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System Update Edward Snowden, Andray Domise and Cassie King
MONOLOGUE
Welcome to a new edition of System Update. Im Glenn Greenwald.
This episode focuses on several of the under-discussed and under-explored ramifications of the choices were collectively making in response to the coronavirus pandemic:
How do we protect civil liberties and political rights while at the same time vesting powers necessary power in governments and corporations in order to manage the pandemic? What are the enduring social, cultural, political and psychological consequences ones that will endure even after this pandemic is brought under control from being in isolation and segregated from one another and quarantining and socially distancing?
And then finally, what is the role that animal agriculture and industrial factory farms, the way that we feed ourselves as a planet of almost 8 billion people have to do with the outbreak of highly new and frightening pathogens?
Joining me to explore these topics are three guests. The first is NSA whistleblower and president of the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Edward Snowden. The second is the contributing writer at Macleanss magazine in Canada, Andray Domise, who writes and thinks about these topics in very thought provoking and insightful ways. And then the third is Cassie King, a very courageous, young and experienced investigator and activist with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, who has been inside of many of the largest and most disease-ridden factory farms.
It seems like much more time than this, but its only been a few weeks since most of us have been in isolation and quarantine. The first European country to really drown in this crisis was Italy, and the Italian government ordered a nationwide lockdown only on March 9, just about exactly one month ago. And it was only after that that other countries in Western Europe and North America, such as the United States and Canada and in Latin America, began doing the same. So its only been a matter of a few weeks that we all have been in this isolation and been segregated from one another.
And in that time, weve seen a very wide array of responses from different states for how to deal with this pandemic. Everything ranging from educational campaigns designed to encourage voluntary behavior of social distancing to the implementation of new surveillance systems in order to enable contact tracing of the type that we saw in South Korea to police enforced quarantines where people can be fined or even arrested for leaving their homes without permission or without justification under the law: things that were seeing not only in places like Singapore, but also the United States and throughout Latin America and Europe. And then finally, the ultimate expression of authoritarianism in Hungary, a member of the EU state, that quickly seized on this crisis in order to essentially turn itself into despotism, into rule by emergency decree by a strongman.
In the meantime, there are billions of people on the planet who have had their lives radically and suddenly disrupted in fundamental ways. Obviously just having to be in our homes without being able to go out, the fear of a scary and unknown new virus and the looming threat of sustained economic crises, perhaps even a Great Depression, has upended all of our lives in ways that just three months ago were unthinkable.
And its precisely for that reason, precisely because of that, that it is imperative that we think very hard, very rationally, very deliberatively and very freely about the choices that were now making in terms of what powers do we want to invest in governments, what powers do we want to invest in corporations? Because these choices have profound and long-lasting effects about the society that were going to be.
And in thinking about those questions, I think three points are imperative. The first is that it is crucial that we all collectively vigilantly create the space and safeguard the space in which we can have free debates on these questions, in which pieties can be challenged and orthodoxies questioned.
To really learn that lesson, I think that we can look at an event that was maybe not as cataclysmic as this pandemic, but certainly was traumatic, which most of us lived through, which was the attack of September 11th in 2001, in which the immediate aftermath brought a climate based on fear in which very little dissent was tolerated, it was immediately stigmatized or worse. One way that you can see that is by looking at the now infamous Patriot Act, which was enacted on October 25th, 2001 so just six weeks after the September 11th attack it passed the Senate by a vote of 98 to 1. Just one senator, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin, was willing to stand up on the Senate floor and vote against it on the grounds that it vested radical and excessive surveillance and detention powers in the US government.
Even more illustrative is the Authorization to Use Military Force, which empowered George Bush and the Bush/Cheney administration to use violence, military force and war against anybody that they deemed, in their unilateral and sole discretion, to be responsible in any way for the 9/11 attacks. It passed on September 14th, 2001, roughly 72 hours after the attack, and it passed the Senate by a vote of 98 to zero. So nobody was willing to stand up and oppose it. And it passed the Congress, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 420 to 1. Just one lone member of Congress, the courageous Barbara Lee of California, stood up on the floor of the House and warned that this authorization would lead to endless war.
And she, Congresswoman Lee, was so stigmatized, so demonized, for her lone vote against that authorization that she received a tidal wave of very credible death threats and was forced to use state-provided security for months in order to prevent any attacks on her. That was the climate that quickly emerged in the wake of 9/11.
And now we know that Congresswoman Lee was correct in warning that the AUMF would lead to years and years of endless war. We know that Russ Feingold was correct to stand up and warn of the dangers of the Patriot Act. And yet there was so little dissent and debate permissible because of the climate of fear that arose, that very little deliberation or rational discussion or rational debate was possible. I think its imperative that we avoid that mistake.
There was a column by the Israeli writer, Yuval Noah Harari, in the Financial Times on March 20th, which underscored this point very potently. He wrote: The decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks will probably shape the world for years to come. They will shape not just our health care systems, but also our economy, politics and culture. We should also take into account the long term consequences of our action when choosing between alternatives. We should ask ourselves not only how to overcome the immediate threat, but also what kind of world will we inhabit once the storm passes? Yes, the storm will pass. Humankind will survive. Most of us will still be alive, but we will inhabit a very different world.
Its precisely for that reason that the decisions that were now making are genuinely momentous, are genuinely profound, that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of how these competing values ought to be calibrated and navigated. Its in all of our interests not to demonize or stigmatize those who question prevailing orthodoxies, because we see how often those prevailing orthodoxies are wrong, but to safeguard their right to do that, so were having rational debate rather than fear-driven debate about the kinds of decisions that were making.
The second point I think its vital to recognize is that there really is no such thing in a crisis as temporary powers vested in power centers. We can say that were in favor of things like enhanced surveillance authorities or enhanced police power to enforce quarantine or the ability of governments and corporations to more comprehensively track what it is that were doing just until the crisis blows over. But the reality is much different. Its almost inevitable that powers that are vested in the hands of corporations and governments in the name of a temporary emergency end up being anything but temporary. They end up being permanent and they expand rather than contract even once that original crisis is over.
Again, I think probably the best example are the measures adopted in the wake of 9/11, beginning with the Patriot Act, which was recognized even while the World Trade Center was still in its rubble as being genuinely radical, as threatening and menacing as any piece of legislation seen in the United States in decades. And yet the answer given by those who are advocates of its enactment was, oh, dont worry, were putting into the bill a sunset provision to to ensure that it will expire after a few years once the threat of Muslim terrorism has been managed, and it will only be a temporary part of our political system, not anything permanently new or radical.
Perhaps illustrating this mentality in its purest distillation was an Oct. 14, 2001 New York Times invoked exactly that argument, writing: The House of Representatives approved legislation today to give the government broad new powers for the wiretapping, surveillance and investigation of terrorism suspects. But in recognition of many lawmakers, fears of the potential for government overreaching and abuse, the House included a five year limit after which many of those powers would expire..
And yet here we are almost 20 years later, and none of the powers of the Patriot Act have expired. Each time the Patriot Act comes up for reauthorization, not only does it pass, it passes overwhelmingly by votes in the Senate of 91 to 9 or 90 to 8. And not only has it not been rescinded, even attempts to reform it are rejected. And if anything, the Patriot Act has expanded radically beyond its original interpretation to something much broader and darker. And yet its still impossible to retract it. Nobody really talks anymore about rescinding the Patriot Act. Its become a permanent part of the fabric of American life.
The same is true of the Authorization to Use Military Force, which was enacted in the wake of 9/11 on the grounds that it would enable the president to eradicate those who were responsible for the 9/11 attack. And yet, 19 years later, President Bush and then President Obama and now President Trump still invoke it as purported legal authority to bomb or otherwise use military violence against groups that didnt even exist at the time of the 9/11 attacks, let alone bear responsibility for it.
Another very potent example is the Defense Production Act of 1950, which many have urged President Trump to invoke more prolifically in response to this crisis. That was a bill that was passed under the Truman administration that allowed U.S. presidents essentially to commandeer industry and force it to work for the national defense of the United States. And the justification at the time was it was necessary to win the Korean War, to force industry not to produce its own products for profit, but to produce weapons and steel and other materials to enable the U.S. to win the war.
Yet here we are 70 years later. And not only is that law still very much in place, and not only are people urging President Trump to invoke it, but the meaning and reach and scope of that law have wildly expanded so that national defense now means not just things like winning wars, but even enabling the government to address public health crises. That is the reality of powers that we acquiesce to now on a temporary basis. They are likely to be permanent. And they are likely to expand far beyond their original expression.
Again, Harari warns of this in a very clear way in the Financial Times article he wrote where he writes: you could, of course, make the case for biometric surveillance as a temporary measure taken during a state of emergency. It would go away once the emergency is over. But temporary measures have a nasty habit about lasting emergencies, especially as theres always a new emergency lurking on the horizon. My home country of Israel, for example, declared a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence, which justified a range of temporary measures from press censorship and land confiscation to special regulations for making pudding. I kid you not.
He goes on to note, of course, that 72 years later, those emergency temporary decrees are still very much in place, and they now empower the Israeli government to do far more than even their original advocates ever envisioned. Its one thing to defend and advocate new powers in the hands of governments and corporations in the name of fighting this pandemic. But its crucial to be realistic about it, which means that we must recognize that those powers, even if you want them to be temporary, are highly unlikely to be that.
The last point I think is very important to start thinking about and to acknowledge are the serious and profound cultural, social, psychological and political changes that are being fostered by a lot of the measures, including ones in which were voluntarily engaging and that are almost certain to endure once this pandemic is over. If you think about it, the fact that we are all physically separated from one another is itself a momentous change. And not only are we physically separated from one another, but were being trained to regard each other not as fellow citizens with whom we can connect and with whom we can work in pursuit of common goals. But were being trained to regard one another as threats, as vectors of a fatal disease who are to be avoided.
And what that means is that we see power centers strengthening rapidly as a result of this pandemic, states gaining previously unthinkable powers, corporations watching their smaller competitors go out of business as a result of the economic standstill, while the giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart become even bigger. And weve lost our ability to unite, to do any kind of meaningful protest because we cant even gather together on the street with one another because were all segregated physically from one another.
We saw this very disturbingly in the case of the attempt by a handful of Amazon warehouse workers to organize a strike. And Amazon then fired the organizer of that strike and its spokesman, former Obama White House press secretary Jay Carnay, justified the firing on the grounds that by organizing a protest, he violated social distancing guidelines and endangered the health of other Amazon workers, including the ones who voluntarily participated in the protest, so were already seeing protests being pathologized, being criminalized, on top of the difficulty of joining together when were all in physical isolation from one another.
Here in Brazil, when people want to protest, as they often do increasingly, the unhinged and sociopathic response of the Bolsonaro government to the coronavirus pandemic, they go to their windows, pick up pots and pans and spoons and bang with the spoons on those pots and pans. Its a traditional form of Latin American protest. It creates a lot of noise, but under the circumstances its not very menacing, since the government knows none of them can go out onto the street and gather together and protest and march. That is creating a very meaningful imbalance between power centers, which are strengthening, and we the citizenry which are weakening even to the point of physically weakening by being confined to our homes, prevented from engaging in our normal exercise regimen, the mental health costs that come with it as well. I think its crucial, critical that we begin to think very deeply and very clearly about what these effects are likely to be.
And related to that is the question of what is the animal agriculture industrys role in spawning a lot of these new never before seen pathogens. We obviously dont know for certain what the origin, what the genesis of Covd-19 is. There are certainly theories that it leaped from animals to humans, that its a zoonotic virus, as weve seen so many others of that kind. We dont know for certain, but what we do know is that we in the west love to deride and condemn and mock what we regard as Asian agricultural practices. People are blaming wet markets in which animals are killed on the spot or the consumption of animals that we in the west dont consume, such as bats or snakes or dogs, when in reality, industrial agriculture in the West, especially in the United States, is a festering ground for disease and pathogens and viruses, not just the way that they enter our body through food consumption, but the way that the waste is dumped in our communities. And I think its well past time that we begin to think about what the effect is of industrial agriculture in creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, and in introducing new viruses and pathogens into the human species.
So the main point, the overarching point of this episode for me is that wherever you fall on the political or ideological spectrum, however you think these competing values should be balanced and navigated and calibrated in a time of what obviously is a true crisis, which is the coronavirus pandemic, I think it is absolutely imperative that we work to ensure that not just ourselves, but our fellow citizens have the ability to question orthodoxies and to ask what the long term ramifications are or even the mid-term, the ramifications are of a lot of these measures.
Weve already seen social media sites like Facebook and Google and Twitter prohibiting certain arguments from being made on the grounds that theyre unscientific and theres a part of all of us, certainly me, that is relieved when its applied to the president of Brazil, or influential evangelical pastors can encourage people to go believe that there is a cure or to go gather in large crowds. But theres another part of me that makes me very wary of vesting Silicon Valley tech companies with the control to manage our discourse, to regulate what isnt isnt being permitted to be expressed, even if theyre clinging to scientific consensus when doing so. Because as weve seen over and over, consensus from experts of all types so often is wrong.
And this debate that we are going to have and need to have can only happen if were all dedicated to ensuring that it can happen. So I constructed this episode and chose the guests that I chose to speak to with the goal of ensuring this kind of debate being fostered. And I hope that it contributes to everybody thinking a little bit more deeply and a little bit more insightfully. I know each of these guests helped me to do that, and I hope that they help you to do that as well. So enjoy the new episode.
Guest: Edward Snowden
Glenn Greenwald: So I have a special guest to join me to explore these issues. NSA whistleblower, the president of the Press Freedom Group, Freedom of the Press Foundation, on whose board I also sit, the president of the board of directors of that group and the author last year of a book about surveillance called Permanent Record. Welcome to System Update, Edward Snowden, thanks so much for taking the time to talk me.
Edward Snowden: Its good to be with you, Glenn. Thanks for having me on.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah. If memory serves, I think weve talked once or twice before, but Im delighted to talk again. So the reason why I decided to focus this episode on these questions of civil liberties and investing the state with authority vs. the individual liberties and civil liberties that we cherish is because I know for myself, once, in a visceral way, I started appreciating how dangerous this pandemic truly was how lethal this virus was, how easily it spreads, I found myself for the first couple of weeks kind of almost instinctively relinquishing my general defense of, and clinging to, civil liberties and almost wanting the government to seize authorities that prior to this I would never have dreamed about supporting. And I realized that our psyches are constructed in a way that when the first-order survival need is imperiled, were very easily manipulated or even not necessarily manipulated but were very easily persuaded that we ought to give up a lot of civil liberties. It was only after a couple of weeks when that started alarming me did I start trying to calibrate for myself, how that balance should be maintained.
So Im curious, just on a kind of general level, when you have a global pandemic of this kind, what is your view about the proper balance between civil liberties and individual rights, on the one hand, and investing governments with added authorities on the other.
Edward Snowden: I think when you were getting into the question, the most important point was there: that you yourself, who have been, you know, for years, a pretty strident critic of the spread of authoritarianism, the rise of unlimited executive privileges and authorities in country after country, even you go, hey, you know, Im worried about this, maybe they can track the virus better if they start doing this stuff or the other. As long as we stop this thing, this crazy, inhuman thing, its worth it. And even if, you know, a moment of reflection, you catch your breath, a week goes by, three weeks go by, the headlines dont have as much sting, you start to adjust to the new normal, lean back and think about it in a more considered way. On reflection, and you start to go, well, you know, maybe, maybe I was a little bit rash there. Recognize that, as somebody who has like a self-identity as a critic of governments, but youre still very much ahead of the curve. And this is, I think, the most teachable moment from the current pandemic, something that we so often forget, whenever there is a crisis in any corner of the world that begins reshaping laws and reshaping societies and the boundaries of our rights that we live in and defend and over time try to expand. And that is that human emotion is itself viral. This is one of the basic principles for the Internet and social media. You know, theyve done studies on this and theyve seen the emotions that have the largest contagion are anger and fear, right? And what we are seeing is were seeing hysteria spread. And remember, fear can be rational. This is a serious problem. This virus is a serious threat to public health and well-being and safety. And we should do what we can to mitigate it. But what weve seen is a panic sweep across the entire world. The political class, the media class, the sort of commentariat. And you can see it on the Internet. You know, theres one group of people who are trying to bury any suggestion that this is serious at all, absolute denialism of any facts and evidence that there could be some danger to this, that we should put economic limits in place, whatever. And then the other side of this that says this is the end of everything were all going to die, everyone is gonna get this. And, you know, its just you may kiss your relatives goodbye cause youre never going to see them again.
And the reality, of course, is it is more complex. Its somewhere in the middle. But that moment of intense, instantly transmissible fear is what happened to us in 9/11. Its what happens to us in the lead up to every war. Its what happens to us, whenever the government is trying to start a campaign to gather new authorities, they say, you know, were gonna protect you from roving gangs, were going to protect the children, were gonna do whatever we can. And that moment, that window of vulnerability, where rationality goes out of the window, goes out of the room, we are all susceptible to it.
And that is what we are seeing now. We are only now beginning to get our feet under us. And in the time that we now take a breath and start looking at whats happened, we see governments around the world, in country after country have already begun helping themselves.
So, for example, the mass movements of everyone everywhere to the maximum extent of their capability, which they say is for tracking the spread of the virus. But all of the questions that, you know, in a more considered time, we would have looked at like, one, does this work? Is it effective? And if it is effective, is it worth the cost that were paying? And how will we make sure that this is not permanent? This is not the kind of emergency measure that we got, you know, 20 years ago now after September 11th, that never ended.
Glenn Greenwald: Mm-Hmm. Let me let me stop you there for a second if I could, on this, this comparison between the aftermath of 9/11 and the fear mongering that was successfully exploited to do things like introduce the Patriot Act with almost no dissent and then ultimately a 19 year war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq, powers of detention without due process, creating prisons in the middle of islands. Things that had previously been unimaginable that were justified in the name of terrorism.
I know the civil liberties community, including myself, spent along a lot of time arguing, not necessarily that measures of that sort are never justified, but that they are not just maybe some of those measures are never justified, like imprisoning people without charges but that a lot of the argument was about the nature and the magnitude of the threat, that the threat itself was being exaggerated, because 3000 people died, horrible deaths, but in a country of 270 million people at the time, with the great difficulty of pulling something off like that again, it did seem like the cost-benefit analysis had gone way off track, in favor of nothing but fear without any kind of calculation.
Here, even though in the U.S., for example, were nowhere near the peak of the pandemic. Far more have already died from this virus than have died, than died on 9/11 to say nothing of the death totals all around the world.
So does that work into your calculation at all, the idea that if we dont take steps that we might otherwise be very resistant to the death total itself is going to completely dwarf 9/11, rendering that comparison a little bit invalid?
Edward Snowden: Well, no, we Everyone looks at these things and considers emergency measures, right? Its natural and its appropriate in the context of human experience: when you have for a short time in a short period, a level of sacrifice that needs to be made for the good of the individual, for the good of the community, for the good of society. Right, think about, you know, youre on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You dont drink all your water on the first day, even though you might be thirsty. The thing that I have a problem with is that we see, for example, in the economic context of what we have going on right now, we have a history, at least in American society, but I think really global society, when we look at the last half century, of repeatedly asking sacrifices of those who have the least capability to make those sacrifices.
Everybody is freaking out about the economic crisis that has been provoked by the fact that were all at home, were all shut-in, were socially distancing, were engaged in trying to flatten the curve of infections, right? Just the logarithmic curve for those who arent following around, where the virus rates of infection keep doubling and doubling, doubling, doubling will overload the hospitals, right? So were trying to insert a breather by sending everybody home going, youre not going to see anybody, therefore, youre not going to transmit anything, and this will take the heat off the hospitals.
And again, this can make sense. And I think it does make sense. The real problem that were about to run into next is when they have to let everybody out and then infection rate begins to rise again. And there was a study that just came out of, I think, the Chan School of Public Health from Harvard, where they were saying this system of pumping the brakes, or of intermittent quarantine, where they sent everyone home and then they we let them out and then they sent every home and let them out will actually continue into next year. And if we dont, thats in the best case, actually.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah.
But Ed, let me let me ask you about that, though, because thats, I mean, thats a really momentous thing to say, right? That, okay, social distancing works. Isolation works. Its something thats necessary not to protect each individual, so each individual can decide to take the risk. Because the reality is, if you dont socially distance, if you go out on the street, youre endangering not only yourself, but you could overload the entire health care system, which prevents other people who need medical attention from getting it. So its a collective and a societal interest as well. So you incurred social distancing and then a lot of people do it, but a lot of people dont.
Does it then become justifiable to support powers of coercive quarantine? I mean, one of the most draconian powers you can invest in a government, to bar people from leaving their own homes, arresting them if they do. Where do you fall on that spectrum of the kinds of measures, not that we ought to just encourage people voluntarily to follow, but that we ought to empower the state to compel and enforce?
Edward Snowden: Well, I think this depends on your personal perspective and philosophy as to what the role of government is and where those lines are drawn. For myself, I actually dont think the government should have the mandatory authorities say, look, nobody goes out, you cant leave, you cant do this, that or the other. But thats also Part of the reason that I feel that way is that I dont believe its actually necessary. I believe the government makes recommendations and we have the kind of public education thats of a quality that can convince people and persuade them rationally that they should limit the amount of time that they spend outside, that they spend in crowds, you know, that theyre in basically zones of potential infection and transmission, they will make the right decisions themselves.
This actually gets into the contact tracing thing that we talk about as well. Is it better for the government just to, you know, break out the jackboots and the batons and go, look, nobody is out of their house or its off to the paddy wagon? Alternately, do you tell people, look, this is dangerous to you, its dangerous to your family. This is a global pandemic. You can reduce the risk to yourself, your community, if you follow this kind of recommendation. And heres why we make these recommendations. Heres the basis for it, here are the facts. Heres the best of our evidence and our science. I think most people go along with it. This is similar to the idea of contact tracing.
Glenn Greenwald: So lets just let me, lets stop there for a second, because I want to do something that in a million years never thought they was going to do, which is make a pro-surveillance case. Not necessarily because I believe in this case, but because I think that its far more plausible than it was, say, three months ago, and Im interested in your thoughts on it.
So weve seen in the first three months of this pandemic or so, starting in December in Wuhan, a wide, very wide array of responses from different countries. So on the one hand, you have what would you could say is like the most repressive means of dealing with the pandemic, which is what we saw in China and probably Singapore, which are authoritarian countries to begin with, that used a lot of brute force of literally dragging people out of their homes when there were fevers detected or other indicia of the virus and forcibly quarantining them in essentially prison hospitals.
Then you have kind of on the other spectrum Western democracies where individual liberty is more valued, where people are much more defiant of even suggestive government messaging, let alone compulsory ones like in in Western Europe, where the virus has really ravaged places like Spain and Italy and is now doing the same in the U.K. and France.
And so the kind of middle ground model that a lot of people have held up as a country that avoided the harshest repression of China, but handled it much better than Western Europe is South Korea, which relied heavily on the kind of electronic surveillance that you and I spent a lot of years advocating against in order to do things like contact tracing and find where people who had the virus interacted with other people in order to then remove them from the population or quarantine them or reward them.
And although its unclear how every country is doing, because these official counts are not very reliable, it does seem clear that South Korea did a better job than most countries, if not all countries, in managing the initial outbreak by using electronic surveillance. Does that make you, Edward Snowden, more receptive to the idea that perhaps we ought to allow states, governments, a little bit more leeway, a little bit more authority on a temporary basis, if that such a thing exists, to use that kind of surveillance data with the noble goal of trying to get this pandemic under control without having to use more repressive measures like we saw in Singapore, in China.
Edward Snowden: Nice try. I would say, look, theres a lot of presumption in the sort of example on the question there. One of them is that South Korea relied heavily on this. It is true that they did sort of embrace quickly in these kind of location tracking measures. It is not clear how much it helped. It is actually, it could be argued, that South Koreas case is exceptional for a number of ways, one of which the largest spread came from a very specific region because it was a religious community that was very tightly knit and it was spreading through them. They were in a local region and then you could look at that.
There is also the distinction between Asian cultures, the in-group versus outgroup importance.So what you see when you look at like a Japan or a South Korea are countries that already have a culture of whenever someone gets a cold, they put a flu mask on. I lived in Japan. I saw this, right? And thats without a pandemic.
They also remember the SARS pandemic and they made preparations in response to it. So I would say actually what you saw was South Korea doing an across the board push to grasp at any capabilities that they had, applying them to the maximum extent that they could, and that this is crucial the public listened to expert recommendations that were coming from health authorities. They made some voluntary individual, took voluntary individual actions like mask wearing, hand sanitizing, things like that that could limit the transmissibility and infectiousness of it. And what we see is that collective voluntary action can be very effective.
Now, when we look at the counterexample that you have here of an authoritarian society of China, we go, well, what if South Korea took a Chinese example here? Would they have been more effective in halting the spread of the virus if they had just welded people into their homes, right? If they had changed peoples doors, turned off the elevators, you know, blocked the stairways, set up cameras outside the homes, you know, said people cant leave without a special pass from the government, all of these things, its not clear that that would have been more effective. In fact, I think theres a very strong argument that it actually would have been worse.
When you look at the example of China, we need to understand that given the Chinese Communist Party and their, shall we say, tenuous relationship with factual reporting, it is very possible that the response to the pandemic and the manner in which it was taken in China caused more harm than what would have happened in a South Korean style response. We have direct, documented cases where they chain the doors to peoples house. They wouldnt allow them to go home from the hospital. And they had dependents at home. Children with disabilities and things like that who literally starved to death in the absence of their caretakers.
Now, putting all of that on the table, acknowledging that, is there a case where some surveillance can be useful? Obviously, yes. I mean, look, I signed up to work for the CIA and the NSA. I know surveillance can be effective and can be useful.
Glenn Greenwald: And just to remind people, one of the arguments both you and I made during the height of the controversy triggered by your whistleblowing, was not that the case that was being made that caused you to come forward was in wholesale opposition to surveillance, quite the country. You were in favor of targeted surveillance with safeguards against people for whom a court had decided there was evidence that they were engaged in terrorist acts or other dangerous acts, right? Youre not against such warrants or wiretaps approved by a court. What you were opposed to was mass surveillance abuse without any constraints or safeguards.
So that kind of leads me into that question brought into this context, which is, and you were getting to this and I just want to remind people of what your prior posture was and mine to apply it here, which: is is there a framework of targeted, limited, controlled, responsible surveillance that you could get behind if done with the proper motives and under the right conditions, with the right safeguards?
Edward Snowden: I think what people are presuming here and this was the presumption of the question put me before is the idea that this is a choice between mass surveillance or just a completely uncontrolled spread of an infectious virus that can cause serious disease. And I dont think thats accurate. In fact, I know that is inaccurate. I mean, you know, I know a little something about how surveillance works here.
What we are being asked is to accept involuntary mass surveillance in a way that has never been done before at this scale. In the context of a real crisis, they go, look, were just gonna do this, the data already exists. Phone companies, were going to apply it to sort of a new use case. Were going to take this surveillance infrastructure that exists, but or rather, were going to take this communications infrastructure that was not designed for surveillance or rather, its told to us that would not be used or abused for surveillance now were going to use it for precisely that, but for a really good reason.
Now, they say that this is necessary. They say that there is no alternative. They say that if you want to save lives, you have to do this. But thats not true. Again, the question here is between the involuntary surveillance of everyone that has been carrying a phone over the last however many weeks, or months, or years that they want to look back to. Because remember, these records of your movements of your phone, at least by AT&T in the United States, are reported to go back to 2008. Everywhere your phone has traveled since 2008, they know that theres no laws regulating how long they can retain this information, in large part in the United States.
Now, imagine an alternate. You go to th e hospital, you are diagnosed with an infection and the doctor goes, it would be really helpful for you to be able to voluntarily share the movements of your phone.
So you go in with your app, you show them, oh, hey, I was sitting next to a guy who I dont know who they are, but you just said they were infected. You now get priority access to this kind of testing. You can get priority access to treatment because it is clear that you have potentially been exposed. And none of this requires privacy sacrifices. None of this requires any sort of involuntary or intrusive violation of rights.
And the funny thing is these capabilities are not difficult to create. This platform could have been slapped together in four days by a bunch of university researchers working together, if they had had the kind of funding in the mandate and the support.
Glenn Greenwald: So let me let me let me ask this, because I think this, I think and this leads to to what I had intended to be the last question which is a lot of your answers are predicated on the desirability not of government coercion, but a voluntary conduct that is not only in the individuals enlightened self-interest, but in the interest as well of society, which in turn means that theres a flow of information thats accurate and reliable and trustworthy, that people put their faith and confidence in, as kind of a reliable font of authority for them to form their understanding about how the pandemic functions.
And maybe, not sure, but I suspect its the case that there are countries in which there is faith in some kind of centralized authority, whether its scientists or the government or media outlets that they trust to get this information, and it can be effective. But in other countries, certainly in the U.S. and its true in here in Brazil and its definitely true throughout Western Europe, theres a collapse of trade trust in these institutions of authority where people arent sure anymore what to believe.
And so, for example, here in Brazil, one of the things we have is on the one hand, you have a lot of scientists, you have the big media outlets disseminating what is the scientific consensus throughout the West and in Asia about how the pandemic functions, about the need for social distancing and isolation, about the threat and lethality of this virus. But then on the other hand, you have a lot of power centers, including the president of the country, his family, his media outlets, his followers, evangelical pastors, saying entirely inaccurate things, just scientifically false claims about theres no need to socially isolate, theres no need to socially distance, the threat of the economic harm is much greater than the threat of this virus that only k ills people above 70 if youre already sick.
And what has happened is companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google that control our discourse online have started censoring and deleting messages from the president of Brazil, high level officials the same thing happen in Venezuela on the ground that theyre disseminating information that is contrary to the scientific consensus. So on the one hand, your solutions of voluntary conduct need and depend upon the citizenry being persuaded about basic scientific facts and whats in their own interests, which in turn means that they cant be misled or deceived into doing things that are irrational. On the other hand, there are dangers, I think, to having companies like Facebook and Google and Twitter control our discourse to the point of even censoring the messaging that comes from democratically elected leaders as unhinged and extremist and authoritarian as they may be.
So if your solution, your vision for how this can best be calibrated relies on an informed citizenry, does that make you more amenable to having these tech companies exert a little bit more control, while were in this crisis, over peoples ability to deceive people with misinformation or even falsehoods and lies?
Edward Snowde: When we, when you ask this question, look, you know, am I comfortable with Facebook and, you know, Google, YouTube, whoever, but its like for properties that basically run the world today. Jeff Bezos decides what you can and cant buy an Amazon. You know, Facebook decides what you can and cant post on social media. You know, Jack Dorsey or whatever gets dragged into this and has to be the politics police. Is that correct? Because some people abuse their authority. And no, I dont think the solution to the abuse of authority is to create more platforms for the abuse of authority. I dont believe making Mark Zuckerberg the central authority for the things that can and cannot be said is an improvement on the situation.
What we are seeing in exactly the situation that you describe with Bolsonaro, with Donald Trump, with all of these people denying basic facts is intentional. Its not a mistake. It is a sustained campaign thats been running for more than a decade now to reduce trust in some of the most important institutions, when were talking about expert understanding of complex, nuanced subjects, because the facts are not in their favor. This is a political struggle for influence. And when the facts are against them, they go, well, why dont we undermine the facts? This is centrally, in my mind, an abuse of authority.
It is their platform, their trust from their voters who believe that they will do whats best for these voters and they go and use it for, you know, callous and self-interested political ends to improve their own lot in the next election, right? But I think what we are seeing as a result of this is were seeing more harm from the abuse of authority than we are suffering from a lack of authority.
The government today in basically any country you point to, is more powerful than it has ever been in any moment in human history. And all of these institutions, all of these different political parties in all of these different cultures, all of these different languages are now coming to their people simultaneously around the world going: well, the problem, see, is we dont have enough power. Thats not persuasive to me. And I think what we see right now, in fact, is that this is the turning of an age. This pandemic, I believe, which is a serious problem, dont mistake me as downplaying the severity of this. What we are seeing is it is revealing structural flaws, not just in our system of government, but in the System, broadly, capitalized, proper noun.
There is an idea that governments, you know, going back hundreds of years exist only for certain reasons. The government is there to provide a basic level of security. You know, this idea of a sense of order, economic well-being, right? It is providing for individuals, for people that they cannot provide for themselves. And what we are seeing in places like the United States and around the world is, in fact, these are the very governments that have unbalanced the system economically, that have engaged in the kind of aggressive wars, endless wars under the Bush and Cheney administration that then were underwritten by the Obama administration, now adopted by the Trump administration, wars without end. Sort of taking a pet crime like terrorism, which is a serious crime, but it is still a crime nonetheless, and now making it a matter of state, right? We are elevating criminals to the levels of equal sovereigns, right? ISIS is being treated like its a nation, as opposed to very large organized crime syndicate.
And when you look at the fact that theyre not maintaining a sense of order, in fact, our countries are becoming more fractious and divided. Theyre not providing the security that were being asked where theyre not being good stewards of the publics health, the publics economy or crucially, the publics rights, which I think is really what we should be saying. People have trouble with guaranteeing themselves at that scale, right? Justice. Can you say the governments today are doing a good job ensuring sort of uniform access to justice?
You wrote an entire book, and the United States, or about the U.S. justice systems, unequal access to justice. I think was called liberty and justice for some. Thats a free plug for the audience there.
Glenn Greenwald: We wont be editing that part out.
Edward Snowden: Yeah. Yeah. Now, the idea here is when when you look at these things broadly and you look at all of these governments panicking, what has begun now is a race between governments to entrench their power to rentrench the system that has failed us and is continuing to fail us. And that in a very real way for people who are dependent upon it economically, and now medically, it has betrayed us. And a race has begun between all of the crises that this system has produced that are now working to persuade people that maybe the system needs to be replaced and the people who are benefiting from those systems to hold it in place.
And I think this is the unanswered question of where this is going to go. But this story of the next 100 years or more is going to be has the system that has served us to this point, is it under our control politically, publicly, ideologically? Is it serving our needs? And is the problem simply that it doesnt ha ve enough power? We need to move closer to sort of this Chinese model of unlimited authoritarian demands in response to emerging crises? Or do we need to actually look for something thats got a little less authority that is available for abuse?
Crises are always exploited by political actors to gain authorities that would otherwise be forbidden to them. And we can understand as people who are impacted by these policies that there can be benefits. But at the point these policies are being sought, these benefits are theoretical. Often there is no evidence for them and they may never materialize. But the consequences of granting these authorities are inevitable. There has never been a moment in history where we have created what is being stood up today, a system where a government, any government, can know the location of every person at every time. This is the architecture of repression. Theyre saying theyre not turning it on. Theyre saying theyre not using it for, you know, marching people off to camps. And right now, I believe them.
But do you want a government that at any moment can round up people of any political persuasion, of people who clicked on this link, of people who were at this place at that time? And you know, even if they say its anonymous data, right. We dont know these people, were just looking at the movements of the population broadly, not an individual scale. We want to see whos breaking quarantine. And they go, well, look, theres 30 people congregating in park who shouldnt be there. Maybe its a religious group. Maybe its a political group. And you know what? That capability will exist in three months, in three years and in 30 years if we allow it to be implemented today.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, I think I think thats the key point. And exactly for that reason, you know, I think a lot of us have had a good few weeks of this kind of first thinking about our own health and our own safety and that of our families, kind of trying to get a hold on what this pandemic is and what the basic scientific facts of it are and the political facts of it are. And now its definitely time to start questioning in a serious way everything thats being proposed in the name of curbing it, of limiting it and stopping it. And that, more than anything, is the reason why I wanted to talk to you, because I knew you you would be one of the ideal people to start raising these questions in an rationally and compelling way. So Im super glad that we got to take some time and talk about this. And I have a feeling that its going to take more than just one conversation to sound the alarm about the need to be vigilant that your rational fears arent exploited for ends other than what people are claiming theyre being exploited for.
Edward Snowden: Oh, yeah. Just for anybody out there whos listening right now, whos struggling, because this has been not a good few weeks. This has been a very difficult few weeks for everyone, really, everywhere.
Its not wrong, its not weird to be scared. I have family members who have lost their jobs. I think everybody has. We are in a vulnerable position and we are being made to depend on a system that we do not really understand and do not have that much control over.
Ask yourself why, for decades, you have been asked to give more and more. And when a moment of crisis comes and Congress starts throwing money around, we are getting the smallest portion of the resources. And then think about now the only thing that we have left, our rights, our ideals, our values as people. Thats what theyre coming for now. Thats what theyre asking us to give up. Thats what theyre asking to change. And remember that from a perspective of a free society. A virus is a serious problem, it is harmful. But the destruction of our rights is fatal. Thats permanent.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, and it takes work to think about the second, whereas our survival instincts very easily let us think about the first and thats where the imbalance can arise.
Ed, thank you so much for this discussion. I think it was extremely illuminating. I think it was the right moment to have it. And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk.