The Washington Post has revealed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly gave the National Security Agency sweeping power to intercept information, “concerning” all but four countries around the world. A classified 2010 document leaked by Edward Snowden lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. Only four were protected from NSA spying: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The NSA was also given permission to gather intelligence about the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency. According to The Washington Post, the secret document indicates that academics, journalists and human rights researchers living in the United States and abroad could all be targeted under the order.
Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, who accompanied Edward Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow last June. She spent 39 days with Snowden in the transit zone of an airport in Moscow while she assisted in his legal application to 21 countries for asylum. Sarah Harrison then remained with Snowden for about three more months after Russia granted him temporary asylum. Sarah Harrison is investigative editor of WikiLeaks and acting director of the newly formed Courage Foundation.
Sarah Harrison talking:
Britain has a Terrorism Act, which has within it a portion called Schedule 7, which is quite unique. What it is is it gives officials the ability to detain people at the border as they go in or out or even transit through the country. And this allows them to question people on no more than a hunch, giving them with no—giving them no right to silence. It also was the case of no right to a lawyer, as well, though that’s starting to be changed. But you’re compelled to answer their questions. All the legal advice received is that the likelihood is very strong that I would be Schedule Sevened, detained under this and questioned, because of my work with WikiLeaks and Snowden. There are certainly answers, for source protection reasons, that I would be unable to answer, which would make me committing a crime upon returning home.
Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was actually just transiting through the country. He was—through the U.K. He had been in Berlin. He was going back to Glenn in Rio, in Brazil. And he was just transiting through the U.K. The U.K. officials got intel that he might have some information that was of benefit, they decided, to their terrorism investigation, and so they detained him under this, and he was compelled to answer all of their questions. He was held for the full nine hours. he was not entitled to a lawyer or anything that full time.
Edward Snowden reached out for help, and we were uniquely in a position to help for several reasons. We have a history and an understanding of what it is to be in a position where you’re being persecuted, where you’re dealing with the government of the United States getting their full force down upon you. We have a number of connections—legal, diplomatic—around the world. And I have a lot of contacts in Hong Kong, so I’ve been there many times. So I was able to operate there knowing the city, when maybe others would be unable.
I had not met him before. So, well, we worked to find out the legal situation, the legal options, to negotiate his ability to exit the country and to ensure that he would have as high a probability of asylum and safe passage in other places around the world.
when we left, the United States had just put in an extradition request for him. The process is that this has to go through the court system there and be approved or be denied. We actually left before it had finished going through the Hong Kong court system, so there was no illegality about his departing the country.
If he had been arrested in Hong Kong, there were two things at play. He had the ability to put in an asylum request. Hong Kong then would obviously have had to have decided what its decision on this asylum request was. They actually have a history of taking a very long time to do this. The problem with his case would have been that if, as it did, the extradition request came in, and if—when it was approved, he would have to be arrested and then held in prison whilst either the extradition request or the asylum were being decided which avenue they would take. And because often the asylum takes so long, he would be held in prison for an awful long time.
Choosing the route to take, the aim was to get to Latin America—Ecuador, specifically. They were obviously positive towards the granting of asylum. The reason for going via Russia was that, obviously, we needed to have a safe flight route. You can’t actually get direct from Hong Kong to Latin America. Normally, flights to Latin America go through the United States or Western Europe. And this was obviously not an option in this case, so hence the sort of seemingly bizarre route via Russia and Cuba on to Latin America. WikiLeaks and Julian helped.
whilst we were in the air, as soon as we’d left, Hong Kong announced that he had left, I think, in an ability to sort of say, you know, “Stop hassling us. He’s gone. He’s not here anymore.” So then the United States made very public announcements about how they had canceled his passport, and if any—you know, any onward travel therefore would be without any valid documentation. So we were essentially stranded by the U.S. government in Russia.
For 39 days. Well, he didn’t—we didn’t have a visa. I mean, that was not—that you can transit through without needing a visa as long as you’re under 24 hours within the airport. So, hence, we had no visa to remain in Russia, so he couldn’t just walk on through. And so, we spent 39 days trying to get asylum in various places around the world, many, including Germany. And they were either turned down or ignored, the requests, for the most part. Latin America was very supportive, but the ability to physically get there safely at this stage was impossible, and so, hence, applying for temporary asylum in Russia.
One’s sort of a general ethical point that someone had done something so brave, and they should be supported, and I felt an empathy, a natural human empathy, and wished to support. Then there’s also the fact that, I mean, I work for a publishing organization. We obviously rely a lot on sources and believe in source protection. And the last example that the world had of how the U.S. government treats a high-value source is Chelsea Manning, who they put into a cage, was tortured, sentenced to prison for 35 years in the end. And I think it’s important for the world that you can speak the truth, you can blow the whistle, and you don’t have to end up in a cage; there are people that will support you, that there are people that will take risks for you, when you have risked so much, and you can have asylum in a country.
When that letter(that Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general, wrote to the minister of justice of Russia requesting that Edward Snowden be extradited to the United States) came out, it was sort of rather extraordinary, when you’re looking at a country that has Guantánamo Bay. Chelsea Manning was—it was found by the U.N. special rapporteur on torture at the time, [Juan Méndez], that she had been tortured. So these claims were, as far as I could see, just empty rhetoric trying desperately to block any right to asylum that Snowden legally had around the world. They did this in a number of occasions. When we were looking at asylum in other countries, as well, they pre-emptively put in extradition requests to those countries, even though he wasn’t there, didn’t have asylum. So, I think that it’s an obvious pattern that the U.S. government chooses to try to initiate a pre-emptive attack to prevent people’s legal rights.
we were still in the airport. There had been a number of presidents that had been Russia meeting with Putin. There was—and Morales was one of them. President Morales was one of them. And when his plane took off, there was the allegation that Snowden was on the flight, and the airspace around Europe shut down while he was trying to get across the continent. So here you see an extraordinary example of the U.S. dominance, where they’re able to get other supposedly sovereign nations to close their airspace because of supposed intel that they have, and a president’s plane, violating international agreements, is downed and was forced to come down in Austria.
There was Spain, Portugal, France. There was a number of countries that participated. Austria had to accept him at the airport. I don’t think they’d go quite as far as having his plane run out of fuel and just crash to the ground, quite that far.
It was obviously extraordinary, and still is, that a president’s plane would be downed. I think that it is something—these sorts of extralegal and extraordinary actions is something that WikiLeaks has seen on a number of occasions. The financial blockade—when we were publishing the war logs that started and started publishing Cablegate, there was an extralegal financial blockade against us. The fact that financial—supposedly independent financial companies will just cut off because of—cut off a publishing organization because of pressure from the U.S. government is, again, another extraordinary act that shouldn’t be happening within the rule of law. PayPal and MasterCard.
To receive donations, direct to us or actually via third parties that were collecting money for us. So this is quite an extraordinary, against-the-rule-of-law action that was taken due to pressure of the United States government. And it’s another—another example of this type of action can be seen with the downing of the plane.
for Edward Snowden’s defense and also for future Snowdens. We want to show that there is an organization that will do what we did for Snowden and as much as possible in raising money for legal defense, public advocacy for whistleblowers, so that they know when they—if they come forward, there is a support group there for them.
Edward Snowden certainly didn’t purposefully end up in Moscow. He’s not a spy or any of these words. I think that they come forward with this type of rhetoric to try and paint a picture which is completely untrue. And the facts of the case actually speak against that. What Edward Snowden did was inherently a patriotic act. He revealed this information to show to the American public that they are being spied on by their own government and that the government of the United States is breaking its own Constitution. And this is facts that they should know. And so, to call him a spy—well, if he’s a spy, it is only for the American public.
His history, I think, sort of speaks for itself, in that he’s always had a desire to serve his country. He’s always been very patriotic. And at the beginning, this played out with an understanding that the war in Iraq was legitimate, and he wanted to help and fight for his nation. Through his work then at the NSA and working as a contractor for the intelligence agency, he was able to understand that actually this isn’t necessarily—they’re not actually necessarily doing the right thing and telling the public the truth. And so his—although his same motives have always been the same, to serve his country and to uphold the Constitution, the method with which this was appropriate to actually act out became a very different one. And in this case, it became having to explain to the American public what was actually being done to them.
I had previously been working as an investigative journalist. WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in which it does it, with its—the concept we have of scientific journalism, I find very important and really appeals to me, that all of the source documents should be there. The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history. And we’ve actually seen that a number of the largest stories that have come out of our publications are because of people finding them themselves, or people who are involved in maybe a court case, then they have some more evidence for their court case, they’re able to try and get justice. And so, for me, this is a very important ethic that is very dear to WikiLeaks’s heart that few others do have.
WikiLeaks still been releasing information. We have released the Syria Files, which are emails from some sections of the Syrian government, since he’s been confined. We carried on releasing the GI Files, which are emails from global intelligence agency Stratfor which showed spying on Bhopal activists. We’ve released policy documents, chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a secret agreement that’s taking place covering a lot of the world’s countries in trade, and their IP chapters, which talk about very high levels of data sharing, environment chapters that, despite the rhetoric, they’re doing very little to actually combat environmental protections—or, to keep environmental protections. Our most recent release was of the Trade in Services Agreement, the financial annex of that, which again is another secret trade that’s taking place which affects over 60 percent of the world’s trade in services.
We will do our own assessment. We get them ready for publication. We do our own journalism on them and write our own stories. But we also make large international collaborations. Cablegate, for example, we had 80 media organizations around the world that we were giving access to these documents to.
when it comes to large international publications like that, you do need local partners to be able to give the expertise and the full understanding of what’s going on in those regions, and, of course, to publish in the language of those countries for the people that it’s affecting. So, we put—we try to put together as large a media coordination group as possible for each publication.
Here is a man—there are obvious threats from the United States. There is a secret grand jury taking place trying to indict him and other members of WikiLeaks.
There were documents that came out—I mean, there have been some public statements by government officials. But then there were also documents that came out in the Chelsea Manning trial, the alleged WikiLeaks source that was just sentenced to 35 years in prison. And they show categorically that this secret grand jury is taking place. So there is an obvious U.S. threat. There have been politicians talking about his—calling for his assassination. So his asylum is against the United States threat; that is at what Ecuador is protecting him.
Since the beginning of the Swedish allegations, Julian and now, since he’s been under their protection, the Ecuadorean government have been asking for Sweden to come and question him at the embassy. Of course, he would like nothing more than to clear his name and for this case to be ended, but the Swedes, despite the fact that it’s a regular legal practice, refuse to come and do so. The problem with if he were to be extradited to Sweden is that they have—the prosecutor there has petitioned for him to be put straight into solitary confinement. And then, regardless with what was happening with the U.S. case, he would not have the ability to take asylum. So he really needed to take that protection from the U.S. whilst it was still an available avenue for him.
His asylum is not really a comment on that. It’s more a comment on his own situation and his ability to take asylum. Because he would be put straight into prison within Sweden into solitary confinement, he would be unable—even if the U.S. put in an extradition order, he would be unable to take asylum from jail there. So it really was a last moment for him to be able to take up this legal right.
They’re trying to indict him for a number of charges, it seems like. It’s difficult to understand the exact parameters, because it is a secret grand jury and they’re letting as little out as possible. But it seems they’re trying to indict him for his publishing actions. They would like to work up an espionage charge against him. But, yes, it’s difficult to tell exactly. But a secret grand jury is there trying to indict him, and that only happens when it’s serious allegations.
— source democracynow.org
Sarah Harrison, investigative editor of WikiLeaks and acting director of the newly formed Courage Foundation. In 2013, she accompanied NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and spent four months with him in Russia.