Sarah Harrison, investigative editor of WikiLeaks. In 2013, she accompanied NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow and spent four months with him in Russia at the airport
Sarah Harrison talking:
having worked with quite a number of sources before for my work with WikiLeaks, this was obviously a large issue for me. When Edward Snowden reached out to us, asking for assistance when he was in Hong Kong, having understood that he was now in an obviously very complex legal and political situation and needed some people to assist with technical and operational security expertise, he reached out to us as an organization. And I went over there, as the person on the ground in Hong Kong, to help him, not only for him, himself, because he had clearly done something so brave and deserved the protection, I felt, but also for the larger objective to try and show that despite Obama’s war on whistleblowers, that actually there was another option. At the time, the Obama administration was intent upon putting alleged source Chelsea Manning into prison for decades—as she is now in prison for 35 years—and we really wanted to try and show the world that there are people that will stand up, there are people that will help. And The Guardian, for example, when—did not give any additional help to Edward Snowden as a source, as a person there, and we wanted to show there are publishers that will help in these scenarios.
With regards to the effects of the documents and revelations that Edward Snowden gave, I think that it has become obvious to so many people in the world that this is, at the very least, a public debate that needed to be happened—that needed to happen. In Germany, it sparked an inquiry into not only the NSA surveillance on this soil, but also with the collaboration with the intelligence services here. And there have been some amazing revelations that have come out through the documents and this inquiry about how strong that cooperation is, with essentially the intel services here being more beholden to the United States than they are to their own government. And we’ve seen similar sorts of revelations and beginnings of change around the world. A number of corporations are understanding they actually have to give better services with regards to encryption and privacy to their customers and are changing their products accordingly.
– argument by some here in the United States that Snowden should have pursued normal whistleblower challenges as somebody—or complaints to supervisors within the institutions that he worked in? But you’ve dealt with many whistleblowers through the years.
I would say that we can actually see, through some quite recent examples—Thomas Drake, a previous NSA whistleblower, being one—that where these channels are attempted to be used, A, not only do they fail, but there is combative persecution that comes back in retaliation from the U.S. government. Thomas Drake lost his job, essentially his life, ended up having to take a very expensive legal case. He is—he was cleared in the end through some very good defense work, but it essentially ruined his life. And the whistleblowing acts that he tried to take were not taken seriously through these proper channels. So they clearly don’t work.
And particularly in the national security industry, I think there is no hope that Edward Snowden could have taken the right channels. Now, he actually did try, right at the beginning, did try these channels. He is, as been mentioned a number of times in this program, a patriot and a believer of the U.S. systems and justice system. But, sadly, as has been proven in the attempts he tried with this, and we’ve seen re. fair trials for whistleblowers, etc., that justice system isn’t always fair, and he was unable to blow the whistle and get this information into the public domain or try any reforms in the other ways, other than to go public in the manner in which he did to U.S. media.
David Miranda, a journalist that was working with Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian at the time. When he transited through the U.K., he was stopped under the Terrorism Act, where you have no right to silence when you’re stopped like this at airports. And he was forced to give up passwords, etc. My legal team was very certain that I would be stopped for my work with WikiLeaks and with Snowden, under this Terrorism Act, despite being a journalist, and would—they knew my ethics: I would not answer some questions, and would therefore be at risk of charges of terrorism. David Miranda, rightfully, said that journalists should not be stopped under this act. We have a belief in the U.K. of freedom of press. And in an attempt to try and protect all journalists, he took a case against this act being used against journalists, and finally won earlier this year at the High Court in the U.K. After this win, my legal team took a reassessment of the risks of the situation, and, very happily, I was able to return home to the U.K. this summer.
we can see in Snowden’s situation that, as Snowden was alluding to in the conversation he had with MacAskill, his case is essentially a very good test case, in that we, despite Obama campaigning on protecting more whistleblowers—he has put more in prison—we do have more and more whistleblowers coming forward, post-Snowden, as well. Courage is contagious. And yet the laws clearly don’t protect them. There are no paths for them that are workable beforehand. The laws don’t protect them afterwards. As well as what Oliver was talking about with regards to a fair trial or not for Snowden, he also would not be able to mount a public interest defense. He would not be able to explain, as you are with other sorts of alleged crimes, the public debate he had started and how, from an ethical standpoint, actually what he did was right. So, essentially, whether before or after, he has so few options open to him.
And I think that this spin that we’ve—we have from Clinton, and including this harm done, well, there’s actually no examples of that. From my work with WikiLeaks, we’ve had years of these attacks, and still the U.S. government has not come up with any examples of this. So, to me, this is all just rhetorical spin trying to deflect from the real situation, that we clearly need whistleblowers as part of our democratic processes. And at the moment, protections for them do not exist at all, and they clearly must be built. And I think that the campaign for pardoning that has begun will hopefully spark this element of the public debate a lot, to see how we can move forward in that area, as well as the protections of privacy.
Oliver Stone talking:
When Mrs. Clinton said “into the wrong hands,” she clearly meant the Russians. And she misses the point that no spy gives his story to the newspapers for free, which is what he did, and we show it very clearly in the Hong Kong hotel room. On top of it, you remember the scene when Snowden turns over all the records to the journalists.
And we made a point in the scene, is he kills the—he destroys, deletes all the information that he has. He says, “I have no more information. I’m traveling with no baggage,” because he knew—he had no exit plan. I mean, it was really kind of a—he wanted just to get this information out. And he risked, basically, everything. He felt like it was over with his life. He was willing to accept arrest or death or—it was over. And that’s what the point of that scene was. He deletes it. It’s your responsibility now.
When you showed the scene of Joe and Shailene walking in front of the White House, they’re talking. His early views were very libertarian about Ed’s views. And the point is that many Republicans are supporting that view. I think 50 of them voted for the Freedom Act. And a lot of them actually are in sympathy with this idea of—that the NSA has gone way too far.
Sarah Harrison talking:
it is great news that Manning has felt she is able to end her hunger strike and that her demands are starting to be met, her demands for basic human rights. It is sad and, I think, an obvious—these are two other obvious examples of this persecution of these truth tellers, these people bringing information into the public domain. Just again referring to the Hillary clip, as Oliver was explaining, Ed very much was working with U.S. journalists to bring this information to the U.S. public. So one can only assume, in Hillary’s quote, she’s talking about the wrong hands being supposedly the American public understanding what their government is up to.
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Sarah Harrison
investigative editor of WikiLeaks and director of the Courage Foundation, which raises defense funds for Snowden and other whistleblowers.
Oliver Stone
three-time Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter.
— source democracynow.org