12/24/21 12/24/21 [captioning made possible amy: from new york, this is democracy now! today a special on two men who will not be home for christmas, julian assange and edward snowden. >> the most important thing about the stories of013, the surveillance system was the product of a failure where we the public have sort of lost our seat at the table.

>> as wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all of our society. amy: in a special brdcast, an hour with nsa whistleblower edward snowden, who is in political exile in moscow, along with journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges. we will talk about mass surveillance, government secrecy, internet freedom, and u.s. attempts to extradite and prosecute wikileaks founder julian assange, who is in prison in london. >> what they're angry about is he represents still a weapon that prevents themrom doing what is most important to them, which is the ability to run the world, including societies that are docratic, without anyone knowing what they are doing. amy: all that and more, coming u

this is democracy now!, demoacynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. today, a special on two people who will not be home for the holidays, edward snowden and julian assange. in this special broadcast, we spend the hour with nsa whistleblower edward snowden, along with two pulitr prize winning journalists, glenn greenwald and chris hedges. i recently moderated a discussion with them at the virtual war on terror film festival after a screening of "citizenfour," the oscar winning documentary about snowden by laura poitras. the documentary chronicles how snowden met with laura poitras and glenn greenwald in a hotel room in hong kong in june 2013 to share a trove of secret documents about how the united states had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on americans and people across the globe.

it was the biggest leak ever to come out of the nsa. after sharing the documents, edward snowden was charged in the united states for violating the espionage act d other laws. as he attempted to flee from hong kong to latin america, snowden was stranded in russia at the airport after the u.s. revoked his passport. he was great a political asylum and has lived in moscow ever since. i began by asking edward snowden to talk about why he chose to blow the whistle on the nsa. >> i grew up in the shadow of government. both my parents worked for the government and expected i would as well. september 11 happened. i was 18 years old. it was one of those things th really changes the politics

not only of the people, but the place. at the time, i didn't really question that. we had this new problem, everybody on tv saying fix it. when everybody else was protesting the iraq war, i was volunteering. that is because i believed with the government was saying. not all, but i believe the government was mostly honest because it seemed to me unreasonable that the government would be willing to risk sort of our long-term fate for short-term [inaudible] ended up goingo work for dcaa, undercover overseas. then i moved into contracting, which was you're still working for the government in government offices taki directives from government ofcials

working with government equipment, but the badge you wear that identifies you changes from blue to green. you make basically twice as much for the same work. i worked for the nsa before eventually bouncing back and forth and back and forth until i ended up in hawaii in a place called the office of information sharing. it was only here -- i was told they would not know how good i would be at that job, neither did i -- that i could sethe whole picture. at the same me that i was beginning to identify with the government, the governmentas beginning to identify le with citizens. whatad happened was as we grew up with this idea of a private citizen

[indiscernible] the public official, right, where we know everything about them d what they're doing, th their policies and interests are, we scrutinize them because they order our lives, the directives that happened to us. that was being converted. and because of the new war on terror, all of the old ideals could be tossed away and replaced. that was the system of mass surveillance. we were publicly told the government knew it was likely unconstitutional, and certainly illegal, but they continued with it anyway because they argued to themselves, at least, it was necessary. it was not necessary and it would take time to establish that th fact, but in brief, realizing this through the documentation

of the architecture of the system, how it came to be, who is involved in building it, authorizing it, constructing it, which fell to people like me, did not realize at each step of our careers what it was we were actually building. because they need to know principal collapsed your universe. you didn't realize what the office next door you was doing. you're not supposed to know. it was only by breaking down those barriers come the fact, from cia to nsa that i moved from actual officer of government to contractor working for privatcompanies, extending the work of government, then finally working in this office where i could see sort of everything, not just at my agency but other agencies, that i saw the large picture. and th was fundamentally the government lied not only to me, but to all of us.

and this to me seems like something publicly, broadly we h to know. because if government is democracy intended to be mandated by the consent of the government, we don't know what it is they're doing, and that is not consent -- informed consent. it is not informed, it is not meaningful. i started writing to journalists that brought me eventually to glenn. that is where the story goes from there. y cut to and glenn?ras i want you to tell the story again because there are many who have not seen the film and it is that act, and we will then introduce glenn, when you decided to leave everything that you knew so well,

where you felt so safe to enter world where, as you said, you had no idea where you would end up. >> when you first enter on duty at the cia, they take you in a dark room. it is very solemn ceremony. you raise your hand and say "i, state your name, whatever, do solemnly swear to support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic." i talked about the oath of secrecy, there is no oath of secrecy. there's a standard form classified that you sign. it is an agreement. on the other hand, you do take this oath of service. and this for me [indiscernible]

on o hand you're supposed to keep the secrets of government because this is classified information. the fact the government is breaking the law is itsela secret. but when the government lawbreaking is a violation of the constitution that you enter into duty to uphold, what did you do? i talked to my colleagues and my bosses. they wanted nothing to do with this. many of them agreed it was wrong, they said, it is not my job to fix it and it is not your job, either. they knew what would happen as a result. everyone knew the government was going to be tremely unhappy. and everyone who has done this in the past has ended up charged. but for me, i felt i had an obligation to do this. so i gathered information i believed was evidence, unlawful or unconstitutional activity,

and i could have published it myself. i could have just put it on the internet, established a website. possibly could have made it so it would not likely track back to me. however, i thought if i just declared myself the president of secrets and i made some mistake, there wasn't much process involved -- the problem is the government itself [indiscernible] power. the president saying, look, we decide what we will and won't do. the courts have no role in this. the legislature has no real role in this. oversight has not been nctional for years, whici'm sure the panelists will describe. i did on to replicate that. i can check my own worst impulse i partnering with journalists and then take my bias out of the equation.

look at what the documents say, go to the government for clarificatio [indiscernible] find the best possible version of the truth. what is the most accurate representation of this? and of that superset of their investigation, what is the subset of that as in the public interest? working in absolute secrecy with laura poitras and glenn greenwald individually ewan macaskill, i shared this archive of information with them, publish only what they believe is in the public interest. that is what brought us to this hotel room in hong kong. explain what these documents actually meant for the first time. as glenn testified to, these were very dense,

technical documents and the sort of thing that journalists and the public world had never seen before because there are highly classified. amy: that brings us to glenn greenwald. glenn talk about your first contacts with ed snowden, when you decided to make that trip to hong kong, the risks you are taking. at the time, you worked for the guardian, taking on all of the institutions that you knew could certainly take you down. >> in e weeks leading to our ultimate meaning, i was fixated on the idea that we all fly to hong kong to be with him. we still got not know who he was. we do not know which agency he worked for. the fact he wanted us to go to hong kong

made everything much more confusin because why would somebody with high-level access to top secret documents -- usually would expect to find a person like that in the underworld of arlington, virginia, not hong kong. i remember telling ed, look, i trust you. i feel like what you're saying intuitively is genuine. but before i get on a plane and fly all the way literally across the world to the other side of the world, show me something that demonstrates you are authentic, that you actually have material that makes this all worthwhile. we spent, i don't know, a good two weeks setting up an encryption system to let him do at. i think he sent me 20 documents. even though the documents were just the tiniest tip

of the iceberg, as he said, they were shocking. just the mere fact alone that top-secret documents had leaked for the first time ever from the nsa, the most secretive agency within the world's most powerful government, was already momentous enough, independent other content. but among the documents are parts of what we were able to report as the prism program, cooperation on the pt of what of the tim where the nine tech giants of silicon valley with the nsa, widespread datasharing giving over wholesale information about their users to the nsa with no judicial checks, no legal frameworks, no democratic accountability. ed sufficiently lured me. that night i called my editor at the guardian and demanded to fly to new york the next day, which i did. i met with janine gibson, showed her what i had and everyone immediately knew

this was going to be one of the most important stories and it history of modern journalism based on the tiny bit of information. that next day, so iwas very fast, laura and i boarded a plane from jfk direct to hong kong and i talked about how i spent the 16 hours so engrossed with the documents by that point we had had not necessarily the best operational security ever reading top secret documents on a public passenger jet while flying across the world. but i knew this was by this point the kind ofirst opening ever into this sprawling, undemocratic security state. and i could not help myself. i needed to see what was in there. they're related in hong kong 16 years later

and the very next morning through a plane that involves lots of spy craft, which was really important. we did not know if the time what u.s. government authorities knew about ed and what he was doing and what we were doing, what chinese authorities might have known, what local hong kong intelligence officials might have known. all of that still was so important. it was a huge blur. we were 12 hours in a difrent time zone, had to hurtle ourselves in a short time over to hong kong to meet someone we knew nothing about. i will never forget the moment that ed walked in and laura and i were shocked by many things, including his young age. i got the whole time i was talking to somebody who is likely 60 or 65 years old. i think part because of the sophistication of his insight, but also the thing that struck me so much

and to this day is a critical part of my worldview of how i look at things was unlike most sources who understandably when they're turning over top-secret documents for journalists and doing something the government regards as a crime and therefore want to conceal their identity from the start, s posture was, i don't want to hide. i want to identify who i am. i want to explain to the public why i am doing what i have done and why i think it is so important. my belief was that it was probably 65 or 70. a lot easier to say i am willi risk life in prison if life in prison means 10 or 15 or 20 years of expectancy rather than, you know, 60 70. so we were shocked by that. we went up to ed's hotel room and laura being laura, immediately turned on the camera, and me being me,

immediately began interrogating ed. i think we had maybe 10 seconds of niceties before i forced him into this very intense interrogation. we were sitting maybe a few feet apart from one another in the small hotel room. by the end of the day, i was convinced ed was authentic, the documents were genuine, and this was a story that the public had an immediate right to know, should have known years ago. the courage and the kind of principled conviction that drove ed to do what he did i think immediately infected both myself and laura. ewan joined us the next day. i think he was contaminated by that as well. i think eventually that made the guardian very passionate and willing and that act, as we know, created these reverberations that to this day that the government is trying to spy

on what it is we're doing, particularly target marginalized and vulnerable groups in that journalism and whistleblowi is one of the few, if not the only, means we have to find out what they are doing and to guard against their abuses. amy: journalist glenn greenwald, won the pulitzer prize for his reporting on edward snowden's leaked nsa documents. when we me back, we will continue our discussion with glenn and ed snowden and be joined by another pulitzer prize winner, the journalist chris hedges. we will talk about surveillance, internet freedom, julian assange, and more.

■■ [music break] amy: this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. as we continue our discussion with nsa whistleblower edward snowden and pulitzer prize winning journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges, i asked ed snowden to talk about what was most significant about the documents he leaked in 2013 exposing the nsa's massive surveillance apparatus. >> the most important thing about e stories of 2013 that i think, particularly the story about surveillance.

[indiscernible] the surveillance system was the product of a failure of governance where we the public have sort of lost our seat at the table. the secrecy, the state secrets regime, the classification animal had grown to such a size that it allowed to push public oversight further and further to the fringes of the decision making apparatus. what that meant was for the first time in history, there would be technical abilities and the political reality that it was possible to construct a system that had not existed. in history, traditionally, government surveillance

has occurred in a targeted manner. whether it is the police, we suspect this person of a crime, going to a judge, showing the basis for, establishing probable cause, then they put teams -- that people follow them when they leave their house in the morning. they have another team go inside their house and placed listening devices. video surveillance. copy their note pads. take photographs of whatever is going on. the hard disks. whatever. that put necessary contraints on government views. [indiscernible] they don't hear every word the person says, generally. but they get the idea.

they see how long they were with that person. they see where that person went. follow them. these activity records were now available for the first time in the form of what we now call metadata. what private detectives get from following you around, taking pictures, writing down notes were now being produced by the smartphones in our pockets, by the laptops on our desk, on the couch next to us. it was also coming from your tv and from your car. coming from automated license plate readers. all of these things for the first time were producing information that that they did not have to go to a judge and say, we think this person is up to no good. what is under the aegis of threat of terrorists, we could say we want to collect all information that could potentially, theoretically be linked

to a terrorism investigation before we need it. we will simply say, look, we will still gather as though you were suspected. this is what changed and this is what continues. what happened toxpand th to an even grear state of alarm is now this is a business. now coorations are competing against each other to see who can provide similar products and more even attractive product, not just the government's. also to advertisers anyone else. that is what has changed. amy: which brings us to the pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges. chris, you have spent decades exposingow governments wield legal power from central america

to the middle east to the bkans. ed snowden said bend his disclosus with the balance of state versus people's power to meaningfully oppose that power. can you talk about the significance of what ed just said in terms of exposing the wars that the u.s. has engaged in to this day? >> i would focus narrowly on what everything that ed exposed for the press. so when i began reporting the war in el salvador in 1983, when we got secret classified information, they were documents -- we did not transfer anything electronically. this was the traditional way. in order to get those documents, had contacts with people who are willing to pass them to you.

and so what happed -- this was under the obama administration -- the aggressive use of the espioge act against anyone who would reach ou shut down traditional investigative journalism, which i did periodically as a foreign correspdent and they did after 9/11 when i was based in paris covering al qaeda in europe and the middle east. so friends of mine -- i left the paper in 2005, but friends of mine who were still doing investigative reporting at the paper said, in terms of gettin any information on the inter-workings of power of government, it is becoming impossible. and i won't quote her, but a former colleague of mine at the paper, investigative journalist, said, speaks to someone at the doj or anyone else,

they are nervous about even reciting official policy over the phone. something that sounds like a press release. cause they don'want to get tagged for speaking to a journalist. in fact, they are already tagged. i think it is important to understand what ed did and gle did is the only way left. jeremy hammond was another figure when i sued obama over section 1021 of the national defense authorization act which overturned 1878 act which prohibit the military from being used as a domestic police force, used that emails, i think some 3 million emails hammond had hacked into with the prosecutor from like the one ed worked for at the homeland security where the chat was trying to tie domestic opposition groups to foreign terrorist groups.

they were asking, was anything posted on this particular site, this jihadist site? so they could use terrorism laws against them? so the last readout as a journalist comes from figures like ed but the cost is catastrophic in his case if he was not in moscow and they had grabbed him, he would be facing the kind of charges that julian assange is facing, who did not leak, did not hacking anything, he just published material. for me what has been so distressing about the modern kind of period is that that wholesale surveillance. that ability to follow anyone as really shut down our traditional access to people with a concinence inside systems of power, which is the only way that we can do any real

reporting on the national security state. you see what they ha done to ed, to glenn. after he published that, he wasn't sure if he could come back to the united states. that for me, and speaking about the crimes of empire, i mean, that gets back into another issue, which is the collapse of foreign correspondence. as revenue has fallen to the floor, all the foreign bureaus are gone. there is no reporting. people will pull a clip disseminated out of syria or something that somebody has sent out, but that is not reporting. there is a giant black hole about what is happening, which was made the iraqi and afghan war logs so important. and i will, in defense of people there, most of whom are now freelance, covering a war is very expensive.

i mean, if you want to be safe. i was driving in bosnia a $100,000 armored car, and all of this stuff. it was dangerous. i think the danger level has exponentially increased, but we are intentionally trying to shoot journalist and indeed, shot 45 foreign respondents. you cannot go into the caliphate, you cannot go in into syria with many of these groups because you will get kidnapped. that has created, for me, if something was overseas, just terrifying and it has drawn a veil on what the empire is doing, and to quote thucydides when he is attacking the death of athenian democracy and the rise of athenian empire, it opposes on myself. my last point would be that many of the techniques

of surveillance and control that ed exposed were often first tested. gaza is a laboratory for the israeli military and intelligence service and they will talk about it as it being tested against the palestinians. so, we often see on the outer rehes of empire, the techniques that gravitate back to the united states as of course they have. edward: he is right about the laboratory aspect. we see the same kind of techniques that were present in the material that i provided the journalists in 2013 being used to make a moves themselves in afghanistan were being applied by the fbi such as the black lives matter protesters in the 10 years.

it can only be used far away in afghanistan against the other. and then, it moves right here back home to your neighbors, but you spoke about this dynamic that is just something that i was considering on. i think about this a lot, which is it has become more difficult to access ficials. they will not tell you athing. the relationship between sources and the journalists that they work with in place the power and all over the place is wrecked, but the doors have really been closed, but this has increased the necessity and the power meant of document releases.

things like chelsea manning provided, things like i provided. ellsberg, in the 70's. and we see the facebook person, frances haugen. it feels like we are in talks about this postruth where the actual facts of the case are disputed frequely as the interpretation of what the obvious truth is. it seems that documentation has a way around that. i would just ask, where do you think things are headed from, if we have normal orccess to factual infmation om theovernment, you have a much greater history of doing this, amy, since you are part of the life. democracy now! is one of the few outlets that reports aggressively on this. it is snowing on us in regards to what is happening,

because they want to view the fact of our reality through a preferred lens. when you begin shutting the voting public from t facts of our reality and what they actually are, d at the same time, any documentary release is quite literally criminalized, what happens next? chris: what happens next is -- i will let glenn, because he has written on this. i do not think the facebook is a whistleblower but a tool, and they are using her to justify the censorship that they want. so, you know this gets into a whole other analysis but we have undergone a corporate coup d'état. it is over, anytime you ha a tiny cabal it seizes power,

in our case corporate. all of the institutions, especially democratic initutions are formed to increase that power and wealth. then of course, you are leaving the vast majority, the 99% if we want to use that term, the whole process is about disempowering them. that surveillance has to become more dark. amy: pulitzer prize-winning chris hedges. we will continue with chris hedges, edward snowden and glenn greenwald and we will talk more about the imprisoned publisher, julian assange. ■■ [music break]

amy: this is democracy now!, democracynow.org. the war and peace report, i am amy goodman. as we continue our discussion with edward snowden and glenn greenwald and chris hedges. i asked edward snowden to talk about attempts to prosecute and extradite wikileaks founder julian assange who suffered a mini stroke in late october. as he fought to avoid extradition to the united states, to face espionage charges.

he faces 175 years in prison. a british court ruled in favor of the biden administration's appeal to extradite assange, in a ruling condemned by journalists around the world as a major blow to press freedom. this is ed snowden. edward: we see this in the public responses to leaking and whistleblowing or whatever you want to call that. it is both sides of the aisle, democrat, and republican, any country and pick their political dynamic, power does not respond well to its misbehavior being exposed. that is very clear, and that is what happened. there is no access to courts, or protection for someone

who makes the government uncomfortable, or produces a large amount of a political threat, entirely political threat. a nonviolent publication of true information. this is all julian assange has ever done. all of the charges in cmunicating national census information, espionage, conspiracy, it is all entirely constructed. racking charge under the computer fraud and abuse act, which is supposed to show about hacking military computers. it never happened, it was a product of a 20 second conversation between a suppose it julian assange because the chat transcript is anonymous.

but then it is describing this person trying to access the administrative account for the work machine to copy this material. i work with these machines. it is entirely a source protection conversation about how could manning protect their identy if this was manning from being discovered. this is predicting as if julian assange hacked the pentagon and that is absolutely ridiculous. if you look at the consteation, julian is one of history's greatest criminals, and others have gotten less time than what they are threatening assange with. what was his crime? telling the truth about what the government did not want to be told. chris mentioned this facebook person,

and a lot of people miss this. it does not really mter why a whistleblower or anyone else publishes this material, and it does not matter whether it is facebook's dirty laundry or risotto recipes or material regarding the absolute government's internal truth of mass surveillance. the whistleblower is the lever. we do not have to like them, but they do not truly matter once they haveone this, and it is wonderful the support i received. i very much hope that julian will receive more of it, particularly from the press, which is great. it would be a tragedy if he did not. but, the response should be a little bit like thank you very much for your whistleblowing, but now please stop telling us what we should do about facebook.

you are not especially placed to answer a puic conversation. we will hear you out, sure. but you should be treated as the speaker of god's honest truth. that is a wonderful thing, it is a public interest gesture, but a lot of the opposition people has aut this is it is the point where the whistleblower label is applied to someone and every thing that they say after that should receive additional weight. but their statements should not be evaluated any differently. chris: i was reflecting on what i said at the beginning in some ways that these events that were 10 lifimes ago and a lot of ways anything happened before trump does,

and a lot of it seems like it happened just yesterday, and i think the reason for that is that sometimes there are important details that we forgot, so chris mentioned and i probably have not thought abouthis in several years because it is revealing that when there was a report around the time we were doing the snowden reporting that the nsa has been spying on president obama and the personal cell phone of angela merkel. she called president obama indignant and enraged and very meaningfully given that she had grown up in communist east germany under the actual stasi it was not an abstraction to her. and it was a very vivid memory and said what you are doing is what they did and that caused german newspapers to go and interview former agents of the stasi

and what they said about the snowden revelations is that we would've loved to have had the capacity that the nsa developed, but it was beyond anything that we could have possibly dreamed of. what they have done is so far beyond anything that we were capable of doing or even thought about doing. this is ubiquitous surveillance that they have created. and i thought that was poignant, and on the other hand it seems like yesterday because so many of theind of battles that were waged as a result of what ed did and the fallout are very much with us today. you know, i think that at the time when we started the reporting and the debates that were provoked by them unfolded, the focus was on the infringement of our right to privacy. that was an important part of the story.

i always fellike the story was about more than that. one part of it was whether or not we actually have a democracy in anything other than name only if incredibly consequential events are being undertaken in the dark without anybody knowing what is beindone. one of the things that was so striking when when we revealed these programs it was not just the public and the media thatad no idea that the nsa was doing any of these things, it was members of the intelligence committee. and, embers of the national security committees and you cake parliament and the u.k. parliament and they wrote op-ed saying we do not know that anything was happening. we were waging a battle on the public's right to know. the reason there was so much backlash against t story and ed and the reason eight years later he was in russia and when donald trump floated the idea of a pardon more outrage came

and the reason they are so angry was not necessarily because of the right privacy aspect, but because of their ality to make consequential decisions, the most consequenti decisio without anybody knowing what they are doing was imperiled by these revelations. that is the same reason that julian assange is now in prison, not necessarily because they are specifically angry about what he revealed in 2010 or 2016 or even the revelations, what they are angry about is that he represents still a weapon that prevents them from doing what is most important to them. which is, the ability to run the world including societies that are sensibly democratic without anyone knowing what they are doing. the other aspect that is really important with regards to this whole facebook disclosures

and the debate that is taking place over how we combat things like misinformation and fake news as a result of frances haugen and even before that. i mentioned the first day that i interrogated ed what i wanted and needed to know more than anything was you are 29 years old, you have a loving family, you have a girlfriend with whom you have had a very fulfilling relationship. you have this incredibly bright future ahead of you, why would you want to risk your entire life spending the rest of your life in a high security prison for this cause, why is this importt enough for you to do. what finally convinced me about his motives was when he told me about how a free internet was so central to everything that he was able to do in his life growing up, you know it like in a lower middle-class home with the about the ability to travel internationally lots of those privilege

that peoplcome from well wered places, that was his gateway to exploring the world. in a lot of ways i saw our cause not necessarily by a limited definition protectin the right of privacy, but protecting a free intern, this invention which is singularly cable of empowering and emancipating people and allowing people to communicate and organize without centralized corporate and government control. and, i see so many of the current controversies about how much censorship there should be online, comments from facebook and google, the anger that facebook and google are not censoring enough which is the big take away from these disclosures from frances haugen. debates about how much the government should control the internet, that is very much a central part of that same battle

that was being waged when ed and julian came forward, which is can centers of power around the world tolerate any kind of instrument like the internet that enables people to interact freely, to think freely and develop ideas freely and organize ideas freely outside of the control centralized authority. edward: what is happening with julian assange today and wikileaks, like glenn said, i do not think any reasonable person lieves it has anything to do with what he did in 2009, publishing the iraq and afghanistan war logs and guantanamo they files which received high prizes in journalism. they recognize it as a public interest story of historic importance.

glenn: "the guardian," "new york times," and all the major news outlets participated because of that recognition. edward: this was a positive event even though the administration hated it. but we are not in that world now. we are in 2020 and 2021. we are far from it, and now it is dug up and used against him. and think everyone recognizes the question is why, or should recognize that the question is why. this is a case of political character that asserts a political crim that he would never qualify for in extradition and then what is a political crime? it is any crime in which the victim is the state itself. assassination is not a political crime because the head of state is still a person. you shoot the president or the archduke,

you still qualified for extradition because you committed murder. the state is an apparatus when you are publishing its misdeeds and that is held up the candle, there is a political crime. and that makes julian assange political criminal. if assange is a criminal then we are all criminals because we want to know the truth. and we must know the truth, at least the outlines of it in order to exercise our rights as a citizen in the free society. glenn said 2013 was a motivating force for his participation, the free internet and i would go further and say it is a free society. glenn: about the press, the institutions, they hate julian and they hated him when he was giving them that information. the reason they hate him is that he shame them into doing their job.

i do not know if told you about every time i talked to bill who could not stand me, he would bring you up he would be i guess you could work for democracy now!. he had this thing about you all. edward: high praise. glenn: you shamed him, that is what the alternative press does, but there is a real hatred because they want to present themselves as the journalistic and moral center, and that is why the press after the revelations turned with a vengeance. chris: i think that is not only on part because he is gone large, but i think it was the prism of all of the issues. i think bill keller was the first to smear him because he said he was so dirty and he smells.

the role of the media and all of these things that we are talking about, the corporate media, it is so crucial because obviously if the media were out there like they were doing under trump saying that joe biden is imperiling press freedoms and raising their voice it would be more difficult to do what they are doing to julian, but they are not. i think he gets back what to chris said, julian was doing the kind of whistleblowing and reporting that like ed was doing with what the government does not want and what they do is when the cia comes to you and the fbi comes to you and says here's the information you want to be published and they publish it. i think they are a huge impediments to so many of the goals that we have been talking about trying to reach but a crucial instrument that is being used i the centers of authority to maintain these repressive structures in place. amy: in the little time we have left,

you know, julian assanges and belmarsh prison. faces 170 years in prison in the united states. yahoo! news revealed that the cia had was plotting to kidnap or assassinate him. if we could end by you coming specifically on that, and also, in your own taste, what is your hope of returning home? what communications are you having with the biden administration, is there any hope? edward: i did not communicate with the biden administration or the trump administration, we are not really calling each other every day. that is quite a ways back. were just gonna set it aside, because no movement and it does not matter, history will be the judge.

if they want to force me into exile, fine, i am not going to be miserable, i will make a positive impact as much as i can from the situation. about the case with julian and the assassination plans, extradition and plans agait him, that is an extraordinary story. if you have not read this you absolutely should. the cia was planning it out and their partners in london, having done fights the streets of london, if they had to shoot out the tires, which service was going to do that. it is crazy,t is hard to believe work, it should be hard to believe, but, unfortunately in the direction that our society is progressing in the post-9/11 period is becoming more familiar. and i think that is uniquely threatening. it was funny when i came forward in 2013 i was a private citizen

and i think there is a comment in the film like the embassy is right up the street or whatever, just try and off me, whether they do it hands-on or they say it was an accident, he fell. to me, those things were possible. at the time, even journalists who are working with me, martin gailman said it was a little bit ridiculous. years later he himself was subjected to surveillance and saw that the u.s. intelligence services haveeen keeping tabs on his reporting before he was ever involved with me, and of course now we see things like julian. force is not a barrier to the state when it comes to securing their objectives. and i believe that anything they could have done

to stop this story, they would have done. if that meant taking action against me, or takg action against a journalist, they would have done it. in the case of julian assange, that thinking has been vindicated. julian assange is not a whistleblower, that is not a judgment on him. he is not the source, he is the publisher, meaning that he should be at less risk and yet somehow he has ended up more at risk. the question is how is that possible, has assange changed and when we look at the charges, not really, talking about things that happened in the district past. what has changed is the nature of the state and its relationship to the press, and if we let that be established, with them murdering his stage, not with a gunshot, but with concrete or whatever prison they put him in,

that is not better. whether you kill someone fast or slow, you are killing them. you are doing that because you do not like what they say, that is a final judgment on the state rather than on the victim of the state. amy: that is national security agency whistleblower edward snowden, along with journalists glenn greenwald and chris hedges. i spoke to them as part of our discussion at the virtual war on terror film festival. we will link our entire discussion at democracynow.org. and that does it for today's show. democracy now! is looking for feedback from people who appreciate the closed captionin e-mail your comments to outreach@democracynow.org

or mail them to democracy now! p.o. box 693 new york, new york 10013. [captioning made possible