to everybody's metadata, telephone calls, email and all that today. So Olyardy went to the heads of the telecom companies and knocked on their door. And at Western Union, for example, he said it was easier than I imagined after the minute, after we put all our cards on the table, President Carlton anxiously seemed anxious to do everything he could for us. So no problem with Western Union. Despite the fact that it was against the law, they cooperated with Olyardy. Then he went across town to the... There were three big companies doing this at the time. He went across to the postal telegraph headquarters. That was the other big company doing it. They were a little bit more nervous and they actually had a cutout, some lawyer that they had to deal with with Olyardy because they were very afraid of getting arrested. And then he finally got all the cooperation of all the different companies. And all the companies began sending all their telegrams to NSA, just like NSA is getting all this e-mail today. Back then, the companies cooperated and they began sending all their telegrams to the black chamber. I'm not sure about the singing telegrams, whether they made it there or not, but by the end of 1920, the black chamber had the secret and illegal cooperation of virtually the entire American cable industry, the telegram industry. But in 1929, it all came to an end, Henry Stimson was the Secretary of State. He had no idea that the government had a black chamber, that the government was actually doing all this eavesdropping. So as a result, he shut down the black chamber in 1929. And that put Herbert Yardley out of work. He'd been doing it for 10 years, and now all of a sudden he was out of a job. So he decided to become the world's first NSA whistleblower. So long before Yardley, long before Sidot and Herbie Yardley became a whistleblower, he wrote a book called The American Black Chamber. I mean, the government was extremely upset, but they had never heard of this before. Nobody had ever written a book about secret things in government before. So they tried to ban the book or they tried to put them in jail, but there were no laws at that time that could really do that. So he tried another book after that. It was called Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, 1921 to 1922. And he actually included real messages that he took from the black chamber in the book, and the government got furious, and they secretly basically stole his manuscript. And that manuscript was hidden for years and years until I found that manuscript in government documents back in around 1982 when my book came out. So after they closed the black chamber, the NSA, there was no real NSA for a while because the black chamber was closed, but the British had been doing this for a very long time. I mean, the British had been eavesdropping on communications around the world for virtually since the beginning of the century, last century, maybe even before that. This is a map from 1901 of the undersea cables. And that was how the British were able to eavesdrop on so much communications. I mean, this, again, didn't just start a few years ago. The British have been doing this for more than 100 years now because they owned all the cables around the world. Those were all the cables owned by the Brits. So if they owned the cables around the world, they have an easy job of doing all the eavesdropping and they've been doing it ever since. And then World War II came, they had censorship again and once again they could eavesdrop because of censorship. And then when World War II ended, the NSA was back in the same position where Yardley was. All of a sudden, censorship ended, the privacy laws came back into play and they were without any kind of access to the cables and the telecom companies. So instead of Yardley, now you had this Brigadier General Preston Cortiman who had to make the rounds up in New York. He had to go up there and they weren't as friendly as when Yardley found him. He was getting some resistance from a number of companies, including ITT. They basically threw him out the door. They listened to their general counsel and they said, this is against the law. What are you talking about? We're not going to give you our telegrams. So what he did was he walked across the street a couple blocks away to Western Union headquarters and Western Union, they weren't happy. Their general counsel didn't want him to do it but they did agree providing that the Attorney General of the United States secretly approve it and then they would cooperate and give all their telegrams to NSA. So then Cortiman goes back to ITT and basically intimidates them. He says, look, you don't want to be the only company not cooperating with us so we just got Western Union cooperating. So then because of that, ITT agreed. Again, they wanted a grant of immunity, secret grant of immunity from the Attorney General in case they got caught. So then they went to RCA, the third biggest company doing all this and going in there and saying the other two companies have cooperated, that pretty much sealed it for RCA. They said, okay, we'll do it because the other companies are doing it but again, we want this letter from the Attorney General because they were very afraid of being prosecuted. This is how the NSA got the material. They set up a secret office in New York. They had it masqueraded as a television tape processing company and every night, just after midnight, somebody would go to the back door of the telecom companies and ask for all the communications for that day, all the telegrams coming into the country, going out of the country or going through the company. And they would take the tapes back to the phony television tape processing company. They make duplicates of all those telegrams, millions of telegrams. And then they send them down to, they make a copy, they take the original back to the company before the day shift came in, before the morning shift because it was only the midnight shift that knew this was going on. And then they send the dupes down to NSA and they put them through this huge computer. It was the biggest, fastest, most powerful computer at the time. It was appropriately called the Harvest Computer because that's what it did. It harvested all the names of everybody they were looking for, names of people they were looking for, words, phrases, whatever they were looking for. The computer would go all through these. In law school, we're told that if you're in the government and you want to get access to somebody's telegram, you have to go to a judge and an impartial judge and present probable cause and so forth. Never occurred to NSA. They just got everybody's telegram and without any kind of a warrant. So, you know, these companies are getting very nervous here. Sarnoff from RCA, for example, and Western Union, these other companies are getting very, very nervous that they're doing this because it is totally illegal and they didn't particularly want to go to jail. And they were getting worried because they weren't getting this letter that had been promised from the Attorney General. And they were thinking that they're maybe getting steamrolled here and one of these days, you know, New York Times is going to come up with a story and they're going to head off to court for prosecution. So, instead of this letter, Dwight Eisenhower was a five star general at the time. He was chief of staff of the U.S. Army. He sent a letter of appreciation to them. I mean, it didn't really mean much, but that's the best they could do at the time. That's Eisenhower. And again, this is when Truman was president. So, it didn't do much good. The heads of the telecom companies were still very nervous. They were very afraid that they were going to go to jail so they were putting more pressure on the Pentagon basically to come up with some kind of a guarantee that they weren't going to be prosecuted. What happened was that the Forest Hall was the Secretary of Defense at the time and Forest Hall had a meeting with them and he told them he was speaking for the president and as long as the Attorney General was in office he could guarantee or he could give assurances anyway that the Department of Justice would do everything in his power to keep them out of jail. It didn't make him feel too good, nothing, but they still wanted something in writing, something from the government that said that, look, what we're doing here is on behalf of the president or somebody. The problem was that the only person that knew what they were doing basically was Forest Hall, the Secretary of Defense, and all of a sudden he resigned. Not only that, a few weeks later he was in the hospital for psychiatric examination and then he put a sash around his neck and jumped out of the 16th floor window of Bethesda Naval Hospital. Among the people that were very worried were the people in the telecom companies, but four days earlier, luckily they had met with the person who took Forest Hall's place, Lewis Johnson, and he gave him the assurances that the Attorney General and the president had both approved this and they were presented a memorandum and the memorandum was actually, it wasn't signed by Truman, but it was initialed by Truman or initialed that he had been okayed by the president, Tom Clark and that was it. That's the last time the telecom chiefs ever saw assurances, but it did indicate that at least the knowledge of this went as high as Truman, the fact that they were doing this illegal eavesdropping on everybody's telecom communications. So nobody knew anything about this until the church committee. That was in 1975. The church committee had this investigation. They found out that NSA had been doing this and I had testified in executive session before the church committee, as I mentioned earlier, my little part and they did a really good job of looking into what NSA was doing in terms of spying, but they were still somewhat falling in line with regard to NSA. NSA was saying, please, please don't say much about all this stuff. So they only had one day of hearings on NSA and it was the director of NSA that was called to testify, but they never really got into the telecoms, what the telecoms were doing. The only person that did that was this woman, Bella Abzug. I mean, she was like the ultimate terror in Congress. You never ever wanted to cross Bella Abzug. I mean, she was just the most ferocious person in Congress. So she got very angry that the church committee wasn't looking into the companies. The companies that were doing all this eavesdropping illegally. So she decided to hold a hearing and she was going to call all the telecom chiefs to a public hearing and say, what have you been doing? Who did you cooperate with? What have you given to the government? And at the time, Jerry Ford was president and there were two people that really were stopping her from holding a hearing. They were trying to impede her in every way possible. You'll never guess who they were. One was a guy named Donald Runesfold, who was secretary of defense at the time. Another guy you may have heard of before, his name was Dick Cheney. So they did everything they could to try to stop Bella Abzug from holding this hearing of the telecom chiefs. And they went so far as to issue executive privilege against the companies. I mean, this has never been done before. Nobody ever heard of it. How can you issue executive privilege against the company? You know, you issue it against the CIA or the NSA or the FBI or whoever, but not private companies. So for the first time in history, Ford at the suggestions of Runesfold and Cheney issued executive privilege to keep the companies from testifying in public in Bella Abzug's hearing. But the companies were more afraid of Bella Abzug than they were of Cheney, Runesfold, and Ford. So they all took the stand. They all testified. They told basically what the NSA had been making them do. They even gave a list of the targets and everything else. It was really amazing. I really have to hand it to Bella Abzug. She really got a lot more out of these people than anybody else I think would have at the time. So one of the reforms that came out of the church committee and Bella Abzug and all that was creation of the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which everybody's heard of now. A few years ago hardly anybody ever heard of the FISA court. And these are the judges here. This is the robes they wear. They wear them over the tops of their heads so nobody can see who they are. But the FISA court was created and basically became a rubber stamp. This is where they hang out. The third floor is supposed to be secret where they're hanging out, but their office is on the third floor of the federal court building in Washington. A few people have actually been inside that I did manage to get one picture inside the court, the court in session. It's never been seen before. Show it to you here. These are the judges right here. You can see they really don't want to know what they're doing or what they're assigning, but they rubber stamp like 30,000 warrants. I think they only rejected two in 30 years. But that was sort of the reform. And for 30 years from 1978 until 2001, there weren't really that many problems. They just rubber stamped everything and everything sort of went normally until this happened. Until Khalid al-Midhar. This is a place where a few people have been. I think one of the very few people had been there and lived to tell about it. This is actually Osama bin Laden's operational center in Yemen outside of Sanaa. I did a documentary for PBS, and we went there and filmed it. This is where actually all the operations took place, where people were kind of trained, where they were based. And it was bin Laden's communication center. Bin Laden would communicate to the house from Afghanistan, where most of the operations were being planned. And then the people in the house, Khalid al-Midhar was married to the daughter of the owner of the house, and he lived there. And Khalid al-Midhar and Waffle al-Hazmi were the first two terrorists. What's interesting is that NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for years. They were eavesdropping on everything that went in and everything that came out. Bin Laden used a satellite phone that was never encrypted. And so they were just eavesdropping on the house. So the whole 9-11 activity took place. The first indication of 9-11 took place in December of 1999. That was when a phone call was made from bin Laden to that house saying, send Khalid and Nawaf to Kuala Lumpur for the big meeting. That was the first tip-off of 9-11. NSA had picked it up. So NSA had kind of known about these guys since the very beginning, since 1999, December of 1999, when this meeting was set up. These were the terrorists that came to the United States and so forth. Khalid al-Midhar and Waffle al-Hazmi were the first two. And so the NSA finally, after a couple of years, finally realized in the last month or so that these guys were in the United States and they had this mad scramble to try to find them. They basically ignored the intelligence up until that time. They were eavesdropping on them even while they were in the United States. Khalid al-Midhar, he was in San Diego and he was actually calling back to that house. So NSA was picking up that communications. So these guys had to find some place, the crew that was going to blow up the Pentagon had to find some place to make their headquarters for like six weeks before the attack. And at the same time, NSA is looking for them everywhere at this time. They're like three weeks or so before the attack. They suddenly realize, you know, oh God, we got to find where some of these guys are. I think they're terrorists. And so the terrorists set up their headquarters at this place here. It was called the Valencia Motel. And it happened to be in a place called Laurel, Maryland, and it happened to be just two miles from NSA headquarters. I've actually been in the director's office at NSA. I interviewed General Hayden there one time for one of my books. And you could almost see the Valencia Motel from his office. So these guys were going to the same gyms that the NSA people were going to in Laurel. They were dropping the same supermarkets. And NSA is looking all over for them. You know, they're eavesdropping on everybody, but they can't find them. And they're right down the street, literally down the street. So after 9-11, George Bush decided, you know, he can't trust the FISA court anymore. So he decided to bypass the FISA court while the began the whole program of warrantless eavesdropping, which became Stellar Win. And one of the things that came out in one of the first documents that Snowden, actually the first document that was released from the Snowden archive, was the Inspector General's report on Stellar Win. And what it showed was that not only did they, like back in Yarlies Day and back after World War II, where they had to go and get the telecom companies to cooperate, AT&T actually volunteered before they were even asked. They called up NSA and they said, can we do something, you know, would you like our material here? And NSA was sort of shocked because this was even before they started the warrantless eavesdropping. And so at NSA they were saying, well, how should we do this? I mean, we've never had somebody offer, some company offers all this material before, so then they finally figured out some phony legal authorization from John Yu at the Justice Department and so forth. And that was the beginning of the warrantless eavesdropping in the secret room in San Francisco's telecom center. And then from there they went to the cable companies and it's a little less clear what the cooperation was because they had a prism program where they went in the front door basically with sort of legal papers, FISA warrants, things like that, and then they had the operation muscular where they secretly tapped the unencrypted cables between the data centers and so forth. So again, we never would have learned about any of that without the help of these people here. Bill Benny, I was the first one really to interview Bill Benny. I put him in a cover story I did for Wired Magazine on the big data center in Utah. And Bill Benny is a real hero to me. I interviewed him and he was senior official at NSA. And I said, look, I could say senior government official or source or whatever, I don't have to use your name because you're going to be in a lot of trouble possibly. And he says, no, I wanted my name in there. So I left his name in there and he's been one of the shining lights of the most noted, telling what went on at NSA in terms of the warrantless eavesdropping. So I've got a lot of admiration for him. And then Tom Drake, I was on his legal team. The legal team hired me to be the legal consultant. And he was facing 35 years in prison for cooperating with Siobhan Gordon, Baltimore Sun at the time. NSA wanted to use him as an example to all the other NSA people saying, if you ever even think about leaking, this is what's going to happen to you. So 35 years in prison, the rest of his life basically. But when I looked at the case, I said, look, a lot of this stuff is probably in the public domain. So I spent three months searching through everything in the public domain. And I came up with two big binders of virtually all the material that they were charging him with as being top secret. So after we did that, and I was able to show not only was this information in the public domain, but it had been placed there by the government itself, by a speech by Mike Hayden or whatever. And once we presented that to the judge and the prosecutors and having actually worked on a number of espionage cases over the years, I had never seen anything like this. They actually came back and they dropped the case. They dropped the whole case against Tom Drake. It's never happened in an espionage case. And they said, well, drop the case, all you have to do is just sign this little piece of paper saying you agreed to saying that you plead guilty to a misdemeanor. It was actually less than a parking ticket because there was no fine and no jail time. So I was really happy to see that. And Kirk Webe, yeah. I mean, Tom went through hell. And Tom's been speaking out ever since. So again, these are all my heroes here. And Kirk Webe was working with Bill Benny and he helped me also. And then Chelsea Manny, of course. People don't realize the trauma you go through when you're actually in combat and you watch people gun down. Innocent civilians gun down. And that's what got Chelsea Manny to decide to become a whistleblower. And there were just enormous amounts of information that came out for some of his documents. And then, of course, Ed Snowden. And there's never been anybody like Ed Snowden. I hope there's a lot of people that follow in his footsteps. But the information that he had, I was just astounded. I've written about NSA for 30 years. I just couldn't believe half the stuff that was coming out from his documents. So I'm really a big supporter of whistleblowers. There's really two forces out there. One is the force of fear, the fearmongers who are always pushing for more surveillance and scaring everybody with fear. I think there were four people killed in the United States last year by terrorists. There were 24 people killed by dog bites. And that's an average. Except for 9-11 every other year is normally like that. So it's just fearmongering. The only thing opposing fear is information. And the only people that can get the information out are the whistleblowers. So what's the takeaway? The takeaway, what I took away from all this is that, number one, the NSA and the telecoms have been secretly cooperating for nearly a century. I mean, it just didn't happen with George Bush who's been going on for a long time. Number two, they occasionally get caught, but no one ever gets punished or prosecuted. Neither the eavesdroppers nor the companies. I mean, they just, they do it, they get caught, and they just keep doing it again. And number three, as I just said, after they get caught, they stop for a while and then they just resume their illegal eavesdropping one after another. So what's the answer? One answer, have a major church-style investigation, but this time not by Congress. I mean, what's Congress going to do? Investigate themselves. This time have sort of a 9-11 commission, but not, you know, a lot of old government hacks on there. Put some journalists, writers, privacy advocates. You know, some people, like former Senator Udall, for example, or soon to be former Senator. Number two, have a major Bella Ebbzog style hearing and force the companies to testify about their involvement publicly. And three, have the Justice Department begin another full-blown criminal investigation of the NSA. Now, all these things have a precedent. I mean, a major investigation has a church committee as a precedent, calling the telecoms as Bella Ebbzog's hearing as a precedent. And the 1975 criminal investigation of NSA is a precedent for a new investigation. Just one thing different they should do this time, however, is prosecute them. You know, having worked in law on and off, especially SV and IHK since I got out of law school, I've seen a lot of the criminal justice system, and to some degree it does work, you know, it does work. You put somebody in jail. A lot of times they stop doing what they have been doing. So this will come very easy for NSA. I've even worked out a plan. You see, that's NSA headquarters. Right across the street there's an abandoned asylum for the criminal insane. You just march them across. Very easy. And like I said, it does work. After they're in there for a while, it will work. And I'll guarantee you that, you know, you have General Alexander in a prison cell for a while. When he comes out he's going to be reformed. And this is what he's going to look like. So after he gets out of prison, after he reformed, after he becomes an advocate for Ed Snowden, then the next thing that's going to happen is, Ed Snowden is going to go on the Cryptologic Hall of Fame right next to Herbert Yardley, who was also charged with being a whistleblower. After 70 years, believe it or not, after 70 years in 1999, despite the fact that they were basically ready to prosecute Herbert Yardley for writing a book, they put him on the Cryptologic Hall of Fame. So in 70 years, I predict that Ed Snowden is going to be up there along with Herbert Yardley. So anyway, listen, I appreciate all your attention here, and I'm happy to take any kind of questions anybody would like to ask. Yeah, a big thank you to this talk. It was quite great, and a lot of people wanted to see it, but were not allowed to come in here, so there were even more people liking your talk. Anyway, you have time for some questions and answers, and maybe you should start to ask them. I know that there's one question in the Internet at the moment. Yes, one question here is, New Zealand researcher Nicky Hager has written about his country's involvement in the NSA1 surveillance network. One example he recounted was that analysis in New Zealand were told by the US to prioritize economic signal intelligence of Japan over all else. Given that we have examples of US corporate entities profiting from second over competitors, is it fair to say that the sole purpose of Ecolon is to uphold US economic economy, that second relating to crime, et cetera, is its secondary purpose? Yeah, the question has to do with whether NSA is doing economic intelligence. I've actually testified before the European Parliament on this. It's a more nuanced, complicated question. I don't think the NSA spies on Airbus, for example, and then passes that information on to Boeing. It's just too complicated to do that. They'd have to set up a skiff at Boeing, and then they'd have to give it to Lockheed and everything else. So I don't think there's economic espionage in that sort of micro sense. I think there's economic espionage in the macro sense where they find out what Petra Boss is doing down in Brazil as part of a larger economic espionage. And then they're also eavesdropping on companies that they think may be in violation of embargoes and things. So they do do macro espionage. The other area that they do in terms of economics, which is very interesting, and they've been doing this ever since the NSA was created. Anytime there's a G7 or one of these big economic conferences, NSA spends months trying to set up eavesdropping capabilities. They know what everybody at the G7 or whatever, what their negotiating positions are going to be. So on the big macro issue of economics, they do do a lot of spying on individual companies and passing that on to American companies. I don't think so, but one area where that linkage does happen is where people leave NSA and then go to work for the companies and then they know what they've known for years what the companies don't know because they've been eavesdropping on them. Okay, the next question is coming from the room. It's from number two here. So do you believe that the US government is capable of investigating itself that things like ABSCAM from the 1980s in which I think 31 politicians were targeted and only a handful were actually ever followed through to prosecution, do you feel that a church committee hearing could actually be convened in this day and age? Yes, good question because like I mentioned, I don't think the Congress is capable of doing it. I thought the 9-11 commission left a lot to be desired. I thought that they did a sloppy job. They virtually did no investigation of NSA at all. On the other hand, you had the presidential panel that was appointed by Barack Obama and they came out. There was three people on there, four people, something like that. One of them was a former CIA deputy director and they actually did come out with a recommendation of 46 areas that should be changed, 46 areas that they thought the government was doing illegal or improper or unethical or immoral or whatever kind of activities. The problem wasn't that they came out with a bad report, they came out with a very good report. The problem was Barack Obama ignored it. I mean, he basically brushed it off. He said, okay, there's like three or four, maybe six things that we could change. And then the other 40 he ignored. So those are the two problems. One is finding government people who will do this or rather find people that will go on a committee or whatever that will do an energetic job like the church committee. And the other one is once they've done, will the Congress, which is now more Republican than ever, or a president, go along with it. It's really an uphill battle, but you've got to start someplace. And I think starting with a full investigation, 9-11 style, what the government's been doing in terms of eavesdropping, torture and all that really needs, I mean, we haven't had it since 1975. You know, you need one once a century at least. So anyway, I hope so. Okay, the next question is from the four. Yes, you may have applause. Hi, a few of us watched the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers the other night. And part of the plot hinges on NSA domestic surveillance. And as far as I know, it wasn't really in the popular consciousness at that time, and it seemed really prescient. And I'm just kind of curious whether the producers had some inside track on some of the revelations that eventually came out in your books. I'm sorry, who had the revelations? The producers of the film? Yeah, you mean whether the producers of the film of Sneakers had insight into NSA through what? I'm not sure. It just seemed very prescient based on recent revelations. No, that's true. Yeah, no, it was a really interesting movie, and another one was Enemy of the State that came out in the late 90s. Yeah, no, there have been periodic people that have been interested in domestic spying. My first book came out in 82. It was a bestseller and made quite a bit of noise, and I've been writing about it for a long time, the domestic aspects of it. But the public hadn't really caught on to what the NSA was doing since the church committee until the Snowden revelations. This is very interesting. One of the things that Snowden told me when I was in Moscow was that he had several choices when he became a whistleblower. He could become a whistleblower like Bill Benny, who was a whistleblower to me for my Wired article, and what happened in that Wired article when I interviewed Bill Benny, and I put down what Bill Benny said about all this eavesdropping. General Alexander came out. I don't know how many of you saw Laura Poitras' film last night, but there was a scene in there where General Alexander is sitting in front of a congressional committee, and they're saying, does the U.S. do domestic eavesdropping? Does the NSA spy on Americans? Does the eavesdrop on their e-mails? And he kept saying, no, no, no. Well, that was a response to my article. My article came out, and so then he testified, and he lied in front of the committees. And so all the press, Washington Post and so forth, they reported, oh, this is all nonsense, you know, General Alexander came out and he said they don't do it, so of course they don't do it. So Snowden's seeing that. He's seeing that when he's thinking about becoming a whistleblower, and he sees what happens to Bill Benny. Bill Benny comes out, he says, the U.S. is doing all this spying. Alexander comes out, he says, no, we're not. The press buys into Alexander, because he's got four stars on his shoulders. And so Snowden thinks there's only one way to do this, and that's to actually walk out with the documents. I mean, if I got the documents and I give them to, you know, people in the press, then you're not going to have Alexander being able to lie anymore about it. So I think that's one of the things that happened, was in the past, people would come out, they'd blow the whistle. NSA would say it's, you know, like Tom Drake or whatever, it's nonsense. And so then people would hadn't paid much attention. So that's why I think it was the documents that made the whole difference with Snowden. Okay, then another question from the internet. Yeah, the question is, how is the civic coverage outside of Congress and government about that eavesdropping things? How did the press behave for that time since the founding of the NSA? Was there a civic outcry earlier? Could you just ask me that just one more time? Yeah. How is the civic coverage outside of Congress and government about that eavesdropping things? How did the press behave for that time since the founding of the NSA? Was there a civic outcry earlier? Yeah, good question, you know, the press. One big problem is the press. They never pay any attention to NSA until there's some big thing like Snowden. When I wrote my first book about NSA, the Puzzle Palace in 1982, there had never been anybody in the press that ever did an investigative story on NSA before that. It was just nobody paid attention. It's too hard. CIA is very easy because they've got sources, you know, drop a dime and you'll get 20 CIA sources show up. They're fairly easy for journalists to find. I mean, you can't leave CIA without writing a book. Virtually everybody that leaves CIA writes a book, so there's a million CIA sources. Nobody from NSA has ever written a book, so NSA sources are very hard. And if it's very hard, the journalists are going to go the easy way, which is CIA and not paying any attention to NSA. The other thing is CIA is very easy. You know, it's a spy, they leave a bag behind a tree and somebody picks it up or they shoot somebody with a drone. NSA, you've got to know a little bit about electronics. You know, satellites are up in the air and that radio signals go through. But that's, journalists don't usually study science, so NSA is a lot harder for them to deal with. So that's a lot of reasons why you hardly ever see people doing investigative stories on NSA, at least pre-Snotan, was because of the, first of all, the difficulty of getting sources and second of all, the fact that you have to know at least a little bit about science in order to write about NSA. Okay, then the last question from the room. I know that there are more questions, but the time is up. So it's number one. Thank you very much. My question is, if the NSA and other services are not capable of catching so-called terrorists, even if they shop in the same supermarket, why the heck are these agencies there? Is this just for making money for a security industry? Yes. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I'll give you NSA's track record. It missed the first World Trade Center bombing and missed the attack on the USS Cole, even though it took place in Yemen, a key target of NSA. It missed the attacks on the US embassies in East Africa, even though the NSA had been focusing on that house where the operation was planned for years. It missed 9-11. The director of NSA was having a meeting in his office at the time of 9-11, the director of NSA, and he looks over his TV set and sees the planes going in. So NSA found out about it from a $300 television set. And then after 9-11, they missed the Times Square bomber, some people in Times Square that happened to find that. They missed the Christmas Day underwear bomber, completely missed it. They missed the marathon bombing. So yeah, the NSA doesn't do that. It wasn't set up to catch terrorists. It wasn't what it was set up for. It was set up to find when Russia was about to launch a nuclear war, basically. So it's an agency that's not doing what it was set up to do, and it can't do what it's trying to do very well. So yeah, the key beneficiary of all this are the telecom companies and rather the defense contractors, the war profiteers, basically, who make profits on all this stuff. The amount of contractors that make money from NSA is just astonishing. But anyway, that's a simple answer to your question. Yes, that's the key beneficiaries of all this. It's not the American public. It's the war profiteers. But thanks very much. Yeah, thank you.