Okay yeah it's very strange to be standing up here because I sort of feel like we're in one room but I was sitting there and with the headphones on

I felt really far away from the speakers and now I feel really far from you I can hardly see you and that's strange that technology and being in the same room together still gives us the sense of distance but anyway I hope that the words will connect us so I'm doing a very old

style presentation no charts no images just pure spoken word for five eyes only that's the name of my talk. When I was a child growing up in Kenya Britain was the haloed place of yearly family visits where everything worked well and

life seemed safer, better, freer. My grandfather would often take me to speakers corner in London emphasizing how anybody could stand up and say anything there. He always told me this is the freest country in the world.

I believed him the way some religious people do the doctrines they've been brought up here and repeated over and over. The concepts are habitually accepted but they have no true hold within. They do not power the mind or fill the heart. They can't because they don't stem from a deep personal

understanding of the ideas that spreads to one's thoughts and actions. This may be one of the strange ironies of being in a democracy. One takes freedom for granted. Most of us only truly become aware of our freedom if it's

encroached or if we have a chance to be somewhere that offers a contrast so marked that we can't help reconsidering our conceptions entirely. My perception of the UK as a free and democratic society began altering when I came to live in Germany and then changed even more after the Snowden revelations.

While in Germany I began to consider for the first time if a country can be truly democratic with a monarch as head of state, if a parliament can be representative of the people when one house, the Lord's, is unelected, if it's fair that the acting Prime Minister can call the next election anytime as

long as it's within the allotted five-year term, if an electoral system in which there's no proportional representation can truly reflect the will of the people. With Snowden's disclosures these reflections widened.

The freest country in the world would surely have a constitution, a clear enshrinement of its people's rights. The freest country in the world wouldn't have press censorship like D notices that a government could issue to hush up reporting on a story it found threatening. The freest country

would not have CCTV in schools including in classrooms and in the toilets. The freest country would not electronically store its citizens entire medical histories in a central database and allow pharmaceutical companies or university research departments to pay and access that information. The freest

country in the world would not allow spy agencies access to the private lives of every citizen without due cause or legal process. Intelligence services play a vital role in keeping citizens safe and their work must necessarily be somewhat obscure. However in the UK the agencies operate behind an

impermeable wall and they dislike it if anyone so much as attempts to approach the wall let alone tries to peek over it. In the late 1970s two journalists Duncan Campbell and Crispin Aubrey revealed to the British

public for the first time the existence of government communication headquarters GCHQ and its intelligence collection capacities. The story titled the eavesdroppers claimed that GCHQ along with the United States national security agency NSA was operating a massive global electronic surveillance

network from locations around Britain independent of parliamentary accountability or any public scrutiny. If that sounds like deja vu wait for the next bit. The British government did all it could to discredit those exposing the truth and protect those who were implicated by it.

The journalists were prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in a famous case which was marked by shocking instances of the state attempting to influence the verdict including by vetting jury members. Today the Guardian newspaper is facing a criminal investigation for its publication of Snowden's leaks. Both parties stood accused of harming

national security that convenient cover-up deployed by governments when no other justification exists. Plus a change. Britain has a reputation as the mother of democracy. The Magna Carta of 1215 and the UK 17th century Bill of

Rights are considered milestones in the international development of human rights. Britain also played an outstanding role in resisting the Nazis during the Second World War. Yet for years now Britain has been topping lists of the world's most surveilled societies. A report by Privacy

International identified the country as a place of endemic surveillance, a distinction also awarded to Russia and China. The report also had Britain as the worst EU country in terms of the protection of individual privacy. The UK has the most CCTV cameras per head of any country in the world. You

can find them or rather they can find you on public transport, on buses, trains and increasingly even in taxis. They can follow you in malls, parks, health centres, restaurants, gyms, banks and probably down the street where you live. Some of them even have wipers so they can ensure clear images when

it rains because the temperamental British weather certainly shouldn't interfere with the essential task of monitoring people going about their everyday business. Conservative estimates from 2013 suggest there's one CCTV camera for every 14 people while research on surveillance in

secondary schools found an average of one camera for every five pupils. In a country where this kind of everyday public scrutiny is standard the prying of spy agencies is inevitably less of a big deal. It's no coincidence that NSA and GCHQ have managed to be most successful in the UK. Elsewhere in the

US and Germany for example people are affronted by the infringement of their privacy through digital surveillance even though they cannot directly see or feel the violations. The very idea of being closely watched is deeply disturbing for these citizens. But the Brits are used to eyes everywhere thanks to the

five million odd CCTV cameras scattered throughout their land. They have not reacted strongly to the Snowden revelations partly because they are already so used to being watched. Similarly the British government so accustomed to surveilling its citizens barely remarked on the revelations for months except to insist that its intelligence agencies

were subject to rigorous oversight and operated within the law. By contrast the US government has properly engaged with the issue. Obama's long speech on NSA reform for all its shortcomings at least acknowledged that changes need to be made. David Cameron meanwhile has expressed his satisfaction that the

British public is unmoved his word by the Snowden revelations. I think the public reaction has not been one of shock horror he said it has been much more one of intelligence agencies carry out intelligence work good. He also

added I would encourage the newspapers that are endlessly dallying in this to think before they act because we are in severe danger of making ourselves less safe as a result. I recently talked to a German writer who's been very aware and critical of surveillance since 9-11. I asked her how she had come to be so

engaged with the issue and she said it was because she was immediately alert to the encroachment on civil liberties implicit in greater surveillance. She'd had a thorough education in human rights and the principles underpinning German democracy and when confronted with a reality contradicting that there was no way she could sit back and quietly

ignore it. I began to think back on my own education I recall many lessons admittedly enjoyable ones on Henry VIII his six wives and the divine right of kings. My own rights I have no memory of learning either at my

primary school a bastion of Britishness in Kenya or at the secondary schools I attended in the UK. Certainly I was taught about the French Revolution the 1848 revolutions the two world wars these events are loaded with lessons in freedom and oppression and the necessity of speaking truth to power. A

more astute student might have tried to find out more for herself and made connections with the present day but I was a more credulous kind of pupil. I assumed I was being taught what I most needed to know and I was ready to believe what I was told. Of course there was inevitably some study of

different British administrations and the odd act of Parliament but I didn't get any overall picture of the evolution of British democracy or its present-day workings. This seems shocking to me now a gross negligence on the part of the state not to educate citizens about their rights is to disenfranchise them only societies peopled by individuals who have an active

evolving understanding of freedom can hope to be truly democratic. In fact learning about democracy and human rights did not actually become a compulsory part of the UK's national curriculum until 2002 which was just

after I'd graduated from university. Before then it's possible that in some schools thanks to especially enlightened teachers students were learning about these things but it's also likely that I wasn't the only one who came through the British system with gaps in my knowledge. Since 2002 young people have to do a subject called citizenship where they learn amongst other things

about fairness and justice the role of Parliament and government and the rights and duties of citizens. I can only hope many of these students are sharper than I was and pick up on the discrepancy between what they're learning and the cameras hanging in the corners of their classrooms. For those who didn't have the benefit of learning their rights in school or who

learned and forgot or who are simply interested in refreshing themselves on these essential facts getting information from the UK government is not simple. The new main government website www.gov.uk offers a list of over 30 topics under the heading your rights and the law. It's quite

revealing that first on the list is consumer rights. Consumption it would seem is the most important form of participation in British society. The right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression are not even listed under the government's assessment of your rights and the law. Nor does

anything useful come up if you enter those terms in the site search facility. Buried somewhere in the middle of the list is the topic data protection act which gives a neat summary of how your personal data must be handled by organisations without explicitly asserting that you have a

right to privacy. Indeed UK law has not traditionally had a freestanding right to privacy although there are a number of laws protecting it in different contexts. It's a strange society indeed where CCTV cameras are by legal requirement announced everywhere with signs proclaiming for your

security while information on people's rights is kept concealed. Presumably that is for your security too. It's like a perverse game of hide and seek between state and citizen and brings to mind a comment by Nick Pickles former director of the privacy campaign Big Brother Watch. In modern Britain there

are people in positions of responsibility who seem to think 1984 was an instruction manual. Indeed the doublespeak Orwell described could just as easily apply to the UK now. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery. These could be the slogans of the current government. The UK has no

written constitution. Instead an arcane hodgepodge of treaties, common law, acts of Parliament, EU law and royal prerogatives underwrites UK democracy. But the rights of British citizens as of all citizens who are part of the EU are beautifully and simply enshrined in the European Convention on Human

Rights which since 2000 is enforced in the UK through the Human Rights Act. This act is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented in the British press with suggestions that it undermines British law and parliamentary sovereignty. The current Tory government wanted to remove all mention of the

Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights from the citizenship syllabus from this year. They also wanted to change the universal language of human rights so that in the UK young people would instead learn about their precious liberties as if by dressing the

fundamentals up in different words they might diminish people's claim to them. Thankfully the Tories didn't manage to push through these reforms but they have promised as though it would be a huge favor to scrap the Human Rights Act if they win the next election. This would leave British citizens

completely exposed again because the European Convention on Human Rights could no longer be directly enforced in the UK. Since the dismantling of the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s Britain has struggled to accept its less prominent role on the world stage. The special relationship with the US has

been one way for the small island to punch above its weight and Britain continues to have some influence in former colonies through the Commonwealth. The European Union is probably the alliance that most boosts Britain's global status as well as having huge national advantages and yet it's the one alliance the country seems most willing to disregard probably

because the EU has standards of democratic accountability that the UK is reluctant to adopt. The UK is much keener on its role in another far less accountable alliance called Five Eyes, an intelligent sharing cooperation between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. According to the

intercept, the new site launched by Glenn Greenwald and others, the operations of Five Eyes are unknown even to most members of the national governments involved of involved countries. And here's a quote taken from an NSA top

secret file leaked by Snowden. For a variety of reasons our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations international or domestic. First, we are helping our partners address critical intelligence shortfalls just as they are assisting us. Second, in many of our

foreign partners capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense intelligence apparatuses are witting to any signals intelligence connection to the US and NSA. Surveillance offers a way to have untrammeled power and

influence again. The global reach of GCHQ represents a cloud Britain no longer has in any field except perhaps the financial services in London and we're all just waiting for that bubble to burst again. The UK seems eager to be the world leader in mass surveillance as if this will give the small island

the kind of influence it had in its big empire days. But now as then every conquest has its cost. The price of the UK surveillance drive is the highest one of all. Impoverishment, mental emotional and spiritual of its own civil

society. There's a salutary example in a recent report published about the work culture at the Crossrail project. Currently Europe's largest construction site this rail link will eventually provide a high-speed East

West link between London and its outskirts. To get the job done safely on time and with a healthy financial position on completion, those are Crossrail's words, Crossrail has site workers under constant surveillance. The report describes this approach as a negative spy culture where supervisors watch people who may be in danger, photograph or video it and

then email it around. The workers who are routinely asked to report anything they may see wrong have become too afraid to speak up even if they are injured for fear they may be blamed regardless of the circumstances. If nothing changes the whole of the UK might one day run along along the

lines of this construction site. There are and always have been strong currents of resistance against the heavy hand of the British state, brave individuals and organisations that continue to challenge the status quo often through the courts sometimes successfully. The action of a few even

amidst the inaction of many still always matters but the majority whatever they're doing or not is finally the most decisive. Polls for the upcoming European elections indicate increased support for right-wing parties across

the EU. Such nationalist appeals are finding resonance because more people feel a loss of autonomy. There's a sense that if we wrench back some power from over there the result will be an automatic expansion of our own capacities for self-determination. Europe is becoming the scapegoat for

people's personal and national frustrations. More Brits than ever intend to vote for UKIP, a Eurosceptic right-wing party which is enjoying a surge in support for a new party not seen in the UK since the Second World War. Such parties do not come to the fore out of the blue. Votes for them

are usually the knee-jerk reaction of a citizenry that has gradually come to feel cynical about the establishment and unheard. The anti-EU rhetoric carelessly force-fed for decades to the British people through a mix of half-hearted truth and deliberate misinformation is backfiring

badly. For all the EU's flaws its institutions have proved greater than the sum of its parts. Time and again decisions in Europe have forced member states to raise their game. The EU court ruling against indiscriminate data retention is a recent powerful example in the surveillance context. It

represents one of the strongest positions on data freedom to be taken by any political body since the Snowden revelations. The EU is more synonymous with dismantling borders, national, trade, fiscal, but in fact it also stands for keeping erect the most important boundary of all, the personal border, the

fundamental line of privacy between the individual and the other, be that state, corporation or lover. It gives me hope that the surveillance state in Britain may eventually be reined in. If the country doesn't first pull out of

the EU following the referendum the Tories have recklessly promised if they return to power next year. Many German words have made their way unchanged into the English language. Some of the most commonly used ones tend to be of a slightly negative nature like angst, blitz and kaput. I want to adopt another

German expression into English, Unterfieraugen. Literally translated it is under four eyes. What that means of course is keeping things between the two of us, keeping them private. The British people like citizens everywhere

deserve to be left under four eyes not kept under five eyes. Thank you. I'm

happy to take questions. Hello I'd like to ask a personal question. What was the

reason that brought you here on stage? Why did you stand up? What made you speak up for peace and against surveillance? Hi there, good question. Well I was, I haven't always been a political person and my writing, my

fiction hasn't always been political but I was very shocked by the Snowden revelations. I sort of felt it as a personal affront and in particular last year when I was asked to sign Yuli Sey's open letter to Merkel and the way that she framed the argument, the way that she identified this as an assault on our liberties and as a diminution of democracy really sort of

brought the point home to me in a completely new way and then I got involved with the rights against mass surveillance initiative which I initiated with six other writers and we wrote the appeal that we wrote for that which by the way I would love it if you all went and signed on change.org

rights against mass surveillance. The formulations we came up with in one sentence in particular really sums it all up for me. A person under surveillance is no longer free, a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. I think that sort of really that process really honed my thinking and made me feel more passionate about this issue and I

suppose I'm fortunate in that I have a platform as a writer and so I can use it to speak and I think fiction can't always carry the burden of your political convictions and it doesn't need to and it's very nice to have an opportunity to talk about things that matter to you in a different context.

Any more questions? Anyone? Thank you very much for the excellent talk. My name is Marcel Dickel, I'm working for a Berlin based foreign policy think-tank called SWP, the Germans will know probably. A quick comment and a

question. The comment is... I can't hear you anymore. Oh that's sad. I'm afraid. Hello. Is it better now? No. No, okay. So what do we do? So it was a personal

problem? It's better now? No, it's okay. A quick comment and the question. The comment is as far as I know the situation in France is not better than

in the UK. We have little information about that but so what I see is that at least of the three biggest states in Europe it's two of them having mass surveillance in a way so it's only Germany so I'm a little bit frustrated about what could be the future of you know being against mass surveillance in

in the Europe when two of the biggest states have this problem and my question is it's not only the Tories being in the government it's the Liberals as well so do you see any support of the Liberals or any other UK party for

your plea against mass surveillance? Thank you, great questions. I'm going to the UK. The Labour, the Conservatives have in in their own ways through the

different administrations contributed to the mass of it to the CCTV cameras the surveillance the the lack of regulatory framework against the spy agencies so I don't have much hope in them Nick Clegg unfortunately has also

you know proved himself to be a bit of a lame duck although they are now making sounds sort of saying yes that they want things to be reviewed they want some change but I my personal feeling is that the British establishment the political establishment is very conservative as a whole they don't want

change because they're all they've all got their hands dirty and they just don't that they also like the power the GCHQ has so I don't really see a lot coming from there unfortunately I was in Strasbourg a few weeks ago with Yuli Se and Eva Manassa to meet Martin Schultz the EU president to present our appeal to him and while I was there I had some of the the sort

of concern you've expressed that people feel that Germany and the UK are somehow both blocking you know progress Germany simply through inaction because it doesn't take decisions it's sort of just sitting and waiting and the UK because it sort of pretends and delays and procrastinates and

stalls and delays things that way I do think I do have more hope in Germany I must say because I feel that there are the Green Party has been very outspoken I think that SPD people in the SPD also are very committed Martin Schultz is one of them and by the way that's another thing if you're

voting in the EU elections whichever European country are voting from please you can make a difference with what part you vote for the left at the European and at the institutions they have really committed to taking on this issue and so your votes can really make a difference there I do believe that if Martin Schultz becomes the next commissioner he will

really forge ahead on this issue and I think German citizens I'm very engaged with this issue and can influence their government and I think we shouldn't forget and I keep using this quote and but to me it sort of really sums up our power I think we've forgotten our power of citizens we are the arsenal of democracy as Roosevelt said we need to speak out we

need to resist and we need to say we need to let our government see that they're not going to get away with ignoring us because you know if we let our rights go now it's very hard to grab them back I don't know if that

sorry to all the people that had a question because I'll have the web the last one hi I can I come from Poland there are several things happening in Poland there were several debates about network censorship and network surveillance that we've won as a civil society with strong words from

the Polish Prime Minister saying that however we do we do not agree with some content on the internet we have no right to censor it so so some it's not that bad everywhere that's very heartening to hear that gives hope but I'm engaged in this debate I'm running the Warsaw crypto party I'm trying to

be active in in different areas and the question that I get most often from people that are not deeply engaged in this in this topic so after an hour of explaining how to use PGP how to use tour how to cover your tracks and how to try to keep your privacy the question that I get is why why privacy

is important and obviously I am able to respond to that to people but what I feel and what I thought about when I heard that you're you're a writer you write fiction is that we need good arguments and for that we need good

stories that showcase that that privacy is important that censorship is the dangerous that what you said that so that people under surveillance are not free anymore and and that would be my appeal I don't know to you or to the to the writer community and the question is do you see the possibility to get writers more involved in writing such stories in showcasing that

this is important that privacy is important that censorship is a problem etc etc thank you thank you very much I agree with you that stories are the things that somehow most touch us and stay with us and instruct us without seeming to instruct us and there are already writers addressing this I mean

Dave Eggers book the circle which came out in the US last year deals with this the extraordinary thing when we did this rights again mass against mass surveillance appeal was that we reached out to writers to to sign and so many of them immediately you know were ready to sign and was so happy that

something was being done and I think that's because as observers of society and as people who go kind of very deep into how people are thinking and feeling West we're perhaps somehow more more sensitive to this more quickly than other people just because we're curious and we look harder as writers and the thing is in a sense you can't nobody likes to be told what to write

or what to create and I think it's a sense more of yeah people will do it as as an how and when it feels urgent to them and sometimes also I think we want to write stories that take us away from the the awfulness of what's

around we want to escape and we want we need stories that give us visions of another kind of world where there is no surveillance so it's a very difficult question but I have no doubt that there will be more of this in in all kind of artistic endeavors just because we all feel implicated by it we all feel this weight on us and and and and we will want to express that at

some point thank you all very much for being here it was a pleasure sharing this time with you