Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief with the Guardian Newspaper. Three and a half months ago, on June 5th, The Guardian revealed the National Security Agency is collecting collecting the telephone records of millions of customers of Verizon under a secret court order. The following day, the paper revealed the existence of a secret program called PRISM that gave the NSA direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. internet giants. Four days later, The Guardian revealed the source behind the leaks was a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden.
Since early June, The Guardian has continued to publish a remarkable series of exposés based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, coloring in the details on how the NSA has managed to collect nearly everything a user does on the internet. The articles have ignited an international debate about the NSA’s activities, digital data protection and the nature of investigative journalism, and the paper has been directly targeted as a result.
Alan Rusbridger talking:
I think it’s quite an interesting story about the old world and the new world, so there’s the fourth estate newspapers, there’s the fifth estate bloggers, and this is a union of the two. We hired Glenn Greenwald, who is a blogger, and who has written knowledgeably, and, some people might, say obsessively about the subject over the last few years. In Hawaii, a 29-year-old NSA analyst was clearly reading Greenwald and was so troubled by what he was doing in his work that he wanted to find somebody knowledgeable to give this material to. So, he came to Glenn, Glenn, by now, was working for The Guardian, and that is how it all kicked off.
there was about two weeks when they were all essentially closeted in the same hotel room. It was a rather unreal period for anyone who has watched a Hollywood movie about these kinds of things; agents on the run, stashes of secrets. But, they worked together and it was important for me that there was a Guardian reporter, a conventional reporter, in the room along with Glenn, Laura and Ewen MacAskill.
Ewen MacAskill, who is a Scottish reporter who’s been on the The Guardian for years and years and years. Very experienced, not easily impressed reporter. Between them, they started to go through this stash of material that Greenwald had — that, that Snowden had with him. And we obviously had to establish Snowden was who he said he was and that the material was what he said it was. At the end of about two weeks, we started to publish material based on it.
to begin with, we needed some help from Snowden to point us to what he thought was important. This is not a world that is easily — these are not documents in which the stories sit up and show themselves. This is a complex world. A lot is written in acronyms, if not in actually code, and so we had to be guided to, initially, to some of the stories that Snowden felt were most newsworthy. And it was important for him, I think, that the world had some sense of what he was trying to say before he outed himself, and so, we started doing stories about this intersection between Silicon Valley, telecom companies, and the intelligence agencies. What is, I think, something new, is putting entire populations under a form of surveillance. So, that is what we did in that first week before Snowden came out and revealed himself to be the whistleblower.
the first four stories were all NSA rather than GCHQ and they were edited out of New York, and we were in touch with the agencies via the White House, and we warned them of what we were going to publish, and we had sometimes helpful dialogue, sometimes robust dialogue about what we were going to do, but it was important for me that we gave them the chance to respond and to make plain any concerns that they had about any particular thing.
We had two big conversations with the government, one at the end of June, and one about halfway through July. And it became obvious to me that their tone was heartening. I think they felt this story was out of their control. There came a point where they directly threatened legal action. Now, in the U.K., the government can move and stop publication. I don’t think that is possible since the Pentagon Papers in the U.S. And there came a point where it was obvious we only had two options. One was to return the material and the other was to destroy it. It didn’t actually matter much to me because the material was already in America, and I have already shared some of it with The New York Times so it was going to make no difference to the reporting, but I what I did not want to do was to get into a big legal action which cold potentially have frozen it all.
this bizarre thing happened, the most bizarre thing that I think has happened in my journalistic career, which was that two technical people from the GCHQ, which is the Government Communications Headquarters, it’s the equivalent of the NSA, came into The Guardian, and supervised our destruction of the lap-books on which — the laptops on which we’d been working.
I wouldn’t give it to them because, I mean, I think journalists generally don’t hand material back to governments. But, also there was always the threat hanging in the background of criminal action against The Guardian and I don’t know what these — or against Snowden — and I don’t know what these discs would have told them about who had been looking at this material, and I did not want to give them evidence that could be used against The Guardian. It is difficult in which you have this potential of criminalizing reporters who are informing the debate that everyone says they want to happen. So, I wouldn’t give it back to them, and so the compromise we agreed on was that we would smash it up. And it turns out to be harder to smash up a computer in ways that would satisfy the spooks than perhaps you would imagine.
I carry it with me as, sort of, a little memento. I think it’s a rather sinister reminder of the intersection of states and journalism. But, it is not just the hard drive. You have to destroy the logic board, there are specific chips on the trackpad, the keyboard. And so, it was very long, dusty, rather noisy work to smash up all these computers.
it goes back to a little of what we were saying about earlier, that here was this intersection between the fourth and the fifth estate. So, one of the copies was in Rio, where Glenn Greenwald lives and I would guess that the intelligence agencies find Glenn Greenwald a difficult customer to deal with because he’s not like a big press organization that you can march in and threaten. And as we say, there were companies in New York. But, I think this is, really, two sides of the same coin. What we are talking about is the collaboration of intelligence agencies around the world to snoop on a global intelligence network. So, that is what they are doing. But, that same global network, the internet, is used by all of us to spread information. So, the thing that makes the snooping possible is the thing, also, that makes it so hard for them to get a piece of information and snuff it out.
it’s a story that, as you know, has sparked an incredible debate in the U.S., it has in throughout Europe, and many other parts of the world. It’s been quite quiet in the U.K., and I am not entirely sure why that is, it may be for unworthy competitive reasons, I hope not. It may just be that in America, you have , in living memory, had McCarthy, you’ve had Nixon, you’ve had Hoover, in Germany they’ve had the Stasi. Maybe in Britain we are a little bit complacent about this kind of stuff. I think actually, people who read these stories and who understand what they are saying are worried, but it has not engendered quite the debate that is has elsewhere.
we’re talking there about British Government taking the decision, which is not actually what is suppose to happen with that law. This law is an obscure bit of The Terror Act, Section 7, which is supposed to be police acting randomly in ports and airports. And why this was wrong to use this law, is because it accords none of the rights to journalistic material that would have happened if they had picked up David Miranda and arrested him as they could have under other acts, or if they’d taken him into Heathrow car park as oppose to the transit lounge.
So, it was just a misuse of terror legislation against journalism. And that, to me, is wrong. If people are saying that it was the government took that decision, then that was even more wrong. And you are right to say that I’ve been revealed about the smashed up discs. There were logistical reasons at the time why I could not write about that. I waited to see how the British Government was going to play this, but it seemed to me at the point that they were going to misuse those kind of laws against reporting. That was the moment to share what else the government had been doing. I thought it was right that the reader should know.
the bit that is sometimes missing from the American debate, the President places great emphasis on the fact that America doesn’t spy on Americans in American territory, as if that was the only thing that mattered. And I thought it was very interesting that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook said, the other day, well that is no use to us if we are trying to build an international business. So, I think Americans haven’t quite understood the anger of other states, of people living in Germany, you say, that Americans feel free to spy on anybody else in the world, and you just have to, sort of, reverse that and think how would Americans feel if Germans were spying on them, or the Chinese. Well, we know how people feel about the Chinese. And then you get to this further dimension that it appears that what the NSA had done is to weaken the systems under which everything is kept secret; banking transactions, medical transactions of ordinary Americans, but also the rest of the world, by building these so-called trapdoors. Now, if the cryptologists seem to say if you build a trap door that the NSA can get through, then probably the Chinese can too, and criminals. So, that, I think this last story about the weakening of the security of the Internet has international implications which are beginning to be felt.
New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan saying many times “readers have been writing to me about a story The Guardian broke last week describing how the U.S. routinely shares with Israel intelligence information that the National Security Agency gathers on American citizens.”
this is another one of those stories that describes the intersections between the American intelligence agencies and what they are paired to share with other governments. So, we obviously thought it was significant to write about what was being shared with Israel, and under what terms, and whether the terms that covered Israel’s use of that was the same as what would be covered in America. That felt a significant story to ask. But, one of the advantages of going into these kind of collaborations is that The New York Times is free to form its own opinion of the material. And so, we’re all coming to these stories from a slightly different angle, which I think is healthy. But, obviously, their own ombudsman felt that was a story they should have covered.
I know some people have a weary shrug and they say, well spies spy and, you know, what is new about that, but, I think it is surprising the degree to which apparently friendly nations are eavesdropping each other, at heads of state level, or cabinet level. We did the story about the G20 meeting in London in which the British government set up a kind of phony tent, an internet cafe, in which delegates could go in and do their emails, not knowing that the British Government or the British intelligence service was logging all their email passwords in order to carry on spying on them when they went home. Most of these were friendly allies, and there was no justification for that except the economic well-being of the U.K. So, I think these are troubling revelations; Brazil is another country. I think it gets to be a big, big story for American innovation and business, if the rest of the world comes to associate these companies with forms of surveillance. That is going to damage American companies. And I think the Silicon Valley companies know this and they are worried. And it also applies to the standards — the international standards by which the internet as a whole operates, and this sense that the Internet is, in some sense, American, or that the American should have an overall role in deciding these standards. There is going be a lot of pushback on that in future and all these things. This is a short-term gain in this kind of behavior and a long term loss.
put it the other way around, if we discovered that Brazil was trying to listen to President Obama’s phone calls emails, there would be outrage. So, you can understand why other states just are offended by this kind of behavior.
the debate never did happen, did it? Because the instinct of these agencies is always going to be to it as secret as possible and to criminalize people who talk about it. So, that debate didn’t happen until Snowden came along. And who is overseeing this and do you trust them? Dianne Feinstein, a great public servant, but does she really understand the finer details of cryptology, and encryption, the capabilities which are expanding exponentially, and can they really match up what the law were intended to do and what engineers are now capable of doing? These are the questions. I think it is not enough just to say, take us on trust we are not doing that, because these secret courts, the FISA courts, we’re now learning some of the things that were troubling them that they never made public. And so, it is a lot to take on trust.
The Guardian has always been something of outsider. It started in Manchester in 1820, has been owned by a family trust since 1936, so it has no owner. We make our own editorial decisions. So, we have a high degree of independence. And it seemed that after 2000, a third of our audience was in America, which is why we’ve moved to America. We now have an operation of 55 people in America, and an audience of many millions. About a third of our audience of 42 million is now in America. And I think there is just an appetite for this kind of reporting. it’s quite rare now. We don’t have shareholders saying we want our returns, and cutting budgets. It is a bit like when you’re doing, it’s keeping very much an international focus because, I think, most American citizens realize their lives cannot be understood in a purely national context. There are things to do with security, economics, technology, the environment are stories that can only be told internationally.
we have been very careful in our reporting, and actually, the intelligence chiefs, when they speak in private, have been graceful enough to acknowledge that we have been responsible. I can understand why you would write a letter like that. And we are not saying that the people who work inside the NSA are bad people. I imagine they have very talented engineers who are capable of doing extraordinary things. I think what we are saying that there has to be a wider debate because it’s not just about national security. There are other interests in society; privacy, civil liberties, of reporting which had to be weighed against security. And so, if you are write about this, you are not saying that the NSA is full of bad people. That would be silly. So, I perfectly understand that you write a letter to the families saying that much of what you do is good and important, which it is.
Assange had a very good and simple idea, which was about liberating material. In a sense, what we tried to do there is what we are doing here, which is to root our reporting on the American First Amendment. So, I mean, even in the U.K., a mature democracy, this reporting was impossible. And I think America should take pride in that, that you have this written constitution that encourages this kind of reporting. And I think if you thought how much we would welcome whistleblowers from Iran or China or Russia, if we could find out the kind of hinge that Assange imagined in which this material could be safely leaked and protected by the highest standards of free speech, that would be a good thing. It went a bit wrong with Assange, and he’s sort of out of action in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
when I see Chelsea Manning given a 60 year sentence, you think, what kind of signal does that show whistleblowers? Because, whistle-blowing, as I say, if we had a whistle-blower inside the Iranian nuclear project, or inside the corruption in some parts of the Chinese Government, we would welcome that. And so, there are kind of universal standards and that’s what civil liberties is all about, that you have universal standards of human rights, and you have to be careful to observe those, and not to bend them, and start using terror legislation against journalism just when it affects you.
I think journalism is certainly by this kind of massive surveillance, yes, because it is impossible to have confidential sources in a world in which algorithms can immediately work out who you’ve been talking to. That’s a big threat.
– source democracynow.org