30c3 Keynote
Glenn Greenwald, frank
2013.12.27
20:00
 
Link and further information can be found here: 

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/wiki/Static:Projects

or: www.twitter.com/c3subtitles (most up to date infos)

Video:
CCC-TV: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5622_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312271930_-_30c3_keynote_-_glenn_greenwald_-_frank.html
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyA6NZ9C9pM
MP3: 
http://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2013/mp3/30C3_-_5622_-_en_-_30c3_keynote_-_glenn_greenwald_-_frank-direct.mp3
https://archive.org/details/Greenwald30C3
soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/dlf-wissenschaft/keynote-glenn-greenwald-30c3
other transcriptions:
https://piratenpad.de/p/30c3-keynote
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Announcer: "There is one seat left over... there! (laughing from the audience) For the first time, this room is FULL! I don't  believe it, we killed the CCH in the second year. So how many people do you think are here? Who thinks 7000? (..) 7500? (..) 8000? (..) 9000? (..) Who thinks we are over 10000? We are now over 6000 now in this hall, at the same spot. Isn't that amazing? Have Fun and Frank will take over from here now."
Frank: "We could play some audience games of course, while waiting for some IP-based connection goining up. As you may have heard, we would really have liked to have Glenn Greenwald the Keynotespeaker in person here, but the circumstances surounding his work make it a little bit difficult. So we have him here on a video transmission from Sao Paulo oh no thats not true from Rio for a keynote for 40/45 minutes and then about 15/20 minutes time for questions."
Announcer: "I forgot something sorry for that. For everybody who is not a native English speaker; Ja Stimmt eigentlich gilt das nur für die deutschen also kann ich auch auf Deutsch sprechen. Macht sonst wenig Sinn das sehe ich ein. Für jenden der des Englischen nicht 100%ig mächtig ist, hat sich das Übersetzungsteam gedacht an statt wie bisher vom deutschen ins englische zu übersetzten dieser Talk wird simultan vom englischen ins deutsche sche übersetzt. Und man kann sich das ganze unter 8011 anhören. Einen riesen applaus für die Übersetzter."
19:30 Glenn comes into the skype screen.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Frank: "So. That was your applaus Glenn. Welcome for the keynote of the 30th Communication Congress in Hamburg. The floor is yours."
Glenn Greenwald:
"Thank you, thank you very much. And thank you to everybody for that warm welcome and thank you as well to the congress organizers for inviting me to speak. My reaction when I learned that I had been asked to deliver the keynote to this conference was probably similar to the one that some of you had, which was: 'Wait, what?' And, you know the reason is that my crytographic and hacker skills are not exactly world renowned. The story has been told many times how I almost lost the biggest national security story in the last decade at least because I found the installation of PGP to be insurmountably annoying and difficult..."
[*audience claps*]
"... There is another story that's very similar that illustrates the same point that I actually don't think has been told before, which is: Prior to my going to Hongkong I spent many hours with both Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden trying to get up to speed on the basics of security technology that I would need in order to report on this story: and they tried to tutor me in all sorts of programs and finally concluded that the only one at least at that time for that moment that I could handle was TrueCrypt.
And they taught me the basics of TrueCrypt and I went to Hongkong and before I would go to sleep at night i would play around with TrueCrypt and I kind of taught myself a couple of functions that they hadn't even taught me and really had all this sort of confidence and on the third or fourth day I went over to meet both of them and I was beaming with pride and I showed them all the new things that I had taught myself how to do on TrueCrypt and I pronounced myself this "cryptographic master" that I was really becoming advanced; and I looked at both of them and I didn't see any return pride coming my way. Actually what I saw was them trying very hard to avoid rolling their eyes out of their head at me to one another. I said "Why are you reacting this way? Why isn't that a great accomplishment?". And they sort of let some moments go by and no one wanted to break it to me and finally Snowden piped it and said "TrueCrypt is really meant for your little kid brother to be able to master it, it's not all that impressive.". And I remember  being very deflated and i kind of went back to the drawing board. 
Well, you know: That was six months ago. And in the interim the importance of security technology and privacy technology has become really central to everything it is that I do. I really have learned an enormous amount about both its importance and how it functions. And I'm far from the only one. I think one of the most significant outcomes of the last six months, but one of the most underdiscussed, is how many people now appreciate the importance of protecting their security of their communications. If you go and look at my inbox from July, probably 3% to 5% of the emails I received were composed of PGP [Pretty Good Privacy] code. That percentage is definetly above 50% today and probably well above 50%.
When we talked about forming our new media company we barely spent any time on the question, it was simply assumed that we all are going to use the most sophisticated encryption that was available to communicate with one another and i think most encouragingly whenever I'm contacted by anyone in jounalism or activism or any related fields, they either use encryption or are embarrassed and ashamed that they don't and apologize to me for the fact that they don't and vow that they are soon going to. And it's really a remarkable sea-change even from the middle of last year when I would talk to some of the leading national security journalists in the world who are working on some of the most sensitive information and virtually none of them even knew what PGP or OTR [Off-the-Record Messaging] or any other of the leading privacy technologies were, let alone how to use them. And it's really encouraging to see this technology spreading so pervasively. I think that this underscores an extremly important point and one that gives me great cause for optimism.
I'm often asked whether I think that the stories that we've been learning over the last six months and the reporting and the debates that have arisen will actually change anything and impose any real limits on the US surveillance state. And typically when people think the answer to that kind of question is yes, the thing that they cite most commonly is probably the least siginficant which is that there's gonna be some kind of debate and our representatives and democratic government are going to respond to our debate and they are going to impose limits with legislative reform, none of that is likely to happen. 
The US government and its allies are not going to voluntarily restrict their own surveillance powers in any meaningful way. In fact the tactic of the US government that we see over and over again, that we've seen historically, is to do the very opposite which is, when they get caught doing something that brings them disrepute and causes scandal and concern, they're very adept at pretending to reform themselves through symbolic gestures, while at the same time doing very little other than placating citizen anger and often increasing their own powers that created the scandal in the first place. 
We saw that in the mid 1970s when there was serious concern and alarm in the United States - at least as much there is now if not more so -  over the US government surveillance capabilities and abuse. And what the US government did in response is they said: ‘Well we're going to engage in all these reforms that will safeguard these powers. We're gonna  create a special court that the government needs to go to get permission before they can target people with surveillance.’ 
 And that sounded great but then they created the court in the most warped [?] way possible. It's a secret court where only the government gets to show up, where only the most pro-national security juges are appointed and so this court gave the appearance of oversight when in reality it's the most grotesque rubber-stamp that is known to the western world. They almost never disapprove of anything. It simply created the appearance that there is judical oversight. They also said we are gonna create congressional committees, the intelligence committees, that are gonna have as their main function overseeing the intelligence committees and making certain that they no longer abuse their power and what they did instead was immediately installed, the most servile loyalists of the intelligence committees as head of this 'oversight committee' and that has been going on for decades and today we have two of the most slavish[?] pro NSA members of congress as the head of these committees who are really there to bolster an justify everything and anything the NSA does, rather than engage in real oversight. So again it's designed to prettify the process while bringing about no real reform. And this process is now reapeating itself: You see the president appoint a handfull of his closest loyalist to this independent white house panel that pretended to issue a report that was very balanced and critical of the surveillance state, but in reality introduced a variety of programs that at the very best would simply make these programs slightly more palatable from a public perspective and in many cases intensify the powers of the surveillance state rather than reining them in any meaningful way.
12:50 [next part needs to be finished]
So the answer to whether or not we gonna have meaningful reform definitely does not lie in the typical processies[??] of democratic accountability that we are all taught to respect but they do lie elsewhere. It is possible that there will be courts that will impose some meaningful restrictions by finding that these programs are unconstitutional. It's I think much more possible that other countries around the world who are truely indignant about the breaches of their privacy security will stand together and create alternatives either in terms of infrastructure or legal regimes that will prevent the United States from exercising hegemony[??] over the internet or make the cost of doing so far too high. I think even more promising is the fact that large private corporations, internet companies and others will start finally paying the price for their collaboration with this spying regime. 
and we've seen that already when they've been dragged into the light and finally now are forced  cause to account for what it is that they are doing and to realize that their economic interests are imperilled by the spying system, exercising their unparalleled power to demand that it be reigned[??] in. I think all of those things are very possible as serious constraints on the surveillance state. 
But I ultimately think that where the greatest hope lies is with the people in this room and the skills that all of you possess. The privacy technologies that have already been developed. 
The Tor browser, PGP, OTR and a varity of other products are making real inroads? and preventing the US government and its allies from invading the sanctity of our communications. None of them is perfect. None of them is invulnerable.
But they all pose a serious obstactle to the US governments ability to continue to destroy our privacy and ultimately the battle over internet freedom, the question of wether or not the internet will really be 
this tool of liberation and democratization or wether it will become the worst tool of human oppression in all of human history will be fought out I think primarily on the technological battlefield. The NSA and the US government certainly knows that. 
That's why Keith Alexander gets dressed up in his little costumes, his dag jeans and his edgy black shirt and goes to hacker conferences.
[applause]
It's why corporations in silicon valley like Palantir Technologies spent so much effort 
depicting themselves as these kind of rebellious pro civil libertarian factions as they spend most of their time in secret working hand in hand with the intelligence community [*signal noise*] cia to increase their capabilities because they want to recrute particularily younger brain power onto their side. 
The side of destroying privacy and putting the internet to use for the most powerful factions. What the outcome of this conflict is, 
[16:00]
what the internet ultimately becomes really is not answerable in any definitive way now. It depends so much on what it is that we as human beings do. One of the most pressing questions is wether people like the ones who are in this room and the people who  have the skills you have now and in the future will succumb to those temptations and go to work for the very entities that are attempting to destroy privacy around the world or wether you put your talents and skills and resources to defending human beings from those invasions and continuing to create protective[/effective?] technology to protect our privacy. And I'm very optimistic because that power does lie in your hands.
[applause]
[16:50]
I wanna talk about another cause of optimism that I have, which is that the pro-privacy alliance is a lot healthier and more vibrant it's a lot bigger and stronger than I think a lot of us even who are in it often appreciate and realize. It is rapidly growing. I know for me personally, every single thing that I have done over the last six months on this story, and all of the platforms I've been given like this speech and the honours that I've received, the accolades that I have been given, I share completely with two people who have been critically important to everything that I have done. One of them is my unbelievably brave and incomparably brilliant collaborator Laura Poitras.
[ applause ]
Laura doesn't get a huge amount of attention, which is how she likes it, but she really does deserve every last recognition and honour and award because although it sounds cliche it really is the case that without her none of this would have happened. We have talked every single day actually over the last six months. We have made almoust every decision, certainly every significant one, in complete partnership[?] and collaboration  and being able to work with somebody who has that high level of understanding about internet security, about strategies for protecting privacy has been completely indispensible to the success of what we've been able to achieve. And then the second person who has been utter??? indispensible ?] and deserves every last accolade to share/award is my [...] source Edward Snowden. 
[applause] 
It's really hard to put into words what a profound effect his choice has had on me, and on Laura, and on the people with whom we have worked directly and on people with whom we indirectly worked. And then millions and millions of people around the world.
The courage and the principle act of concience that he displayed will shape and inspire me for the rest of my life and will inspire, I'm convinced, millions and millions of people to take all sorts of acts they might not have taken because they have seen what good for the world can be done by even a single individual.
[applause] 
I think it's so important to realize, and this to me is the critical point, is that none of us, the three of us, did what we did in a vacuum. We were all inspired by people who have done similiar things in the past, I'm absolutely certain that Edward Snowden was inspired in all sorts of ways by the heroism and self sacrifice of Chelsea Manning.
[applause] 
And I'm quite certain that in one way or the another she, Chelsea Manning was inspired by the whole [glitny??] of whitleblowers and other people of concience who came before her to blow the whistle on extreme levels of corruption wrongdoing and illegality among the worlds most powerful factions and they in term where inspired, I'm certain, by the person who is one of my greatest political heroes, Daniel Ellsberg, who did this fourty years ago.
[applause] 
And even beyond that, I think it is really important to realize that everything that has been allowed to happen over the last six months and I think any kind of significant leak and whistleblowing of classified Information in the digital age both past and current and future owes a huge debt of gratitude to the organization which really pioneerd the template, and that is Wikileaks.
[applause] 
We didn't completely copy to the letter [] just like Wikileaks modified what it has, 
to improve to what we have done and some of the attacks which actuall y been succesful, but it was underscored to me that when Edward Snowden was rescued from Hong Kong [] not only but Wikileaks but by a heroic woman Sarah Harrison. 
[applause]
[some detail work necessary here:]
There is a huge network of human beings around the world who believe in this cause and not only believe in it but are increasingly willing to devote their energies and their resources and their time and sacrifice for it. It's remarkable. In a telephone call I had with Laura, we've almost never communicated by telephone, one of the few exceptions was when we were going to speak to an event at the EFF. And we got on the phone the night before. She went through the list of people who have devoted themselves to transparency and the price that they have paid. And she said: Edward Snowden is stuck in russia, facing 30 years in prison, Chelsea Manning is in prison, Aaron Swartz committed suicide, people like Jeremy Hammond, [..] .. even people like Jim Risen who [...] an organisation like the New York Times, facing the possibility of prison for stories that he has published. [ Aaron Swartz, ... {list of people here}]and she said it's really a sign of how sick the political [] has become that the price of bringing transparency to the government and from doing the job of the media and the congress that they are not doing is this extreme [force of ?] punishment. She was right and had a good point but there actually is another interesting point that the list revealed: As long as it is and it keeps growing. And the reason why that's so amazing to me, the reason that people on that list and others like them pay a price is because the US knows that it's only hope for continuing to maintain it's regiment of secrecy behind [...engage ...] radical incorrupt acts is to intimitate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is they do by suing them that they can be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there is nothing anybody can do about it. 
And it is an effective tactic. It works for some people. Not because those people are cowardly but because the rationale. It really is the case that the US and the british government not only are willing but able to essentially engage in any conduct, no matter how grotesk, no matter how extreme, no matter how lawless with very little opposition that they perceive is enough to make them not want to do it. 
And so there are activists who rationally conclude that it's not worth the price for me to pay in order to engage in that behaviour. That's why they can't go to do it [?] 
But the paradox is that are a lot of other people. I think be even more people who react in exactly the opposite way. When they see the US and the UK government showing their true face, showing the extent to which they are willing to abuse their power, they don't become scared or detered - they become even more emboldened. 
And the reason for that is when you see that these governments are really capable of that level of abuse of power you realize that you can no longer in good conscience stand by and do nothing. It becomes an even greater imperative view to come forward and shine light on what they are doing and if you listen to any of those whistleblowers or activists they are all saying the same thing: it was a slow process to realize that the actions in which they were engaging were justified but they were finally conviced of it by the actions of these governments themselves and its a really sweet irony. And i think it caused serious optimism that it is the United States and it's closest allies who are so [..?]
at this activism with their own abusive behaviour.
[27:39]
Now speaking of the attempt to intimidate and deter and alike. I just want to spend a few minutes talking about the current posture of the US government with regard to Edward Snowden. It's become extremely clear at this point that the US government at the highest level on down is completely committed to persuing only one outcome. 
And that outcome is one where Edward Snowden ends up spending several decades - if not the rest of his life - in a small cage, probably put off in terms of communication from the rest of the world. And the reason why they are so intent on this is not hard to see. It's not because they're worried that society needs to be protected from Edward Snowden and from him repeating these actions. I think it's probably a pretty safe fact that Edward Snowdens security clearance has more or less permanently revoked. 
[laughter] 
The reason they're so intent on it is that they cannot allow Edward Snowden to live any sort of a decent and free life because they're petrified that that will inspire other people to follow his example. and to be unwilling to maintain this bond of secrecy, when maintain that bond does nothing but hides illegal and damaging conduct from the people who are most affected by it.
What I find most amazing about that is not that the United States government is doing that. That is what they do. It's who they are. What I find amazing about it is that there are so many governments around the world, including ones that are capable of protecting his human rights and who have been the biggest beneficiaries of his heroic revelations who are willing to stand by and watch his human rights be crushed and be imprisoned for the crime of showing the world what's beeing done to their privacy. 
[applause] 
It has really been startling to watch governments including some of the largest in europe and their leaders go out in public and express intensed indignation over the fact that the privacy of their citizens is beeing systematically breached. And genuine indignation when they learned that their privacy has also been targeted. 
[laughter, applause] 
And yet at the same time the person who sacrificed in order to defend their basic human rights, their rights of privacy, is now having his own human rights targeted and threatened in recrimination? and I realize that for any 
[30:58]
I realize that for any country like Germany or France or Brazil or any other country around the world to defy the dictates of the United States, that there is a cost of doing this, but there was an even greater cost to Edward Snowden to come forward and do what he did in defence of your rights and yet he did it anyway.
[applause]
I think that what's really important to realize is that countries have the legal and international obligation by virtues of treaties that they've signed to defend Edward Snowden from political prosecution and prevent him from beeing in cage for the rest of his life for having shown a light on systematic abuses of privacy and other forms of abuses of secrecy. But they also have the ethical and moral obligation as the beneficiaries of his actions, to do, what he did for them which is to protect his rights in return.
I want to spend a little bit of time talking about one of my favourite topics  which is journalism. When I was in Hong Kong with Laura and Ed Snowden I’ve been [reflecting] on this a lot in the course of writing the book that I've been writing over the past couple of months about everything that's happend. One of the things I realized in looking back on that moment and also in talking to Laura about what took place there, was that we spent at least as much time talking about issues relating to journalism and the free press as we did talking about surveillance policy. And the reason is that we knew that what we were about to do, would trigger as many debates over the proper role of journalism visavis the state and and other power factions as it would the importance of internet freedom and privacy and the threat of the surveillance state. And we knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting and who we were to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants which calls itself the United States and British media. 
[applause]
And so we spent a great deal of time strategizing about [that we resolve] that we're going to have to be very disruptive about the status quo not only the surveillance and political status quo but also the journalistic status quo. And I think one of the ways that you can see what it is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost entirely without them and despite them.
One of the more remarkable things that has happened to me is: I gave an interview three weeks or so or a month ago on BBC and it was on this program called Hardtalk and I had one point had made what I thought was what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversy observation that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population and [?] their power and to get their agenda advanced, and that the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power and that the pronouncement that this interviewer was citing about how these government programs are critical to stopping terrorism should not be believed unless there's actual evidence shown that they're actually true.
He interrupted me and he said "look ..." I am sorry I don't do pompous British accents well ... you'll just have to transpose it in your own imagination. But he said: 'You know I  just need to stop you, you have said something so remarkable.' He was like a Victorian priest scandalized by seeing a woman pull up her skirt a little bit over her ankles. He said: 'I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the United States and the British government are actually making false claims to the public! How can you possibly...' [laughter from the audience] 
[applause] 
That is not abberational! It really is the central view of certain American and British media stars that when especially people with medals on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government make claims that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence and that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their veracity. 
And obviously we went through Iraq war in which those very two same governments, specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly the government to their people over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we've seen it continuously over the last six months as well: The very first document that Edward Snowden ever showed me was one that he explained would reveal unquestionable lying by the senior national intelligence official of president Obama, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. That was the document that revealed that the Obama administration have succeeded in convincing a court, its secret court to [allow?] phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call, local and international, of every single American.
Even though that National Security [?] James Clapper [before?] the Senate, just month earlier was asked: ‘Does the NSA collect phone data about the communications of Americans?’ and he answered ‘No Sir.’ What we all now know is that this is a complete lie.
There are other lies that the NSA [?] [..top? other people?...] as government officials have told.
By lie I mean advisedly, things they know to be false that they're saying anyway to convince people of what they want them to believe.
Keith Alexander repeatedly said, the head of the NSA, that they are incapable of accounting for the exact number of calls and emails that they intercept from the American [?] communication system even though the program that we ended up exposing [...] informant, counts exact [mathematical precision?] exactly the data that ...said... have provided.
Both the NSA and the GCHQ have repeatedly said that the purpose of these programs is to protect people from terrorism and to saveguard national security and that they never [..] evil shemes engage in spying economic []
that [] expose national security. [] from spying on the Brazalian oil Petrobras [from spying on [US ?..]  economic summits..., to energy companies around the world, in Europe,  in Asia, in Latin America ..[completely []?. These claims proof that they are lies.
And then we have President Obama who repeatedly says things like "we can not - and do not spy on ..eavesdrop .. communications of Americans without warrants ..even though ...
by the congress of which he was a part.... US government to eavesdrop on americans communication without warrants [?] and what you see here....[serial lying?] and yet at the same time  the same...[media that seized it?]  acts scandalized if you suggest that their claims should [] evidence, because their role is not to be advesaries. Their is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions they pretend to  exercise oversight.
[applause]
34:54
Just one more point on that which is to understand just how the American and British media function. You can pretty much turn on the TV at any moment or open a new an internet website and see very brave American journalists calling Edward Snowden criminal and demanding that he be extradited to the United States and prosecuted and imprisoned. They're very very brave when it comes to declaring people who are scorned in Washington and who have no power and have become marginalized, they're very brave in condemning them and standing up to them and demanding that the rule of law be applied to them faithfully. He broke the law, he must pay the consequences.
And yet that top national security official of the United States government went to the Senate and lied to their face as everybody now knows which is at least as much of a serious crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of. And you will be hard-pressed to find a single one of those brave journalists [applause] …
You will be very hard-pressed to find even a single one of those brave intrepid journalists ever even think about let alone express the idea that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper ought to be subject to the rule of law and be prosecuted in prison for the crimes that he committed because the role of the US media and their British counterparts is to be voices for those with the greatest power and to protect their interests and serve them. And everything that we've done over the last six months and everything we decided in the last month about forming a new media organization is all about trying to subvert that process and reanimate and reinstall the process of journalism for what it was intended to be which is as a true adversarial force. A check against those with the greatest power.
 [applause]
So I just wanna close with one last point, which is the nature of the surveillance state that we've reported over the last six months.
Everytime I do an interview people asked similar questions such as ‘What is the most significant story that you have revealed?’ or ‘What is it that we have learned about the last story that you just published?’
And what I really begun saying is that there really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is - I say this without the slightest bit hyperbole or melodrama, it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative - It is literally true that the goal of the NSA and it's 'five eyes'-partners in the English-speaking world Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK, is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that  there be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net, they wanna make sure that all forms of human communication by telephone or by internet and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies. That is [despite] that is to describe [?]  surveillance state. You don't need [hyperbolate any] You don't need to believe me when I say that's their goal, document after document  within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little [?] on the planet, where some forms of communication might take place without their being able to invade it. One of the stories that we are working on right now, I used to get in trouble at the guardian for [previewing...?] my stories but I'm not at the Guardian anymore so  I'm just gonna do it anyway, is ... [applause] 
The NSA and the GCHQ are just being driven crazy by the idea that you can go on an airplane and use certain cell phone devices or internet services and be away from their prying eyes for a few hours at a time. They are obsessed with finding ways to invade the systems online on board internet service and mobile phone service because the very idea that human beings can communicate even for a few moments without them being able to collect and store and analyze and monitor what it is that we're saying is simply intolerable. That is their institutional mandate.
And when I get asked questions when I do interviews in different countries:  ‘Well, why would they want to spy on this official?’ or ‘Why would they want to spy on Sweden?’ or ‘Why would they want to target this company here?’
The premise of that question is really flawed. The [premise] of the question is that the NSA and the CGHQ need a specific reason to target somebody for surveillance. That is not how they think. They target every form of communication that they can possibly get their hands on. 
And  if you think about what individual privacy does for us as human beings, let alone what it does for us on a political level, that it really is the thing that lets us explore boundaries and engage in creativity 
and use the  [mechanics of dissent?] without fear.
When you think about a world in which privacy is allowed to be eliminated –  I’m literally talking about eliminating everything that makes it valuable to be a free individual. The surveillance state by its [?] by its very existing [...] [p/reach] conformity because [...] always being watched
The choices that they make are far more [constrained] are far more limited, [cling] far more closely to [orthodoxy?] than when they can act in a private [?] that's 
[...] the NSA and the GCHQ and the worlds most powerful [?] in our history
[...] because it's what ensures that human beings can no longer resist [...]
[big applause]
Announcer: "We have a little bit of time for questions. I have one: what do you think is the motivation behind this, being able to spy on really everything?"
Glenn: 'obvious discreet motivations, economic competitors, technological advances, politically and diplomatically [] manipulate the world, but ultimately there is one goal and that goal is power. [] When you know everything from everybody about the world [] ever higher wall of secrecy [] the power balance is as extreme as it gets. [] Hence the name privacy. It's supposed to be public agency, public .., public.. hence the name public sceptor. [] They as public servants, public .. have almost no transparancy and that is what [] is about. We [] overruling 
Announcer:  We have approximately ten more minutes. Please line up at the microphones if you want to ask a qeustion. One question from myself: are you fearing for your own well-being to be harmed?'
Glenn: "No, I think .. what Laura and I have been doing together.. laywers that we really shouldn't travel together [] my partner [] when youve had ten of thousands of top secret documents there is obviously .. [] far greater danger, I've paid far greater prices than what .. [] see the people on the list, see the choices that they made, [] to pursue these values that I really believe in.
Announcer: "The next question is from the internet, how do you decide which detail you share with the world or what you are not allowed to see? What is your decision process, do you it alone or in a committee and what are the release criteria?"
Glenn: ".. by far the hardest, I've watched the debate to see the choices that.. [] The first factor the we use was the agreement that we entered with Edward Snowden. What did he want to achieve and what [] what we would publish and what we wouldn't publish. We felt duty-bound to the agreement [] he's not an object that would be sacrificed for a cause, he would be [] has to be regarded and honoured. [ applause] 
Everything that we have done has been done by the formula that we have created with him. I've been one of the most vocal supporters of Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning [] believed in transparency as long as i live, [] there are different tactics and strategies [] We didnt want to reveal information that would help other states with their surveillance. We wouldn't [] raw surveillance or [] to do so would destroy the privacy of them or any people who [] Everything else beyond that .. published in a way that would create the most powerful debate []sustain the interest that people have that was so urgently needed. [I can tell you, we are only 6 months into it]It took WIkileaks i believe nine months to .. the documents. These are difficult documents, people are waiting for us to make mistakes [] what we say about them is accurate. There is a lot more stories to come, a lot more documents that we will publish [applause]
Q: The attacks that the gchq have done - they tried to ... your hardware .... have there been more attacks
Glenn Greenwald: "I think the gchq has done us a huge favor
i think that the most important []
criminally charge ... to stand up to the playground bully and continue to publish [which we will]
i think its up to all of us to devise was to not
i think its important to find ways to raise cost
[when we find a way when they are in fear of us that's when things will change]
[standing ovations]
Thank you very much!
And please continue your work!