[00:00.000 --> 00:01.800]  This is one of the talks you've all been waiting for.
[00:02.820 --> 00:03.680]  Can we have some?
[00:09.390 --> 00:13.170]  Actually, you've been waiting for a lot of talks, but this is like one of the highlights.
[00:13.170 --> 00:21.510]  I'm proud to introduce Vivien Lesnik-Weisman, a lawyer and a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker.
[00:22.010 --> 00:27.290]  Her new film, The Hacker Wars, it's about the targeting of hacktivists by the United States government.
[00:27.790 --> 00:40.150]  And she will be having a conversation here on stage with Thomas Drake, a renowned NSA whistleblower who was persecuted and prosecuted unsuccessfully, fortunately.
[00:41.270 --> 00:45.030]  He called their bluff and he walked away.
[00:45.330 --> 00:50.270]  So let me introduce Thomas Drake and Vivien Lesnik-Weisman.
[01:02.060 --> 01:04.760]  Tom has been very generous with his time.
[01:05.060 --> 01:10.150]  I've interviewed him for many, many hours and I'm very honored to share a stage with him.
[01:10.310 --> 01:16.930]  I'm going to show some clips from the film and we're just going to have a conversation and hopefully we'll have some time for some questions too.
[01:18.620 --> 01:19.150]  So...
[01:20.430 --> 01:26.080]  There is a congruence between whistleblowing and hacktivism and hacktivists.
[01:30.600 --> 01:38.840]  The similarity is speaking truth to and of power, revealing the power structure, whether it's corporate, whether it's government or both.
[01:40.380 --> 01:45.860]  I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency and I served there for about six and a half years.
[01:45.860 --> 01:57.160]  I blew the whistle on the secret surveillance program called Stellar Wind, which were the foundational surveillance programs that ultimately Edward Snowden, 12 years later, is now disclosing through reporters and journalists.
[01:57.440 --> 02:00.420]  The government went ahead and prosecuted me under the Espionage Act.
[02:00.860 --> 02:02.620]  It was a 10 felony count indictment.
[02:02.740 --> 02:04.560]  I faced 35 years in prison.
[02:35.580 --> 02:40.140]  So, Thomas, can you tell us what it was that you learned at the NSA?
[02:41.040 --> 02:52.120]  You were a contractor there for 12 years and then on 9-11, you became an employee with a very high post with all access.
[02:52.420 --> 02:55.860]  And what did you see there that prompted you to blow the whistle?
[02:58.660 --> 03:03.220]  As a government employee, you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
[03:04.620 --> 03:07.300]  It's important to say that, the idea of how to govern ourselves.
[03:07.500 --> 03:18.400]  And for all its faults and foibles, it was a grand experiment that was launched in the late 18th century in this country after a violent revolution and against the British Crown.
[03:20.420 --> 03:23.360]  And that oath is simply to support and defend it.
[03:23.480 --> 03:24.960]  It's not an oath to secrecy.
[03:25.140 --> 03:27.360]  It's not an oath to the President.
[03:27.600 --> 03:28.700]  It's not an oath to NSA.
[03:31.660 --> 03:33.200]  It's an oath to the Constitution.
[03:34.580 --> 03:58.300]  And 9-11 was a trigger event that led the government at the highest levels, up to it including former Vice President Cheney and President Bush, to approve a number of different programs, some of which we still do not know the full extent of in spite of the Snowden disclosures.
[03:59.320 --> 04:23.700]  And much to my horror, having grown up in the 1970s as a very young teenager, witnessing the resignation of a President from his office, Watergate, that's when I was first introduced to civil liberties and civic studies and the history of the Pentagon Papers,
[04:24.040 --> 04:27.540]  the bright and shining lie called Vietnam, Ellsberg facing trial.
[04:29.500 --> 04:32.040]  As the first whistleblower charged on the espionage act.
[04:32.560 --> 04:37.640]  And also finding out that no one was above the law, no one was above the Constitution, even the President said so.
[04:38.720 --> 04:45.840]  And the horrors of what was possible, I was now confronted by in secret.
[04:46.060 --> 05:04.960]  Because right after 9-11, word went out from the White House that the National Security Agency had been given presidential authorization to turn the United States' America into the equivalent of a foreign nation into the equivalent of a foreign nation for the purposes of dragnet electronic surveillance on an extraordinary scale.
[05:05.480 --> 05:09.420]  It didn't matter what had happened in the 70s.
[05:10.260 --> 05:13.460]  It didn't matter that there was a law called the Constitution.
[05:13.760 --> 05:16.400]  It didn't matter that if you want to change the law, you go to Congress.
[05:16.860 --> 05:18.040]  None of that mattered.
[05:18.400 --> 05:25.220]  This was raw executive power taking control of the government from inside out.
[05:25.920 --> 05:29.300]  And no one knew about it, except for a small handful.
[05:30.560 --> 05:40.400]  The surveillance programs that were launched after 9-11 are still considered secret by the U.S. government.
[05:42.500 --> 05:54.380]  And those surveillance programs were designed specifically to collect as much information as possible, no matter what its source.
[05:55.960 --> 06:05.240]  And I was confronted by the dark abyss of the Pandora's box opened up, staring into the past and now the future.
[06:05.420 --> 06:09.000]  And I knew that these decisions would have enormous consequences.
[06:09.200 --> 06:21.660]  You could not unleash a military intelligence agency that was signed by the stroke of a pen in the deepest of secrecy in 1952, not created by any congressional legislation.
[06:22.480 --> 06:24.520]  Headed by a military general.
[06:25.520 --> 06:25.800]  Headed by a military general.
[06:25.800 --> 06:29.460]  Reporting directly in terms of the chain of command to the president as commander-in-chief.
[06:30.180 --> 06:37.000]  And take all that power and turn it on its own country without something giving.
[06:38.820 --> 06:59.560]  And I knew that if I remained silent in those first few weeks after 9-11, when I discovered all this, that I would be complicit in a crime and I could not remain silent when my own government was now a criminal enterprise subverting the Constitution of the United States.
[07:00.620 --> 07:05.080]  And so, I made a choice within the system over a number of years.
[07:06.040 --> 07:17.060]  Some have questioned me, and having continued to remain within the system all those years, to fight them with everything I knew that was available to me in terms of bringing this to light.
[07:17.060 --> 07:24.100]  And it turned out that that was a long and arduous story, which we will probably get into a little bit.
[07:26.540 --> 07:38.780]  But here I was facing the reality, the stark reality, that our own government had... the wheels had come off our own government.
[07:38.920 --> 07:45.120]  And not only were we... had the wheels come off, we were in an entirely different vehicle, an anathema form of government.
[07:45.720 --> 07:54.140]  And as I've told Ellsberg and others, what I was confronted by was the United States was operating under emergency decree, the equivalent of martial law.
[07:54.760 --> 07:57.860]  I'm going to use really strong language during this hour here.
[07:57.880 --> 07:58.540]  I really am.
[07:58.580 --> 08:01.980]  Because I'm afraid that most people still don't get it.
[08:02.120 --> 08:02.840]  I really am.
[08:03.420 --> 08:11.780]  And it's not just the government, but it's also a huge sector of American corporate environment and the corporate economy.
[08:12.700 --> 08:20.640]  We're going to talk about that because there's... our very... our very sovereignty is not just as a nation, but as individuals is at stake.
[08:22.060 --> 08:33.940]  And I don't want... I don't want society becoming like Winston in 1984, where the only place that Winston had any kind of security, to say it that way, was in the corner.
[08:35.140 --> 08:41.740]  Outside the... the constant gaze of the video cameras, which meant they knew where he was.
[08:43.680 --> 08:44.840]  And I've lived this.
[08:44.960 --> 08:52.760]  I've lived this in a way, and I was able to come through it, and I'm sitting in front of you, all the hundreds of you out there, as a free human being.
[08:52.760 --> 08:55.260]  I can't begin to tell you what it means to be free.
[08:55.420 --> 09:05.560]  When the government spent many, many years doing everything it could to take away the very heart of what it means to be a sovereign human being, and put me in prison for as long as they could.
[09:06.120 --> 09:08.140]  What it means to actually be free.
[09:10.200 --> 09:12.740]  You really begin to focus on what matters in life.
[09:12.740 --> 09:17.680]  And so I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people that try to apologize for this.
[09:17.800 --> 09:21.760]  I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for people who try to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
[09:22.060 --> 09:31.420]  It's important to note that after 9-11, we are essentially put under emergency law by the executive, and there was no constitution.
[09:32.540 --> 09:37.800]  So you documented in your case the surveillance date up to that point.
[09:39.020 --> 09:44.380]  If we had really paid attention to what you were saying, we might not be where we are now.
[09:44.840 --> 09:46.280]  The surveillance date is already here.
[09:46.860 --> 10:02.080]  Well, see, the kicker is, I went to everybody that Justin Radak said earlier, I went to every channel that existed, including serving as a material witness over a period of months during 2002, including a joint inquiry, giving prima facie evidence of the surveillance programs,
[10:02.320 --> 10:11.960]  particularly Stellar Wind, the failure of 9-11, as well as a cover-up, and the massive fraud, waste, and abuse, billions and billions being spent in the name of security.
[10:12.900 --> 10:18.480]  And it's important to note that my moment of truth was actually the first week in October of 2001.
[10:18.480 --> 10:20.620]  Now, this is barely three weeks after 9-11.
[10:20.900 --> 10:23.780]  I confronted the lead attorney at NSA.
[10:23.780 --> 10:29.240]  He actually showed up in the recent Frontline documentary called The United States of Secrets.
[10:29.780 --> 10:32.300]  And he said, you don't understand, Mr. Drake.
[10:32.540 --> 10:39.140]  This is after he acknowledged that the White House had approved what they called The Program, the President's Surveillance Program.
[10:39.280 --> 10:40.800]  It was always called The Program.
[10:41.600 --> 10:42.280]  He said, you don't understand.
[10:42.280 --> 10:43.120]  We just need the data.
[10:44.140 --> 10:45.780]  We just need the data.
[10:46.840 --> 11:02.860]  And see, when he said that, I was thrown back to a period in my other life, my other day job, when I was a crypto-linguist flying an RC-135 during the Cold War in the European theater.
[11:03.340 --> 11:06.480]  And what country did I become an expert in?
[11:06.540 --> 11:11.720]  What country did I spend many, many years listening in on their communications?
[11:12.060 --> 11:12.600]  East Germany.
[11:15.140 --> 11:25.600]  A very surreal moment, because now I'm realizing that on a far vast scale that my own government is now deciding that, in the interests of national security, we're just going to collect that all.
[11:25.840 --> 11:29.180]  We need to know everything there is to know about anybody, at any time, anywhere.
[11:29.560 --> 11:31.240]  And we have the platform to do it.
[11:31.560 --> 11:32.720]  That's what's called Internet.
[11:33.560 --> 11:34.600]  And all the telephone.
[11:34.880 --> 11:36.120]  All the telephone systems.
[11:37.560 --> 11:41.380]  To what end is the security surveillance state?
[11:42.040 --> 11:43.840]  It's ultimately about social control.
[11:44.780 --> 11:52.640]  Let no one be naive to believe that somehow there's a morality in collecting all this information and it won't be used for other purposes.
[11:53.100 --> 11:54.920]  And that's precisely what the government is doing.
[11:55.400 --> 12:04.840]  And if anyone stands up to the power structure like a hacktivist or a whistleblower, they don't just indict you, they try to destroy you.
[12:05.560 --> 12:07.180]  This is what they try to do to you.
[12:08.560 --> 12:09.080]  Yeah.
[12:11.040 --> 12:13.020]  What does it mean to have your life destroyed?
[12:13.780 --> 12:13.980]  Okay.
[12:14.540 --> 12:24.400]  Just imagine each of you as sovereign human beings coming under the purview of the government as a person of interest and then becoming a target of the government.
[12:24.940 --> 12:27.740]  The government has decided you're an enemy of the state.
[12:28.860 --> 12:37.580]  And imagine that they have the highest power microscope, a digital microscope, and they spend four years drilling down into your life.
[12:38.220 --> 12:39.840]  Everything there is to know about you.
[12:39.980 --> 12:41.240]  What will they find out?
[12:41.520 --> 12:43.200]  And how could they use it against you?
[12:43.420 --> 12:45.680]  How could they manipulate facts?
[12:45.860 --> 12:47.580]  I'd say facts about your life.
[12:48.380 --> 12:49.840]  Especially when they want to punish you.
[12:50.020 --> 12:51.940]  Especially when they want to put you away.
[12:53.380 --> 13:04.120]  See, I faced a certain reality when the original chief prosecutor came to me in April 2008 before I actually resigned from NSA.
[13:05.140 --> 13:12.220]  And he said, Mr. Drake, how would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison unless you cooperate with our investigation?
[13:13.300 --> 13:18.680]  This is how far the government was willing to go to protect national secrets.
[13:19.720 --> 13:23.280]  There was no way they were going to let someone like me and others.
[13:23.540 --> 13:25.580]  But at that time, I was the target.
[13:26.200 --> 13:37.240]  The target of their multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation in terms of who had leaked information about the Stellar Wind Program to the New York Times.
[13:37.240 --> 13:38.620]  James Rice and Eric Lichtblow.
[13:40.060 --> 13:42.320]  And they were hell-bent to punish somebody.
[13:42.480 --> 13:48.940]  I found out from very deep sources within the government that Cheney had issued a direct edict.
[13:49.400 --> 13:51.360]  Find and fry the perpetrators.
[13:51.500 --> 13:52.980]  I don't care who they are.
[13:53.220 --> 13:54.780]  Make an object lesson of them.
[13:54.960 --> 13:55.380]  Burn them.
[13:56.660 --> 14:07.220]  And so, when you're on the receiving end of the government, with all the powers they have in terms of surveillance, and the FBI, they can make life extraordinarily difficult.
[14:07.460 --> 14:10.940]  And so, I was made a person of interest in 2006.
[14:11.620 --> 14:15.920]  And I experienced severe electronic surveillance and physical surveillance.
[14:16.260 --> 14:25.540]  I ultimately had FBI agents tailing me no matter where I went just to make sure they kept track of me.
[14:28.120 --> 14:29.320]  What can I tell you?
[14:29.320 --> 14:30.400]  I mean, it's...
[14:31.200 --> 14:34.100]  I don't think... and I keep talking about this in public.
[14:34.360 --> 14:39.720]  And every time I tell the story, people start to appreciate what it's like if the government decides to destroy you.
[14:41.840 --> 14:43.540]  It's not... it's not...
[14:44.300 --> 14:46.640]  Look, I listen in on the East German state.
[14:46.840 --> 14:57.500]  I was very familiar with the Stasi and the police state, and what they did to isolate and fragment people's lives.
[14:57.500 --> 14:57.900]  Okay?
[14:58.140 --> 15:00.220]  Listening in on the lives of others, literally.
[15:00.620 --> 15:04.880]  Where they had the entire telephone system designed for surveillance.
[15:05.960 --> 15:08.060]  That's precisely what's happened in this country.
[15:08.940 --> 15:16.280]  I have another clip, which is three hacktivists that were targeted, and they've tried to destroy them as well.
[15:16.560 --> 15:23.600]  And I think that we'll go back and forth between your story and the story of the hacktivists, because I think we've found a lot of analogous situations.
[15:23.600 --> 15:25.540]  Look, you don't speak truth to power.
[15:26.780 --> 15:31.340]  You know, you don't poke the bear in the eye with a stick, right?
[15:33.000 --> 15:38.180]  You don't hold up a mirror and expose government criminality, okay?
[15:38.340 --> 15:41.760]  Government criminality, without them reacting to it.
[15:43.660 --> 15:56.160]  And so, yeah, I found myself behind several eight balls in 2008, and it took them a couple years, and it was the Obama administration, to figure out how to charge me under the Espionage Act.
[15:57.140 --> 15:57.540]  Meh.
[16:07.700 --> 16:08.340]  Anonymous.
[16:08.640 --> 16:09.540]  Cyber attacks.
[16:09.920 --> 16:10.960]  A new kind of warfare.
[16:11.120 --> 16:12.100]  Hackers and activists.
[16:12.320 --> 16:13.120]  Security leaks.
[16:13.300 --> 16:14.120]  Computer hackers.
[16:14.320 --> 16:14.660]  Hackers.
[16:14.760 --> 16:15.300]  Hacktivists.
[16:22.180 --> 16:24.420]  Anonymous has struck again with a warning.
[16:24.660 --> 16:25.860]  This is just the beginning.
[16:26.120 --> 16:30.560]  Anonymous is a collective known for recent attacks on government and corporate websites.
[16:30.560 --> 16:39.920]  The Internet is a powerful new medium where just a handful of people in small groups, just by shifting data around in the right directions, can make big changes and big damage.
[16:40.180 --> 16:42.320]  The more you said, the more frightening it was.
[16:42.580 --> 16:42.600]  I know.
[16:42.600 --> 16:48.420]  The Pentagon is now singling out Anonymous as an example of the serious new cyber threats facing the country.
[16:48.600 --> 16:51.140]  The fundamental unit here is information warfare.
[16:51.420 --> 16:58.340]  We're gaining back the freedoms that the forefathers assured us through technology, and we can't allow these freedoms to be taken away.
[16:58.500 --> 17:02.480]  I will put my body on the altar of liberty again and again and again.
[17:10.910 --> 17:12.630]  Information is the weapon.
[17:12.870 --> 17:18.850]  And information properly understood and properly used in an honest way is more effective than anything else in the world.
[17:26.050 --> 17:28.750]  If you've got your eye on Boeing, yeah, please go for it.
[17:28.830 --> 17:30.050]  I'd like to see those f*ckers go down.
[17:30.190 --> 17:33.430]  Download the code, modify the code just a bit, bombard the Pentagon.
[17:33.630 --> 17:35.610]  You're either with us or you're against us.
[17:46.860 --> 17:53.660]  So the Obama administration and the DOJ has gone after whistleblowers and hacktivists with phenomenal vengeance.
[17:54.720 --> 17:59.920]  We're not going to talk too much about Barrett Brown because there was a panel earlier and there will be another one tomorrow.
[17:59.920 --> 18:04.960]  So we're going to focus a little bit more on both Weave and Hammond.
[18:05.600 --> 18:16.980]  But in general, the whistleblower and the hacktivists, the hacktivists from the outside, the whistleblower from the inside, they share many traits and can you expand on that?
[18:19.020 --> 18:23.320]  Look, there was information that I had access to when I was in the government.
[18:24.260 --> 18:40.700]  And it was crystal clear that what I discovered in terms of government criminality, massive fraud, waste and abuse, threats literally to public safety deserve to be free and made available to the public so they could be informed.
[18:41.980 --> 18:47.780]  And though the first few years I went through government channels, I ultimately did make a fateful decision.
[18:48.600 --> 18:53.660]  In very early 2006, I went to a Baltimore Sun reporter with what I knew.
[18:54.780 --> 19:09.060]  But I knew that by going to this reporter, particularly with this leak investigation going on, that I would not only jeopardize my job, but I could find myself on a really short end of a stick and being charged with far worse.
[19:09.240 --> 19:10.140]  I actually knew that.
[19:10.780 --> 19:13.600]  And yet, it was not about me.
[19:13.600 --> 19:17.980]  It was about what was in the greater interest for the public and what was at stake.
[19:18.520 --> 19:20.580]  And so, that was a choice I made.
[19:20.700 --> 19:21.440]  I mean, that was...
[19:21.440 --> 19:23.700]  You know, we all have moral agency.
[19:23.700 --> 19:26.180]  And I chose to exercise that moral agency.
[19:27.000 --> 19:32.860]  One of the mottos that I continue to live by is you question everything, but especially authority.
[19:32.860 --> 19:40.600]  There's this weird thing now, this pathological transformation of government of, for, and by the people into simply, we're the authority.
[19:40.840 --> 19:49.460]  And because we're the authority, and we have the power, you dare question us, we're going to make sure you remain silent.
[19:49.460 --> 19:54.860]  Or we're going to make it so difficult that we're going to send the most chilling message to anybody else who would dare question us.
[19:54.920 --> 19:56.880]  And that's precisely what's happening in this country.
[19:57.100 --> 20:01.960]  And these are strategic decisions that the government is making in all of these cases.
[20:01.960 --> 20:04.980]  They want to set an example for others.
[20:05.220 --> 20:08.000]  They also want to control the narrative.
[20:08.520 --> 20:11.420]  And whistleblowers and hacktivists are...
[20:11.960 --> 20:13.920]  The narrative escapes from them.
[20:14.020 --> 20:14.780]  They can't control.
[20:15.140 --> 20:23.380]  And also, the courageous ones, the truth-tellers, whether they're hacktivists or whistleblowers, you're willing to go to prison.
[20:23.740 --> 20:26.180]  That's very rare.
[20:26.940 --> 20:32.940]  And it really breaks down the whole security system.
[20:33.500 --> 20:35.200]  Because that's a sea change.
[20:35.400 --> 20:38.520]  People don't want to go to prison.
[20:38.740 --> 20:41.620]  They're just human, and they want to live their lives with their families.
[20:41.920 --> 20:48.500]  But you, and the hacktivists, and the ones in my film, all say, well, we knew we were going to prison.
[20:48.500 --> 20:50.940]  So what do you do with people like that?
[20:51.060 --> 21:03.460]  People who are willing to stand up for what they believe in, people who believe in the Constitution, the real patriots or the people in this film and yourself, against the security surveillance state.
[21:03.580 --> 21:06.240]  What does a state do with you?
[21:06.520 --> 21:08.080]  Well, we've seen what they do.
[21:11.040 --> 21:18.360]  Look, you don't do what Edward Snowden did, you don't do what Jeremy did, you don't do what Weave did, you don't do what Barrett Brown did, right?
[21:18.520 --> 21:25.100]  Especially in this climate, you don't do what I did, or Bill Binney and others, without the government saying, you know what, you're a direct threat.
[21:25.660 --> 21:27.180]  Because you're not playing by the rules.
[21:28.180 --> 21:31.100]  See, but these rules don't mean anything to the government.
[21:32.340 --> 21:34.700]  I am a prime example.
[21:35.000 --> 21:44.320]  I was actually considered to be the example the government was going to establish, and prop me out on the public comment and say, this is what happens when you question us.
[21:44.420 --> 21:48.420]  This is what happens when you decide to expose information to the public interest.
[21:48.700 --> 21:52.220]  This is what happens, because you betrayed the system.
[21:53.080 --> 21:54.920]  You betrayed the system.
[21:56.520 --> 22:08.500]  And those who dare dissent in that manner, those who dare raise their voices against authority, are the most dangerous kind in this kind of regime.
[22:10.780 --> 22:16.300]  And so, not just the government, but even corporations in partnership or in bed with the government.
[22:16.580 --> 22:20.040]  See, I gave a speech, if anybody wants, you can do a search on it.
[22:20.040 --> 22:33.680]  It was at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, not long after I had pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized use of a computer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
[22:33.760 --> 22:38.540]  I was invited to give a talk, and I took on both the government as well as the corporations.
[22:38.760 --> 22:40.580]  And I know people are made very uncomfortable.
[22:41.240 --> 22:45.720]  Because, see, all of this in the information economy is being used against us.
[22:45.720 --> 22:52.660]  All these services, right, is data of who you are is very valuable.
[22:52.920 --> 22:53.960]  And the more the better.
[22:54.800 --> 23:00.220]  And so, you have not just the government surveilling, but you have the corporations that are surveilling you as well.
[23:00.380 --> 23:02.480]  And then selling services back to you.
[23:02.660 --> 23:06.140]  And then they're giving back doors on an extraordinary scale.
[23:06.340 --> 23:08.760]  A scale, it's still not fully revealed.
[23:08.760 --> 23:09.860]  I keep saying that.
[23:09.860 --> 23:13.780]  I'm hoping there's more disclosures in what's come out from Edward Snowden.
[23:13.960 --> 23:16.260]  How far this regime has gone.
[23:16.600 --> 23:20.240]  Fully penetrating the entire infrastructure of our modern society.
[23:20.460 --> 23:23.780]  On a scale the world and history has never seen before.
[23:24.360 --> 23:26.020]  But see, this is all in the background.
[23:26.200 --> 23:27.280]  This is all embedded.
[23:27.980 --> 23:31.460]  And, you know, we're lulled into this matrix mentality, right?
[23:31.460 --> 23:33.960]  That somehow we can protect ourselves.
[23:34.720 --> 23:35.080]  Really.
[23:35.960 --> 23:39.500]  For those of you, especially in this audience, right?
[23:40.500 --> 23:41.800]  You know, deep packet inspection.
[23:41.960 --> 23:43.080]  I'll just throw that out there.
[23:43.180 --> 23:47.680]  When you actually build in surveillance by design, it makes it extraordinarily difficult.
[23:48.140 --> 23:51.140]  That's why anonymization becomes even more important in this space.
[23:51.380 --> 23:57.840]  Now you're sort of in this, you know, who can out-anonymize the other in a cat-and-mouse game and all those.
[23:57.840 --> 24:01.820]  I spend many, many hours helping people, critical people.
[24:02.400 --> 24:04.800]  People that are defending people like myself and others.
[24:05.000 --> 24:06.140]  Completely pro bono.
[24:06.340 --> 24:10.020]  Setting them up with systems that at least have some reasonable expectation.
[24:10.340 --> 24:15.820]  That they can communicate in a way that maybe the government will know exactly what they're saying at the time they say it.
[24:16.060 --> 24:17.280]  With no guarantees.
[24:18.080 --> 24:22.680]  I want to show a clip from a case that I think everyone in this room is familiar with.
[24:24.220 --> 24:26.260]  And Thomas and I spoke about it.
[24:26.260 --> 24:27.920]  We were actually with him last night.
[24:29.140 --> 24:30.740]  It's not scary to be going to prison?
[24:31.660 --> 24:33.500]  No, it never was scary to be going to prison.
[24:33.680 --> 24:36.300]  There's all these cool people and I'm learning all these cool things.
[24:36.580 --> 24:41.980]  And, you know, I'm making lifelong future friends and, you know, it's a future business partner, certainly.
[24:54.450 --> 24:55.230]  Embarrassing people.
[24:55.410 --> 24:56.270]  I enjoy it.
[24:56.330 --> 24:57.570]  It's viscerally fun.
[24:57.690 --> 24:58.590]  He's an instigator.
[24:58.730 --> 25:00.650]  The most lovable little pest on the Internet.
[25:00.650 --> 25:04.570]  His ability to make other people so angry is the talent that he has.
[25:04.670 --> 25:10.270]  Little Weave is going to troll the f*ck out of Apple at AT&T.
[25:17.980 --> 25:21.880]  How do I plan on keeping my cornbread safe in prison?
[25:23.260 --> 25:30.280]  I will stab a nigger that dares reach across my plate.
[25:35.680 --> 25:39.960]  I am the Bruce Lee of RegXP.
[25:40.800 --> 25:42.320]  I didn't get caught.
[25:42.640 --> 25:44.660]  I put my name on what I did.
[25:44.940 --> 25:48.020]  I'm not here to play nice with AT&T.
[25:48.020 --> 25:49.660]  I'm here to comment and criticize.
[25:49.660 --> 25:54.500]  There was a URL on an AT&T web server with a number at the end.
[25:54.680 --> 26:04.500]  And if you had added one to this number, like you could have typed it in the iPad web browser over and over again, you would see the next iPad 3G user email address.
[26:16.820 --> 26:25.000]  So we was convicted to 41 months, the top of the guidelines, CFAA violations for adding one to a number.
[26:25.640 --> 26:26.940]  What do you think, Thomas?
[26:31.530 --> 26:32.910]  Pretty ridiculous, isn't it?
[26:33.510 --> 26:33.750]  Yeah.
[26:35.030 --> 26:38.430]  You know, it's funny seeing this again because... and then it's not so funny.
[26:38.590 --> 26:42.510]  I used to be in the software development and coding arena.
[26:42.730 --> 26:45.350]  I was a certified software test engineer for a number of years.
[26:45.710 --> 26:49.550]  I've analyzed hundreds of millions of lines of code back in my day.
[26:50.450 --> 26:56.410]  And we used to look for hidden channels, covert channels, back doors.
[26:58.110 --> 27:01.770]  You know, this... this is... this is the space of... of the digital age.
[27:01.970 --> 27:02.490]  And why?
[27:03.270 --> 27:05.990]  Because we're increasingly reliant on these very systems.
[27:06.250 --> 27:08.310]  And, you know, I...
[27:09.230 --> 27:20.370]  What... what does it mean when the government is actually... has a state-sponsored program to ensure that the electronic infrastructure society is as... is weak and as insecure as possible?
[27:20.910 --> 27:21.890]  What does it tell you?
[27:23.950 --> 27:26.270]  Now the government is actually the enemy, isn't it?
[27:26.770 --> 27:26.870]  Yeah.
[27:27.850 --> 27:30.310]  Well, they turned me into an enemy of the state.
[27:30.450 --> 27:31.930]  It was all power projection.
[27:32.810 --> 27:32.890]  Right?
[27:33.350 --> 27:33.890]  And so...
[27:33.890 --> 27:37.950]  Your crimes were similar because we basically embarrassed AT&T.
[27:38.710 --> 27:42.670]  And in the end, you didn't have any classified information that you revealed.
[27:42.670 --> 27:45.170]  But you certainly embarrassed the NSA.
[27:46.910 --> 27:46.990]  Yeah.
[27:47.150 --> 27:51.370]  And it's really interesting psychologically when you make an institution look bad.
[27:53.010 --> 27:56.330]  So, you know, just to save their face, they're gonna spite you.
[27:57.470 --> 27:59.330]  And that's precisely what happened to me.
[28:00.010 --> 28:00.870]  I mean, I...
[28:00.870 --> 28:01.930]  Remember, Ed's...
[28:02.910 --> 28:06.250]  You don't spend a lifetime as I did in various capacities.
[28:06.750 --> 28:08.310]  Military in the Cold War.
[28:08.530 --> 28:11.170]  As a contractor, I did a lot of consulting in Silicon Valley.
[28:11.170 --> 28:12.310]  I mean, it's funny.
[28:12.390 --> 28:16.150]  I remember when I was a virtual member of the Chaos Computer Club in the 1980s.
[28:16.270 --> 28:18.890]  Those were really innocent days now when I look back on them.
[28:19.010 --> 28:21.070]  There wasn't all these dark shadows about what could be.
[28:21.550 --> 28:22.010]  It was...
[28:22.010 --> 28:22.550]  It was...
[28:22.550 --> 28:23.730]  You had this...
[28:23.730 --> 28:27.570]  The ethics of anything you discovered or found, you would share.
[28:27.730 --> 28:28.990]  And it was really cool.
[28:29.110 --> 28:29.870]  And you had clubs.
[28:29.890 --> 28:30.690]  And you got together.
[28:30.790 --> 28:31.590]  And you had dinners.
[28:31.850 --> 28:33.570]  And families chatted.
[28:33.770 --> 28:35.990]  And you did all kinds of things like that together.
[28:36.210 --> 28:37.670]  And it was all this new technology.
[28:37.850 --> 28:39.590]  My first computer was an Atari 800.
[28:39.590 --> 28:53.750]  It was really, really a moment when I was being severely interrogated by the FBI willingly in my house in November of 2007 when they showed up with a dozen FBI agents that were armed.
[28:54.130 --> 28:55.790]  And they tossed my house.
[28:55.990 --> 28:59.210]  And one of the technicians was coming up from this...
[28:59.210 --> 29:03.230]  I have all kinds of, you know, legacy equipment.
[29:03.470 --> 29:03.630]  Okay?
[29:15.900 --> 29:16.780]  So, I...
[29:16.780 --> 29:24.580]  It was really funny because I'm seeing like, you know, 300 bought acoustic modems, you know, being confiscated by the FBI.
[29:24.620 --> 29:26.540]  And I had this highly modified.
[29:26.540 --> 29:27.920]  I used to be...
[29:27.920 --> 29:33.180]  You know, I'm gonna like reveal myself here and come out of the, you know, hacker closet in part.
[29:33.180 --> 29:33.660]  Okay.
[29:34.960 --> 29:35.320]  Um...
[29:35.320 --> 29:36.580]  I used to do hardware hacking.
[29:36.780 --> 29:37.800]  I mean, that was a big deal.
[29:38.000 --> 29:41.900]  You know, I remember sitting around a kitchen table with a friend, so we had the word down to our last EEPROM, right?
[29:41.900 --> 29:47.660]  And if we didn't burn it correctly, you know, we'd fry our Atari 810 disk drive, right?
[29:48.300 --> 29:50.780]  All of 90K that it was at the time, right?
[29:51.560 --> 29:55.760]  So, he's coming up the stairs with one of my highly modified Atari 8-bit computers.
[29:55.760 --> 29:59.100]  And I looked at him, I said, do you really need that?
[30:00.060 --> 30:01.980]  It was like a museum piece, right?
[30:02.060 --> 30:03.020]  It was like a one-off.
[30:03.120 --> 30:04.540]  There weren't many of these around.
[30:05.360 --> 30:11.300]  And I said, you know, that was an operating system designed in 1978 and 79, 10K operating system.
[30:11.360 --> 30:14.800]  It hasn't been modified for, you know, like 30 years, right?
[30:15.480 --> 30:16.940]  You really need that?
[30:17.640 --> 30:19.120]  And he said, no, I guess not.
[30:19.360 --> 30:21.720]  And he actually went back down the stairs and put it on the shelf.
[30:27.950 --> 30:28.350]  Yeah.
[30:28.350 --> 30:28.450]  Yeah.
[30:29.550 --> 30:31.550]  We always knew you were a hacker, Tom.
[30:31.750 --> 30:31.930]  Yeah.
[30:32.570 --> 30:33.510]  At heart, yes.
[30:35.430 --> 30:35.950]  Yeah.
[30:37.610 --> 30:41.190]  I want to show one more clip, but it's the...
[30:41.190 --> 30:41.610]  Sorry.
[30:46.620 --> 30:47.520]  Wait, sorry.
[30:47.920 --> 30:48.500]  I get nervous.
[30:49.840 --> 30:52.340]  Whenever Drake's next to me...
[31:01.630 --> 31:03.890]  Just know that information is power.
[31:04.810 --> 31:09.110]  If they hold it on you, like they did with me, you know, I would...
[31:09.110 --> 31:09.470]  I...
[31:09.470 --> 31:10.990]  Just so you know, they manipulated information.
[31:10.990 --> 31:12.510]  I said I was data-framed, literally.
[31:13.230 --> 31:16.690]  They had evidence that I...
[31:16.690 --> 31:19.610]  That they claimed was extremely sensitive information.
[31:19.610 --> 31:21.050]  It was very top secret.
[31:21.290 --> 31:24.810]  And that this gravely damaged the national security of the United States.
[31:24.810 --> 31:25.770]  Wow.
[31:25.970 --> 31:30.690]  And I knew during my pretrial criminal proceedings, they had doctored it.
[31:30.890 --> 31:32.130]  They had doctored the evidence.
[31:33.210 --> 31:39.070]  Literally modified the header information on the document to make it look like it was classified when it wasn't.
[31:39.630 --> 31:40.870]  That's how far they went.
[31:40.870 --> 31:40.990]  So...
[31:40.990 --> 31:47.590]  And then when they declassified something, and they said that you should have known that it was actually classified.
[31:47.930 --> 31:48.150]  Yeah.
[31:48.270 --> 31:49.310]  I mean, this is Kafkaesque.
[31:49.570 --> 31:50.110]  I mean, that's...
[31:50.110 --> 31:50.250]  Right.
[31:50.370 --> 31:52.830]  I should have known that it was classified even when it wasn't.
[31:52.930 --> 31:56.430]  Even though they actually had an affidavit from their own people that it was actually unclassified.
[31:57.070 --> 32:07.410]  Can you tell us the infinitely quotable, I do not plea bargain with the truth, when that came about, when you said that, when they offered you a deal?
[32:07.570 --> 32:08.230]  Well, I was...
[32:08.230 --> 32:09.390]  They offered many, many deals.
[32:09.610 --> 32:10.470]  So I'll just...
[32:10.470 --> 32:13.190]  I was sharing this with Vivian just last night over dinner.
[32:15.810 --> 32:27.030]  And when I was originally confronted as a person of interest and now a target of a criminal investigation, the chief prosecutor said, threatened me with spending the rest of my life in prison.
[32:27.190 --> 32:32.050]  And if I actually pled out in 2008 that maybe it would be 35 years or less.
[32:32.510 --> 32:32.890]  Maybe.
[32:34.390 --> 32:35.650]  That's a pretty good deal, right?
[32:38.690 --> 32:44.490]  A year later, in May of 2009, I was at a conference in Arizona and I get...
[32:44.490 --> 32:50.030]  I had a private attorney who I was spending tens of thousands of dollars on to defend me against the government.
[32:50.610 --> 33:01.850]  So this is a year later and he said, there's another plea framework, no guarantees, but it looks like they're gonna come down from, you know, 25, 35 years to maybe 15 to 17.
[33:02.490 --> 33:03.710]  Much better deal, right?
[33:04.310 --> 33:11.010]  And I kept saying, I kept saying, if you have the evidence to convict me before a jury of my...
[33:11.010 --> 33:12.810]  then bring the charges on.
[33:12.930 --> 33:13.650]  Just bring them on.
[33:14.910 --> 33:17.770]  I was not gonna plead out to something I didn't do.
[33:17.770 --> 33:21.970]  And I literally told the original chief prosecutor I would not plea bargain with the truth.
[33:22.270 --> 33:24.810]  But I didn't know that it wasn't...
[33:24.810 --> 33:27.830]  It was no certainty in my case that the truth was gonna matter with them.
[33:27.930 --> 33:28.490]  Because it didn't.
[33:28.610 --> 33:30.190]  It's only what they could get away with.
[33:30.970 --> 33:37.190]  So then we get to the 2010 when I was secretly charged.
[33:37.430 --> 33:42.830]  Now, it's important for you to know just how much resources the government put into my case.
[33:43.690 --> 33:54.030]  I was asked... I was actually in New York City, clearing my head, attempting to do so, in April of 2008.
[33:54.170 --> 34:00.250]  And I get a phone call from one of the FBI agents, who was the contact person.
[34:00.450 --> 34:02.890]  This is before I actually had a private attorney.
[34:04.510 --> 34:07.370]  And she said, we need you to come back down to one of our facilities.
[34:07.550 --> 34:14.150]  Well, this is one of those sensitive compartmented information facilities that Jesselyn Radak mentioned in her talk.
[34:15.010 --> 34:17.170]  And it's in the greater Washington DC area.
[34:17.170 --> 34:18.330]  And it's a black room.
[34:18.510 --> 34:19.570]  There are no...
[34:19.570 --> 34:21.270]  It's got one door that comes in and out.
[34:21.270 --> 34:23.170]  And I'm walking in.
[34:23.370 --> 34:24.250]  And guess what I'm noticing?
[34:24.670 --> 34:27.210]  I'm seeing agents' cubicles.
[34:27.410 --> 34:31.910]  And they actually have a label, one of those little name tags.
[34:32.070 --> 34:33.270]  And it says mole hunter.
[34:34.570 --> 34:35.690]  They actually...
[34:35.690 --> 34:38.670]  The mole hunter unit is actually well known within the FBI.
[34:38.950 --> 34:42.950]  But this is the unit that doesn't go after truth tellers and whistle blowers or hacktivists.
[34:43.030 --> 34:45.370]  This is the one ostensibly is trained to go after real spies.
[34:46.970 --> 34:50.990]  That's how egregious they considered me.
[34:50.990 --> 34:55.270]  This is how far they had painted me into the black shadows.
[34:55.570 --> 35:01.750]  They were seeking key elements, lead FBI agents from this mole hunter unit.
[35:02.350 --> 35:05.630]  It reminds me of Spy Hunter, one of the old classic games.
[35:06.850 --> 35:08.550]  And I was hunted.
[35:09.690 --> 35:10.830]  You know, it's sort of weird.
[35:11.030 --> 35:12.950]  I mean, having played a lot of the classic games...
[35:12.950 --> 35:15.530]  Remember, that was the other nice thing about all the golden era of computing.
[35:15.950 --> 35:20.770]  There was a lot of extraordinarily cool games to play when you weren't coding and hacking and doing other things, right?
[35:22.590 --> 35:25.470]  I want to bring this fellow into the conversation.
[35:51.440 --> 35:58.400]  Infamous anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond number one on the FBI cyber crime list pled guilty to Christmas hacking spree.
[35:59.960 --> 36:01.360]  For 10 years of a fisherman.
[36:01.360 --> 36:05.540]  For 10 years of a.., Jeremy Hammond category... long term familiar with the Seven Horse House.
[36:06.540 --> 36:08.520]  Known as the electronic Robin Hood?
[36:08.740 --> 36:09.280]  Jeremy Hammond.
[36:09.320 --> 36:13.040]  Computer hacker Jeremy Hammond has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
[36:24.240 --> 36:27.240]  Hammond's actions are acts of civil disobedience.
[36:29.780 --> 36:30.320]  Fundamentally.
[36:35.600 --> 36:37.160]  Could you elaborate on that?
[36:39.480 --> 36:44.700]  Look, I'm going to say something that's really serious about this because this reminds me in terms of what Jeremy Hammond did.
[36:44.820 --> 37:02.180]  It was an extraordinary service to actually hack the Stratfor emails and for Project PM because one of the things I discovered at NSA during... is this surveillance state regime metastasized and became a cancer on the body politic, a cancer on the Constitution.
[37:04.320 --> 37:09.980]  NSA had extraordinary deep relationships with traditional IT companies and telcos like AT&T and Verizon.
[37:11.980 --> 37:26.980]  But one of the things that developed is you had these specialized companies, revolving door, that were using information that was collected by the government, secrecy and surveillance apparatus, and then passing it on to their clients to leverage.
[37:27.460 --> 37:28.880]  Remember, information is power.
[37:29.280 --> 37:37.180]  So now you're not... not only do you have a mass surveillance state, but you're now repurposing what ostensibly was, you know, intelligence information.
[37:37.280 --> 37:40.640]  And you're repurposing in the form of economic and industrial espionage.
[37:41.280 --> 37:46.020]  And you're selling secrets to others because it's worth a lot of money.
[37:46.420 --> 37:49.340]  Or you're selling influence or you're buying influence.
[37:50.460 --> 37:52.060]  It's important to know this.
[37:53.660 --> 37:58.700]  And I understand why the government was really ticked at Jeremy.
[37:58.920 --> 38:05.540]  I really understand and appreciate why they would want to hammer him as hard as they could with everything they had in their arsenal.
[38:07.240 --> 38:09.860]  Because he was revealing a state secret.
[38:10.140 --> 38:14.860]  Something that I actually shared with the 9-11 congressional investigators.
[38:15.260 --> 38:37.600]  But see, all of my material evidence in terms of secret surveillance, the industrial espionage, the relationships with a number of U.S.-based corporations and overseas subsidiaries, was all considered so secret as a state secret that it couldn't even end up in the secret report of the 9-11 investigations.
[38:38.240 --> 38:40.760]  It was all censored and suppressed.
[38:41.120 --> 38:59.640]  In fact, for years now, and it's been renewed in the last year, there were people working on my behalf and independently attempting to even locate the thousands of pages of documentation that I actually gave these investigators as well as hours of oral testimony.
[38:59.720 --> 39:03.200]  They cannot find any record of any of this.
[39:03.400 --> 39:06.360]  Apparently, it's all been disappeared in the archives.
[39:07.260 --> 39:10.620]  Sort of the Indiana Jones warehouse, you know?
[39:10.960 --> 39:12.980]  There's an NSA version of it, by the way.
[39:13.080 --> 39:15.160]  That's actually where THINTHREAD ended up, okay?
[39:16.120 --> 39:16.380]  Yeah.
[39:16.680 --> 39:19.400]  It went into the Indiana Jones digital warehouse, never to be seen again.
[39:19.400 --> 39:42.940]  So, it's really important to understand, at the highest levels, when you combine the government with these corporations who are now utilizing the information, or you have, essentially, intelligence companies that specialize in brokering intelligence that is provided to them by the government at the highest levels.
[39:43.340 --> 39:44.660]  What does that do?
[39:45.040 --> 39:47.040]  And what form of government is that?
[39:47.040 --> 39:49.080]  It's certainly not the form of government.
[39:49.240 --> 39:50.680]  I took an oath to support and defend.
[39:51.020 --> 39:59.520]  But now I'm finding out that my own government is a clear and compelling danger to the Constitution.
[39:59.520 --> 40:04.700]  That it is, in fact, a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
[40:05.280 --> 40:06.240]  Not just form.
[40:12.460 --> 40:22.500]  So, when the hackers, hacktivists, and the whistleblowers reveal criminality, and they break a law, what Jeremy did was a violation of the law.
[40:22.680 --> 40:23.260]  It was illegal.
[40:23.620 --> 40:24.840]  But it was right.
[40:27.160 --> 40:45.580]  When our government, our legal system, unchains from principle and what's right, and just latches onto a law to punish, to destroy the lives of people like yourself, and Jeremy, and Barrett Brown.
[40:45.580 --> 40:50.520]  I mean, it's the demise of the rule of law.
[40:50.940 --> 40:52.240]  I mean, we have laws.
[40:52.840 --> 40:54.400]  The Third Reich had laws.
[40:55.680 --> 40:56.100]  But...
[40:56.720 --> 40:58.760]  That means we're no longer citizens with rights.
[40:58.920 --> 41:00.020]  We have no any other rights.
[41:00.080 --> 41:03.820]  There is no right of life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
[41:04.000 --> 41:04.840]  You have no sovereignty.
[41:05.060 --> 41:07.200]  It's only what privilege is given to you by the state.
[41:07.900 --> 41:08.320]  Really.
[41:08.680 --> 41:10.200]  You know, we've been there in history.
[41:10.360 --> 41:11.100]  It's not kind.
[41:11.100 --> 41:15.720]  And yet the power that's available to the government and these corporations is extraordinarily enormous.
[41:16.060 --> 41:21.220]  But that means that, in essence, the government itself has become the outlaw, truth be told.
[41:22.900 --> 41:35.620]  And those who would violate certain laws, or allegedly violate certain laws, and those are the ones that are turned in the criminal, should tell you how far this government has gone.
[41:36.040 --> 41:37.020]  I mean, it really...
[41:37.020 --> 41:39.300]  If you no longer can...
[41:39.300 --> 42:00.660]  Remember, the government is us, but if the government is now acting in its own self-interest, and it's now acting out of its own power, and the pathology of then using that power to hammer you, or those who would question what it's doing, we've gone far down the pike of this dark thread of history.
[42:00.860 --> 42:02.480]  And history is not kind at all.
[42:02.480 --> 42:03.620]  I mean, I was...
[42:03.620 --> 42:15.620]  It was extremely personal for me on a recent trip to Berlin, where I actually visited the Stasi headquarters, as well as their secret prison system, one of them, as well as their archives.
[42:16.060 --> 42:21.300]  Standing there in the archives, seeing umpteen row upon row upon row of files.
[42:21.300 --> 42:22.420]  This incredibly...
[42:23.740 --> 42:24.380]  Sorry.
[42:29.380 --> 42:29.420]  Sorry.
[42:29.760 --> 42:30.360]  Sorry.
[42:30.360 --> 42:32.320]  Just reality reminding us what's at stake here.
[42:34.500 --> 42:36.140]  The voice of truth, yeah.
[42:37.500 --> 42:53.360]  Standing there, seeing all of these records of people, and this incredibly sophisticated file... paper-based system, file-based indexing scheme, to keep track of as many people as possible, and what their affiliation is.
[42:54.500 --> 42:55.580]  They were the protectors.
[42:55.700 --> 42:58.240]  The Stasi were the protectors of the state, and the party.
[43:00.500 --> 43:02.260]  Think about what's happening in this country.
[43:02.440 --> 43:03.360]  Who are they protecting?
[43:05.380 --> 43:06.520]  I mean, I don't want to go back...
[43:06.520 --> 43:07.200]  Who are they protecting?
[43:07.520 --> 43:15.380]  Well, I don't want to go back to the Middle Ages, where, you know, you have all these, you know, moated communities, and the power elites, and everybody else is on the outside with the breadcrumbs.
[43:15.380 --> 43:19.140]  I mean, that's, you know, that's an extraordinary unequal power relationship.
[43:19.140 --> 43:25.160]  And we know what happens in history, in terms of what that means.
[43:25.500 --> 43:27.200]  You know, you become a serf.
[43:27.480 --> 43:31.960]  You know, you become a subject of the state, not a citizen of the state.
[43:33.120 --> 43:37.480]  In that first clip that I showed, there was a lot of media hype around Anonymous.
[43:38.940 --> 43:43.440]  The government, the FBI, has moved online in this new theater.
[43:43.440 --> 43:48.500]  And it's very important that there's hype and fear.
[43:48.800 --> 43:54.320]  And it's the same thing that fuels, you know, don't see something, say something.
[43:54.500 --> 43:55.740]  We have to always be in fear.
[43:55.900 --> 44:03.320]  And now, we have to be in fear of the hackers, because they're going to destroy the world, take down the electronic grid, the power structure.
[44:03.320 --> 44:09.880]  You know, it will be the end of the world if we don't control the Internet, the hackers.
[44:12.100 --> 44:23.640]  It seems like the way they're coming down on hackers is disproportionate to their violations of law.
[44:24.480 --> 44:29.460]  Look, they interviewed a former Stasi officer in an organization I was very familiar with from the Cold War.
[44:30.160 --> 44:34.720]  And they said it's naive to believe that all of this information is being collected on such a vast scale.
[44:34.960 --> 44:38.000]  It's simply being done so for the purpose of national security.
[44:39.780 --> 44:40.420]  It's not.
[44:41.040 --> 44:43.220]  It's under being done in the name of national security.
[44:43.580 --> 44:46.300]  See, I've said national security has become the state religion.
[44:46.840 --> 44:52.400]  And the priests of the secret information, right, hold that and protect it.
[44:52.600 --> 44:53.720]  They interpret it.
[44:53.860 --> 44:55.540]  They don't let anybody into the inner sanctums.
[44:55.720 --> 44:57.520]  It really is that level.
[44:57.800 --> 44:59.560]  So why do they want to know everything?
[45:02.880 --> 45:05.120]  See, they've actually said why.
[45:05.520 --> 45:11.760]  When I was at NSA, General Hayden, in executive session, would say, we just need to own the net.
[45:11.760 --> 45:19.920]  We need to know what anybody is doing at any time, anywhere, under any circumstance.
[45:21.820 --> 45:25.100]  The only way they can do that is create a mass surveillance regime.
[45:25.520 --> 45:26.540]  That's the only way.
[45:27.780 --> 45:32.140]  And so by collecting it all as a Stasi, it's the equivalent of the Stasi model.
[45:32.220 --> 45:34.620]  In order to know everything, we have to collect it all.
[45:36.140 --> 45:42.680]  And these former Stasi officers have said, they're going to use this for social control.
[45:43.000 --> 45:48.360]  Because the fact that they have this much information means they can use it for other purposes.
[45:48.960 --> 45:55.740]  Bill Binney himself is called, and there is this weird legal term called parallel construction, where you repurpose the intelligence.
[45:56.260 --> 46:01.840]  You collect it under the guise of mass security, and you repurpose it for law enforcement.
[46:03.180 --> 46:07.660]  Which means you're in complete violation of due process, because you have no probable cause.
[46:07.800 --> 46:09.060]  You're simply targeting everything.
[46:09.500 --> 46:13.000]  Well, if you target everything, that means you're simply making the haystack bigger.
[46:13.140 --> 46:14.240]  And I grew up on a farm.
[46:14.440 --> 46:21.320]  That's like cutting every field, you know, all the hay, piling all the hay in the barn, and every straw becomes a needle.
[46:22.060 --> 46:23.340]  How do you find the needle?
[46:24.720 --> 46:31.420]  There is no needle to be found, because the purpose was you're simply harvesting the data on an extraordinary scale, because you need to know.
[46:31.960 --> 46:35.600]  And as I said, NSA is absolutely pathologically obsessed.
[46:36.420 --> 46:39.420]  Have any of you seen these shows about hoarders?
[46:40.800 --> 46:41.540]  About what?
[46:42.020 --> 46:42.500]  Hoarders.
[46:44.160 --> 46:50.660]  People where they can't even move in their own house, where they fill their homes up with all kinds of stuff.
[46:50.660 --> 46:52.080]  It's a psychological thing.
[46:52.220 --> 46:56.840]  It's somehow, if I get enough stuff around me, then that's me, right?
[46:57.020 --> 47:01.660]  And they keep projecting it, and they keep stuffing more stuff into their house until there's no room left.
[47:02.300 --> 47:04.100]  This is precisely the case with NSA.
[47:04.300 --> 47:06.120]  And I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
[47:06.160 --> 47:09.240]  On the other hand, NSA was always a technical collection agency.
[47:09.660 --> 47:12.020]  So you can imagine the pathological response.
[47:12.260 --> 47:18.240]  They failed 9-11, although I recognize it was a trigger event, and there's a whole lot of things that they should have known about and didn't.
[47:18.240 --> 47:24.080]  Another part of my whistleblowing is we could have actually prevented 9-11, truth be told.
[47:24.380 --> 47:25.920]  That's part of the real cover-up.
[47:27.120 --> 47:33.220]  But all this information is to compensate for the failure of not knowing.
[47:33.220 --> 47:38.320]  So, as I was told by that lead attorney, we just need to get the data.
[47:38.480 --> 47:40.160]  It was always about the data.
[47:40.480 --> 47:42.080]  That somehow the data...
[47:42.080 --> 47:57.180]  So you can imagine, if you're revealing the state secret of a mass surveillance regime where they just want access to all the data or through your corporate partners, we can't forget the corporate partners.
[47:57.180 --> 48:09.780]  NSA cannot, or the FBI, or a number of other intel agencies, cannot do what they're doing without direct relationships and partnerships with the corporate side.
[48:09.960 --> 48:15.580]  Well, wasn't that part of the thin thread versus Stellarwind Trailblazer?
[48:15.680 --> 48:23.800]  I mean, it was because there was millions and millions and billions of dollars at stake with the contractors versus the very small, efficient NSA program.
[48:23.800 --> 48:30.820]  I was told by my immediate superior, who was the number three person that I reported to at NSA, who do I piss off?
[48:30.940 --> 48:39.860]  A dozen people in thin thread or the hundreds and hundreds and billions and billions of dollars in contracts under what they called SIGINT programs?
[48:40.840 --> 48:42.100]  The answer was obvious.
[48:43.060 --> 48:50.840]  It didn't matter that thin thread fundamentally protected the sovereign rights of citizens no matter where they were, not just U.S. citizens, by the way.
[48:50.840 --> 48:57.300]  This is another meme that somehow U.S. citizens are superior to any other person or citizen in the world.
[48:57.540 --> 49:01.420]  I absolutely reject that notion.
[49:02.640 --> 49:03.320]  Period.
[49:12.660 --> 49:15.340]  There is no special American exceptionalism.
[49:15.480 --> 49:17.860]  It's somehow America is immune from history.
[49:17.980 --> 49:18.460]  It's not.
[49:18.460 --> 49:20.920]  What you're seeing are the end trials of empire.
[49:21.080 --> 49:25.120]  And the last time I checked, all empires end up in the dustbin of history.
[49:32.890 --> 49:37.030]  It's interesting that the press hasn't really focused very much on the Stratfor reveals.
[49:37.150 --> 49:41.890]  We have at least two journalists here that have very much focused on it.
[49:41.890 --> 49:46.830]  Doug Lucas being one of them, Joe Fiondo, Del Cameron.
[49:47.350 --> 49:53.490]  Well, several, but they're in smaller publications, but the one of...
[49:53.490 --> 50:04.630]  I mean, the Stratfor reveals are just completely the most morally debased criminality that our government could participate in.
[50:04.630 --> 50:14.070]  Just to mention one of them was a Stratfor email that was in that dump that Hammond was responsible for hacking into Stratfor.
[50:14.870 --> 50:22.290]  Said that the DEA had asked permission to assassinate El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel.
[50:22.810 --> 50:30.030]  So can you imagine what would happen if the U.S. government was involved in assassinating a cartel leader?
[50:30.030 --> 50:32.730]  That would be the failed state.
[50:32.970 --> 50:40.250]  The border states would be turned into what's going on in the gang wars of Mexico.
[50:41.410 --> 50:43.570]  There's just one after another.
[50:43.830 --> 50:45.530]  I mean, that's just the one that comes to mind.
[50:45.770 --> 50:49.510]  But there was so much criminality to think...
[50:49.510 --> 51:14.050]  There's a woman in India, a Bhopal activist, that has an altar to Jeremy Hammond because she couldn't believe that he was in jail for 10 years when what he revealed was that Stratfor was spying on the Bhopal activists for Dow Chemicals so they could evade their responsibility for a spill that killed thousands of people.
[51:14.610 --> 51:24.370]  So it comes back to like, yeah, he broke the law, but we're on the wrong side of every issue here.
[51:24.370 --> 51:25.250]  The government is.
[51:25.510 --> 51:31.230]  They should be praising him and castigating Stratfor and the government, but that's not what's going on.
[51:31.850 --> 51:42.830]  I wanted to show one more clip because this is really, to me, one of the things that Thomas Drake says, that the hacktivist cases are very much about fundamentally First Amendment cases.
[51:43.510 --> 51:44.470]  To show this.
[51:46.730 --> 51:52.710]  Infamous computer hacker known by his alias Weave is a free man after more than a year behind bars.
[51:52.870 --> 51:55.350]  An appeals court has now overturned his conviction.
[51:59.860 --> 52:02.320]  So this case is at every step of the way.
[52:02.780 --> 52:08.240]  From the initial criminal complaint to my time in prison, it has always been about my speech.
[52:08.240 --> 52:09.980]  And they've wanted to silence me.
[52:12.810 --> 52:23.830]  They further punished me in prison and subjected me to conditions above and beyond any other prisoners at my facility because of my speech.
[52:24.450 --> 52:28.070]  They wanted me to disappear from public view and memory.
[52:47.890 --> 52:52.770]  So we've spent seven months of his 14 months in isolation.
[52:52.770 --> 52:53.540]  The U.N. has said that U.S. solitary confinement is torture.
[52:56.940 --> 53:04.560]  No one else in his low minimum security facility spent more than several days at a time in the shoe.
[53:04.560 --> 53:06.750]  So they really came down on him.
[53:06.980 --> 53:08.270]  They want to destroy him.
[53:08.480 --> 53:13.820]  They want to destroy these truth-tellers, the hacktivists, the people that threaten the status quo.
[53:16.440 --> 53:21.680]  It's the demise of the rule of law, unchained from the Constitution.
[53:22.000 --> 53:22.500]  Thomas?
[53:23.680 --> 53:28.860]  They simply want to extinguish those who would dare question power and authority.
[53:30.860 --> 53:33.160]  Extinguish the very essence of what it means to be a human being.
[53:33.160 --> 53:39.820]  It's why I absolutely will not yield, I will not bend to those who would dare take our sovereignty away.
[53:39.940 --> 53:40.960]  Because that's what's at stake.
[53:41.230 --> 53:46.540]  And it's why I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[53:46.540 --> 53:51.680]  Because those are inalienable rights for every single human being across the globe.
[54:07.350 --> 54:07.950]  Thank you.
[54:08.130 --> 54:09.850]  It's an honor to have shared a stage with you.
[54:09.850 --> 54:10.850]  Thank you.
[54:26.670 --> 54:30.790]  Are you available to go down and down at the message level for a little bit?
[54:30.950 --> 54:32.570]  A bunch of people have been asking .
[54:32.570 --> 54:33.110]  Listen.
[54:33.550 --> 54:36.070]  We gotta do it outside the room because another big talk is coming up.
[54:36.290 --> 54:36.990]  Can you go downstairs?
[54:37.490 --> 54:38.170]  Let me set up at this point.
[54:44.600 --> 54:44.960]  Alright.
[55:00.880 --> 55:01.900]  Del, are you here?
[55:05.540 --> 55:06.240]  Hi, Del.
[55:25.170 --> 55:25.610]  Mike?
[55:25.610 --> 55:36.850]  I just want to say, everybody who just saw this talk, if you'd like to participate in a Q&A with Thomas Drake, downstairs in the mezzanine level near Radio Statler, he'll be available for Q&A.
[55:36.970 --> 55:37.790]  I think that's worthwhile.
[55:38.010 --> 55:40.550]  But not to detract from the upcoming talk.
[55:41.210 --> 55:43.610]  The press area, which is right near Radio Statler.
[55:48.570 --> 55:49.290]  We need to ask for a chair.
[55:50.030 --> 55:50.690]  Two more chairs?
[55:51.090 --> 55:51.470]  Alright.
[55:52.570 --> 55:54.170]  Yeah, we have to compress down even tighter.
[55:57.490 --> 56:09.390]  Can you guys... Yeah, can you guys... No, it's okay, because I should slide over my chair, because this is the main laptop, and I'm just going to tilt it towards whoever is speaking.
[56:10.470 --> 56:13.470]  Can you guys spread the public box around just to video us?
[56:14.270 --> 56:15.230]  Can you share?
[56:15.430 --> 56:17.410]  And what is the video feed?
[56:17.790 --> 56:18.850]  Is it VGA?
[56:19.270 --> 56:20.070]  Alright, I can do that.
[56:22.610 --> 56:24.330]  Oh, there's an adapter already on it.
[56:24.390 --> 56:24.490]  Alright.
[56:25.110 --> 56:26.030]  How much more is it?
[56:26.530 --> 56:27.550]  How close is it?
[56:28.250 --> 56:29.330]  How close is it?
[56:32.200 --> 56:32.760]  Okay.
[56:33.540 --> 56:33.600]  Yes.
[56:34.460 --> 56:34.940]  I am.
[56:35.620 --> 56:36.040]  Okay.
[56:48.790 --> 56:48.910]  Okay.
[56:49.330 --> 56:50.030]  Alright!
[56:50.430 --> 56:51.550]  Um, I- Okay.
[56:51.610 --> 56:52.570]  I said 35 times...
[56:52.570 --> 56:52.690]  I will do...
[56:55.750 --> 56:56.670]  The Girls...
[56:56.670 --> 56:57.170]  Trendy...
[56:57.170 --> 56:57.190]  Light...