Hello. How are you?

Sarah Harrison joined WikiLeaks about four years ago. She came from the Center for Investigative Journalism and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. From researching and coordinating the publication of hundreds of thousands of censored documents with media across the globe,

to making that information accessible to the public on the Internet, to fighting for her organization's ability to persevere in the face of extra legal sanctions and the largest criminal investigation ever conducted into a publisher and its sources which continues today,

to protecting not only her own organization's sources but those of other journalists and publishers, the tireless and courageous work of WikiLeaks investigation editor, Sarah Harrison, has enlightened and empowered public discourse in a manner few of her colleagues can credibly claim for themselves.

Were it not for Harrison's work, our news would be dominated by stories about the imprisonment and prosecution of Edward Snowden by the U.S. government. Were it not for her commitment to preserving our historical record,

we would not know the facts surrounding the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians by U.S.-led engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, or understand the whole-scale privatization of intelligence. It's a pleasure to speak with Ms. Harrison today. Thank you. So, on April 25th, the Department of Justice lawyers stated that the multi-subject criminal investigations into WikiLeaks and its sources continues.

Prior to that, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald both made public entrances into the U.S. On the advice of your counsel, you've been advised not to return to the U.K. Why can't you go home? Well, the U.K. has a unique part of its terrorism law, which is called Schedule 7.

Schedule 7 is about detaining people at ports, so airports, boat ports, any entrance or exit to the country. And what they can do there is they can detain anyone for questioning on no more than a hunch, as has just been proven in the recent Miranda judgment. When you're there, what we would generally expect to be the rights of someone being questioned are taken away.

You have no right to silence. You must answer their questions or you're committing a crime. Because of my involvement in two very significant cases for the U.S. and U.K. governments, that being WikiLeaks and Snowden,

my lawyers feel certain or relatively certain that I would be detained under Schedule 7, at which point, for reasons of source protection, I would not answer the majority of their questions, and therefore would be committing a crime upon entering my home country. You mentioned that Laura and Glenn had gone back to the U.S.

They had very specific circumstances within which they did this, though. They were going to collect a very important and prestigious award, and they just went for a short period of time. If I were to try to return home to live, I would not have those protections. And so on those basis, it's advised that I remain here in Germany.

Why should Germany or any country grant Edward Snowden asylum? Well, it's a question, it's a moral and ethical, but also a political question, this one, and of course a legal one. The law around asylum is that someone, that most countries are signed up to,

is that someone should be given asylum if they need it for their political opinion or if they face persecution if they go home. Edward Snowden's act of disclosure was inherently a political act.

He did this because the U.S. government was breaking its own constitution and spying on its own citizens. In addition, if he went back to the United States, I think it is quite clear he would be persecuted. If you look at the trial of Chelsea Manning, the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond, this shows a record of persecution of these sorts of truth tellers by the United States government.

So on these two basis alone, he legally deserves asylum in most countries in the world. I think also morally and ethically for having shown how our rights are being eroded and we're being spied on by a foreign government, it would be the correct thing to do for other countries to give them asylum.

So therefore I think the more interesting question is why people aren't giving him asylum. And I think that that is due to the U.S. dominance and people are too scared, governments are too scared, we've seen it in the statements coming out of the German government, to actually stand up for what is the right thing to do and for the values they purportedly believe in. And so for this reason, unfortunately, countries are holding back and are not giving him the asylum he deserves.

The U.S. government claims that the programs are legal, albeit secret. And Snowden has said, quote, for me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission is already accomplished. I've already won. As soon as the journalists were able to do work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated.

Because remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. So for you, would it be acceptable in your opinion if the American public decided that they would tolerate being spied on by their own government?

So firstly, going back to some points that you made in the actual question, the government, of course, is trying to say that they haven't broken any laws, but I think the revelations have made it perfectly clear that they have by spying on their own citizens. In addition, yes, Snowden's predominant first aim was to start a debate and see what happened with that,

although I think he's made it perfectly clear that his own personal view is that this surveillance is excessive. So the question on whether I would be happy if the U.S. decided it's okay, I'm not a U.S. citizen.

So what the United States does is not necessarily how I feel my government should be behaving. These revelations have shown that other governments are colluding with the United States. The Five Eyes Alliance, which my own country, the United Kingdom, is particularly a large part of.

And so the question for me is, am I okay with what my government is doing or is allowing to be happening to me? I think that, I mean, this is obviously not okay for me.

Our rights are being eroded, this is a very slippery slope, and I wish that my government would stand up for my rights more. The larger question, though, is, I think, why do our rights matter at all? Our rights are in place to keep our personal autonomy, to allow us not to be dominated by an outside power.

With this erosion of rights that we see in these surveillance revelations, this is precisely what is happening. There is a large dominance that is coming into force and growing all the time around the world by the United States. This is a very large geopolitical issue, and you can see how the effects of this dominance in this geopolitical way with things like,

I was just saying how countries feel unable to give Snowden asylum, or you see the way they are able to yield this geopolitical pressure with regards to things like the climate conference in 2009 in Copenhagen,

where they were surveilling the communications to find out how other countries were going to play to try and engineer that conference. When it came out, for example, that Merkel's phone was being spied on, of course, there was a little bit of initial outrage by her,

but I do wonder, maybe she suddenly sat there and thought, gosh, what are the contents of my calls? Maybe actually I shouldn't start stomping my feet about this, because you don't know what will come out and how that could be used. So, this is a global issue, and for me, other nations around the world,

and I should be standing up against this dominance and against this US surveillance, and I wish my country would do that. So, governments obviously conduct foreign intelligence, most governments do, that can afford it, etc. How is the nature of US foreign intelligence activities pertaining to what Snowden disclosed significant or different?

To everybody spying? I mean, it's obvious, countries spy, they generally, as you say, all have intelligence agencies, it is the nature of countries to try and do this.

What is different about the United States surveillance is its scale and its quality. So, it's conducted on a huge scale in a large variety of means. The ability to store this information, which is now at very low cost, is very pervasive.

It means it's very pervasive. With the United States as well, their actual abilities are made very easy because of their huge budget, which they have. The budget has doubled in the last ten years. The number of people with national security clearance in the United States has doubled in just the last four years.

There's now five million people with this clearance, that's the size of Norway. I mean, I think we'd all be very annoyed if every single person in Norway was running around collecting all our information, but we don't understand the significance of it when it's the other side of the globe, when these facts and figures, they attempt to keep relatively hidden.

So, this huge pervasive, at great scale, mass surveillance makes it inherently different to any other nation's spying capabilities. When something is that large, its quality changes in and of itself. It would be like trying to say that the hydrogen bomb is just another bomb.

It's obviously not. It becomes a geopolitical tool. And I think that this dominance in this way is what makes the NSA surveillance very different to any other countries and far more worrying.

It's interesting, following the coverage related to you specifically, one of the questions I was wondering is, what's it like to be the WikiLeaks cleaning lady? Like, there seems to be a complete… And I think part of that, it's my opinion, part of that has to do with the fact that you're female, to be quite honest.

There's an element of it. And also, you came from the Center for Investigative Journalism and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and you've been with a new organization and the like. And I think a question that a lot of people perhaps don't understand is why would WikiLeaks and your work at WikiLeaks,

why would you protect another journalist source? For us, it was more of an issue of why wouldn't we do it. We have a… one of our core ethics is about source protection.

We've seen and lived what happens in these situations. Julian has been imprisoned, has been detained. Of course, the whole organization watched the Manning trial very closely and saw the persecution that happened there, the fact that the US government with its intent mission on trying to create an example of what happens if you tell the world the truth,

you get thrown in jail, get thrown in a cage, tortured and then put in prison for 35 years. That's the example that they desperately wanted to set and unfortunately achieved it with Manning. We felt that it was very important that there was another example of what happens for journalist sources, for whistleblowers,

if you do tell the truth, you can still have a voice, you can take part in the debate that you have begun. It was very clear to us right from the beginning that there was no other organization that was willing or able to assist Snowden

in a way that would fully protect him. And so it was not really of a question to us or to me about would we help, it was just about doing it. And what did WikiLeaks do? What was the… A variety of things from legal advice, specifically in the region, Hong Kong, that he was in.

Then there was the matter of being able to get out safely from Hong Kong, which we assisted with. We negotiated a number of informal asylum offers so that he would have somewhere to go.

And then obviously staying with him to ensure he was protected on the journey and then what turned out to be a month in an airport. And then three months in Russia to ensure that he was protected, that he could keep his voice and that he was able to continue living as safe as possible.

You were able to basically witness what was going on and to be a witness for the world essentially. Yes, I mean if anything had happened, he made a comment that I quite liked in his European Parliament statement about how he was protected by an organization at that time that had the biggest microphone in the world.

He's talking about our Twitter account and that it's kryptonite for spies. And if anyone had tried to pressure him into doing something that he didn't want to do, then the world would have known there was a witness there, as you say.

Do you think the publication strategy of the Snowden disclosures to date has been effective? Given that, I mean Snowden has talked about the fact that he wanted to, he didn't want to change society, that he wanted to give society a chance to determine if it could change itself.

So do you think that that has been effective? The first point to say is that I think that it's a huge success that anything has come out at all. If he'd gone, history has shown if he'd gone somewhere directly like the New York Times, they would have just sat on it.

I think the law and Glenn have been extremely brave and done great work. I think it's obvious with regards to the focus of the publications that it's very US focused. So then when talking about the global strategy of this, the information has come out outside of the US

in little sort of drips in places around the world that are seemingly at random. A little bit in Italy one week and then next month a little bit in Norway.

I think that this has a couple of issues from a global perspective. One is that you end up with a process of normalization and habituation of the information to the global public. It means that there's less outcry. Of course, in some places here in Germany, for example, certainly within certain communities there has been a decent outcry.

Germany is definitely one of the more successful international areas of this publication. Laura is based here and, of course, Jake Applebaum has been working very hard on these publications as a journalist.

I think this really has helped the impact here, but it is not this case at all in most countries of the world. People are too used to it. Yeah, yeah, we know we're being spied on now is unfortunately for most people the reaction. I also think that for creating a change, A, within those countries, but also I would say within the US itself.

Call me cynical, but I think the fact that the United States government is suddenly going to grow a conscience is not a hugely sane idea. I would say that the best way for a real change to happen is for outside pressure to occur.

When there isn't a coordinated, regional, strong publication in certain regions that allows these countries to get to a level of outcry and come together as a region, strengthening each other,

then they have more ability to actually stand up against the United States. Germany alone does not have that power as we have seen with the issues with the inquiry that's sort of starting here. At the height of Chelsea's three-year trial where she was convicted on 20 offences for 35 years,

it was pretty much established that she had no intent to harm the United States. And in fact, as determined by the United States government, damage is not actually the language that's used in the trial. It's impact, it's probable risk, and Manning was convicted on a probable harm standard.

The defence intelligence agency did a comprehensive review of all the documents, and William Arkin actually tweeted out that he had found out that the assessment was low to moderate risk. So, you know, neither the Afghan war logs or the Iraq war diary, sorry, the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war diary,

contained the name of human intelligence sources. They contained the names of people, but the head of the defence intelligence agency review had determined that

most of the people were actually already killed on the battlefield, those names. And despite what might be commonly understood, I mean, WikiLeaks did approach the State Department with regards to Cablegate and offered to elect, privately elect, if they wished, names, message record numbers.

And the legal advisor at the State Department, Harold Koh, his response, that letter that said that WikiLeaks was in continuing violation of the law, was the basis for extra legal sanctions against WikiLeaks. At that critical time for Manning, Snowden told Bart Gelman, quote,

I don't desire to enable the Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning argument that these documents were released recklessly and unreviewed. I just would like to say, because this is sort of a common misconception, Manning actually sanitized the documents before they were sent to WikiLeaks, just FYI.

You clearly wouldn't agree with the notion that publishing full and unredacted documents is a reckless ask, so what has WikiLeaks learned from Manning's releases, from publishing those? I mean, thank you for explaining that. I mean, you were at the trial, and I think it's a very important point that people often miss, is that the US government who, if anybody wanted to try and show that there was any harm actually from this information coming out,

it was the US government at that trial, and they were unable to. The whole redaction question has come from, and is completely and utterly US propaganda. We saw it when we started with the Warlog publication.

They instantly come out with blood on their hands, blood on their hands, which is, to me, completely ludicrous that people would accept this. We were actually publishing how the United States government had the blood of over 100,000 people on its hands,

and we, for telling the world about this, were suddenly the ones at fault. It's obviously completely wrong, but this is something that they always do. They've done it since the 50s. Any national security journalist can tell you about the propaganda attacks that they have on them.

It was a difficult battle for us through that period of 2010 and going into 2011 to show that this was not actually correct. The concept that information in and of itself can cause harm is just not logical. Words on a page and bits and bytes of data don't actually cause harm in and of themselves.

As you said, the United States government had to admit in the end that there was no harm caused from it. This was a large battle that we fought and made, I think, great strides in this. To me, it's very sad that the concept of redacting, because they're scared of pressure,

is now being loaded up by journalists as how this is responsible journalism. To me, actually taking away our history and denying us the ability to understand fully and have full access to documents is actually more reckless. We have seen countless examples in our publishing history of where things that the journalists that we worked with

did not decide was necessarily a big story to be told, but actually when that document was published in full at the end, have now become the basis of legal cases around the world where people are finally able to get justice.

There's, if I may just tell you one good example of this, actually, to do with a German citizen, Karly Darmastri, who had the same name as a suspected terrorist. Now, this is a story that came from cables, but it was not actually chosen by journalists. This actually just came out when we published the full archive in full in 2011.

So he has the same name as a terrorist, and when he's on holiday in Macedonia, he gets kidnapped by the CIA, secretly renditioned, taken to a torture camp in Syria, moved on to Afghanistan, where he's also tortured. Eventually, the CIA sort of worked out they'd got the wrong person. They still kept him for four months before dumping him back in the Balkans.

And he tried for a long time to get any justice for what had happened to him. And he was unable to until we did our publication, and he found this cable about himself, which had been deemed of no public interest to anybody before. He was then finally able to take a case.

He used our cables, and there was finally a judgment made which used the cables in the judgment. So I think this shows that just allowing a few people to decide what we should know without giving us a full archive is problematic for our whole history and for justice for individuals.

It seems to me, too, I think with the complexity of the global environment and the global media, in my opinion, too, with full archives, you're also able to exploit the subject matter experts

from around the globe to look at, you know, it's my opinion that people would say, well, in terms of the Manning trial, you obviously have an opinion about this trial, so therefore you're not objective. There's nothing more objective than a document or a transcript.

And the full source documents as well, I think if you get one page of a PDF, what if there's a big bust on the next page? I mean, I think you need the full archive. You need to see pieces of information within a context. One star does not make a whole constellation. It changes the nature when you see and you can build these relationships.

I think also there's a big lesson that we found with Cablegate where we actually said that the media organizations, because apparently they would have maybe some particular expertise in an area they were writing on,

silly idea I know, that they could suggest the redactions. And we actually went through and we compared these. And all the redactions were due to reasons of libel, political reasons. The media organizations agreed to redact an individual's name

if they were an imminent harm, imminent immediate danger of loss of life. And in fact, they were redacting names of large companies or politicians that were doing criminal acts around the world. So just the whole process of redaction is actually corrupting.

And the reasons why people redact are not necessarily as they say. So let's talk about this issue of redactions. What kind of considerations does WikiLeaks make in evaluating how the organization is going to handle documents that it receives?

As a general sort of principle, we made a mistake actually with the Iraq war logs where we redacted too much. We'd been hit with this massive propaganda attack. And so we started after the Afghan war logs. So we started with the Iraq war logs to ensure that this couldn't happen again.

And the actual process we went through was we essentially started off with everything was redacted and then we put it back out there. So dictionary words went back out, et cetera. What you then ended up with was a data set that was essentially completely unusable for the public.

So this was then after having survived this propaganda battle, having had the court case where even the government, the Manning court case where the government could not prove harm, we have now understood that actually the way to approach publication is you start from the assumption that everything should be out.

The public deserve their historical archive and they should know everything. If one hypothetically does need to look at a redaction, it should be very specific. It should be about immediate and imminent real danger to someone's loss of life. And it should only be on a time for a short period of time.

Would WikiLeaks ever approach the government or adapt documents again in the future? Working with the government is something else that we have found to be corrupting. It was interesting, Ewan McCaskill from the Guardian did a talk just the other day

where he sort of explained how they'd gone to the White House about the NSA revelations, who'd helped them understand these documents and had also showed them that quite a number of these stories shouldn't come out.

So you can see quite blatantly there that the government is restricting our access to this understanding by media organisations working with them. Yes, we did go to the government or we did interact with the government before Cablegate, but the actual details of this are that the US government made a public display

of how if we were to publish this, it would cause harm. Now what they were doing there was they were setting up a legal basis for intent so that afterwards they could say, well, you knew this would cause harm, therefore you intentionally did this and it's the legal basis for a case.

So of course to this we had to respond, so our lawyers contacted the government and said, as you mentioned, okay, if there's harm, where is it? What can we do about it? To which they didn't respond. So I think this is just another example of how even they did not really see a harm

or certainly didn't care about any supposed harm and that this was just another propaganda attack. So would you see the organisation ever doing that again, approaching the... If we needed to respond in the way that we had there,

I don't see us sort of approaching a government because it just opens yourself up to be lent on in how you publish. Let me ask you this question. I mean, to me, WikiLeaks is born of the internet. You know, in a certain sense it has a different, even full source documents, you know, vis-à-vis sort of search capabilities.

Even in publishing public information with the Manning trial, there is a nature to having an archive that is found in a particular way around the internet and it's structured in a particular way. It's delivered to the quote-unquote audience or the user in a different way.

And there's no question for me, at least there is a sort of, to use sort of common terms, a sort of disruptive innovation of WikiLeaks. You know, it's a publisher, it's a library, it's a lot of different things. In what ways do you believe that WikiLeaks is different from other publishers? Let's kind of talk about traditional media and then newer media.

I think that someone has to be at the front of pushing the boundaries of press freedom. Someone has to have the guts essentially to be able to stand there and to take these hits. And I think that we're pretty uniquely set up to do this

in the way that we are able to, we've decentralized enough, we have a robust enough structure that we're not beholden to a certain jurisdiction or pressure from a certain jurisdiction. Then of course there is the fact that we will always publish full source documents.

The concept, we use the term scientific journalism in the same way that scientists will always publish the full initial data they've worked with to draw their conclusions and their analysis. We will always publish the full archive and the full document set.

Then there are these additional sort of, I guess, added elements that we believe very strongly in creating these searchable archives, ensuring that information is accessible but also usable for the public. We do do our own analysis, our own articles,

but it is these additional elements that we provide that we believe very strongly in that I would say set us apart from other organizations. When you look at the way in which the Snowden releases have done battle,

so to speak, to use that term, with the NSA, how would you compare it to Manning's disclosures against the Pentagon where you publish these disclosures? Obviously both battles are large.

Taking on in one way or another the United States government has no mean feat. With regards to the specific parts of the government that we, to use the word you just used, battled with, the Pentagon has had a large spin machine in place, a PR department in place for a long period of time.

It's huge, it has a lot of money thrown at it. There are people that are there putting out articles all the time. So to go up against this, and they knew we had cable gates in advance, so they were already pre-pepped.

You had Clinton phoning up ambassadors around the world saying, this might come out, this might be there, something that you need to deal with. So we already went into this publication with them having created a whole defense point against it. The difference between that and the NSA is that

they have been built on the concept that they don't exist. So their ability to come back and attack, especially right at the beginning when they did not know that this was about to happen, is far smaller than the Pentagon's abilities.

And the State Department, interestingly enough, the WikiLeaks Persons at Risk group, the 24-7, that was specifically set up to deal with media because Clinton was about to go on a worldwide tour. And the task force, don't forget, WTF. Right, that was the CIA, right? But specifically the State Department had known for six months

that Manning had likely disclosed diplomatic cables, and they knew which database it was from. So it was interesting, as the releases started to begin, that they feigned a complete surprise. The chief submissions from all the embassies around the world

had already done a review and contacted their counterparts and the like. So they were totally prepped for that. I wanted to know if we are capable of doing a Q&A at some point, and if there's any questions from the audience. Is that possible? Is there anybody out there?

Anybody that works here know if we can do a Q&A? Does anybody work here? This lady over here has a question. I can repeat your question if you want to just...

So the question is, what is Edward Snowden going to do when his temporary asylum runs out? What exactly he's actually going to do is obviously, up to his legal team, he has several options in that he can reapply in Russia for the same temporary asylum,

which is an asylum that lasts a year. It's different from the sort of political asylum that they have, which other countries have, which then is more a lifetime status. Obviously, he could also try and apply in other countries.

My personal opinion is from, very sadly, how things seem to be displayed in other countries. For example, Germany is that the governments are not feeling strong enough to actually stand up for him. You've got two months to sort your government out, people.

Anybody else have a question? Something that I wanted to talk to you about was,

when you first arrived, Der Spiegel had done a piece. You know they're the media partners here. I don't care. Which to me was a bit pejorative to some degree. Having spoken to you, I have respect for you

and the work that you've done. I think it's been really courageous and rigorous. I want to talk to you a little bit about that.

That particular article? Just in general, about your role and your...

I think it's a difficult thing, because by the nature of the attacks that we get and therefore the security that we need, we tended to have not, with the vast majority of staff, we don't say exactly what they do, because it's then easy to become a target. If our entire organization was able to be mapped out

of exactly who did what, it would then be very easy for the CIA, whoever, to start targeted attacks. Julian made a very conscious decision after pressure from the media to put a face to the organization after some time when we didn't have one,

to go out there and say, yes, I head up this organization, and it became a complete lightning rod so that the rest of us could have a level of protection. So I suppose with that sort of background, as people started to become known, then it's maybe difficult for media to understand who we are.

I have found an interesting experience, though, in that I have worked with a lot of our media organizations. They know what I do, because they work with me on certain publications, so they know when I've done X, Y, or Z. So I found it very sad

when those journalists that I have worked with call me a companion of Snowden, or a cleaner is the other one, and I organized a party, apparently,

according to someone once. So it's interesting, I suppose, why they do this. I think it's an easy way to delegitimize the organization if you can play down everyone's roles. It's just Julian and then some cleaners and party people, rather than an actual legitimate publishing organization

that's, I'm biased, but I would say doing a better job than most of them. So yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon on why they can't do this. You know, I'd like for you to talk to me about the value of archives.

You talked a little bit about it. WikiLeaks has various types of documents. Certainly they have documents other than just simply Manning's releases as well. So, you know, one of the projects that I really like quite well is Plusteep, is the public library of U.S. diplomacy.

Can we talk a little bit about, you know, the fact that WikiLeaks sort of doesn't just publish censored material, that they also publish material that is hard to access? Yeah, from the beginning,

our mission has been to publish classified or in any other way censored information that is of political, historical importance. And we have always felt this, the concept of having archives and full sets of information.

And also with archives, it's about having those collections made usable and being able to create relationships between different sets of documents. If you have a whole archive of tables, Plusteep that you mentioned, for example, is, yes, it's a compendium of leaked cables

but also declassified cables. And it is now the largest collection of United States diplomatic cables online in the world. It's over 2 million. And by searching it and using it, you can actually see the relationship far better

to analyze these sorts of documents than you can if you just read one cable and then go back. It's interesting because in my discussions with other journalists at other organizations, like, for example, the Washington Post, they use Plusteep and WikiLeaks

every single day in their work. You can see stories come out that link to it on the Internet every single day. So it's of ongoing historical importance. Yes, we have a question here. Where? Right up front.

I've got my glasses on. Take your time, Deanna. If you ask it, I'll repeat it.

Just talk amongst yourselves. Hi, Deanna Beretta from Wow Holland Foundation and the Free Chelsea Manning Network. It's grand to see you on stage. It's really an amazing thing. As we're approaching the year anniversary of this known relevations,

we've had an absurd turn of events happening in Germany because now we have U.S. legal firms writing legal opinions for the German government, threatening parliamentarians and not wanting to acknowledge their immunity were they to travel to the U.S. So now parliamentarians are also in a very difficult situation.

You said we have two months to rally for the government here. I wanted to ask you what can we, because I'd like to take advantage that we're here in Republica, we have viewers worldwide out in Germany, what can we actually do right now? Do you think it's maybe wise to petition to the European High Court for Human Rights or any other campaigns that we should get to start now?

I think people are a little bit at a loss. They don't know what else to do because there is political inertia in their own government. Thank you. The legal advice that you're referring to is very interesting because the situation to do with the inquiry

is that the minority are able to call for Snowden to be a witness, which I think basically the government sort of had to go along with for a bit. And you can see these sorts of tricks now coming into play where they're trying to find reasons why they can't actually let this happen.

So I think it's very important to keep the pressure on here in Germany so that the minority is able to succeed. I think also that it is important that other countries in Europe

stand with Germany and say that they won't let the US have dominance over Germany and that they will support Germany if it were to offer Snowden asylum. So although it's become quite big within the German political sphere,

quite a big topic, I think it's also very important when you're looking at something like this that other nations, so I know there's quite a lot of people here from the international audience, if people can go and get their politicians to stand in solidarity with Germany and show that there is support, that Germany won't just have to stand alone against the US,

I think that that's a way in which hopefully someone can stand up against the United States government. Sarah, a question about the world where you want to live.

Sorry, can you speak up? I can't hear you. I'm sorry. I want to ask about the world where you want to live. Is it a world where every data is free, like free information for everyone? Or is it a world where privacy is respected?

And do you think it's possible? Or do you think with the amount of technical data around us exploding, it is not possible in the end? I think that there's a problem with a lot of the amount of data that has been collected in certain ways so far,

in that actually it is information that is private information. And there's some backtracking to do if we're to actually write that, which is a very difficult thing to do to try to say, I don't know if you saw there was a document that came out from the NSA revelations that was from their intranet,

which was a guy talking about how they should attack system admins, because this is then sort of a keyhole to get into a full system. And what was very interesting to me was the way you saw the psyche of many people working at this agency.

And it was, let's collect it all, let's get it all. I know we've got too much, but it's just so great. And this is sort of very disturbing to me, that we now have a situation where all of our personal information has been taken and collected in one place. And to backtrack from that, to get these agencies, to get the psyche of these people to actually change is a very tough uphill battle.

The question you're actually asking though, I think that there is, I believe in the privacy of individuals like us, where I think there should be complete transparency. It is of powerful people that have a dominance

or ability to dominate over us. And that's where I think that there should be full transparency. And then when it comes to our history and creating our historical archive, being in the public records, that's another area of information which I think should be fully published.

Personal data of individuals such as ourselves, I think should be kept private. And I hope this balance, the problem we now have is this balance is completely off-kilter. We have governments keeping everything private and they're collecting all of our personal information and rectifying this balance, changing it.

It's a huge uphill battle and hopefully we can achieve this. One of the things that's not oftentimes brought into this conversation as well is the fact that, for example, 70% of the US intelligence budget is from private contractors.

Contractors make up 50% or more of the CIA. So there's also the fact that this is also in partnership with corporations and the corporations will blame the government and the government will blame the corporations. Corporations don't have the same supposed liability that governments have.

It's a huge beast now. Billions and billions of dollars are thrown in this industry. As you say, the lines are now blurred between governments and corporations. Snowden worked for a number of corporations and had access to all this same information.

So it's very complex in how you actually start trying to control it. I personally would say that the only way to do it is to start to do things like a huge budget cut. You really need to completely minimize the abilities of these agencies

or it's impossible to stop. It will just keep growing. I think also about the idea of oversight within the US Congress. When you see the fact that, for example, most covert activity in the US is already approved by the intelligence committees.

And the relationship between former directors of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, they oftentimes work for these contractors that eventually develop these relationships with the government. In fact, in the US, what's interesting is it's not just simply the US government

going to AT&T or telecommunications firms and talking about, we need this from you. There is this push since 9-11 for that public-private partnership where most of the infrastructure in the US is owned by private corporations.

So, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community have actually created an even deeper relationship between the two where you have companies coming up with technology that they will sell to the government for disaster preparedness

or some kind of ideological reason that really solidifies their power. There is very little check against that. I think, yeah, it's difficult to check. And also this essentially corporatization of the whole industry

means that the actual reasons behind it become very different. When you have so many corporations involved, they obviously have a very different reason to do something than our government supposedly does, our government's meant to be protecting us. And you can see it, for example, in the NSA revelations

where they say, oh, but we need these things to stop terrorist attacks. But it is quite clear that they haven't and it has been shown through these documents that these methods are not actually protecting us at all. It is about giving power and when you're then blurring it with corporations, the ability to check this becomes almost impossible.

There also needs to be a kind of cost-benefit analysis about this. What is the greater harm? If you're going to go for the idea of a balancing test between national security, so to speak, or unity

and personal freedom or one's inalienable rights, it certainly is questionable because even the organs that are in the United States, for example, that are meant to have deliberation over these important issues really don't have deliberation. I mean, oftentimes, personally, sometimes I'm a little confused

about what's going on with the Snowden documents, and this is my own opinion, because I feel like if Congress was capable of oversight, then wouldn't it seem that Snowden would have protected communications with a member of Congress? Yeah, and it's something that the U.S. government has tried to push to attack Snowden.

It's that there are certain methods in place for a whistleblower in this industry to speak out, but they're completely twisting it there. I mean, he was working for a contractor at that time, and these protections don't exist for contractors.

He should be able to, as you say, go and speak to a member of Congress, but having seen what happened to people such as Thomas Drake, these protections that the government now is loving to sort of spin out are just not actually there in reality, and people's lives are devastated by it.

Thomas Drake tried to use some of those channels, and they just don't work. Does anybody else have any questions? Excuse me, I just wanted to ask you all the time, how are you doing, and how do you get along? Where are you? I'm here. I just wanted to ask you how you're doing

and how you get along in Berlin, maybe just a few words. How I like Berlin. Yeah, and how are you doing? Berlin's a great city. No, I like Berlin a lot. I've been very lucky in coming here in that there's a great community of people, many of whom I knew before coming here.

The Wow Holland Foundation, that is a great organization that has helped us beat the banking blockade and collects money for us. For example, many members of their board are here. Friends of mine like Jay Kaftelbaum that unfortunately aren't able to go to the United States have also been residing here.

So I was very lucky in that when I came, there was already a community here that could help, and it's just growing, so thank you. We have a question over here. Just a few days ago, the Council of Europe has published an expertise on whistleblower protection in Europe,

which is actually not very good. Here in Germany, for example, whistleblower protection is only indirect via the journalistic sources, but there is no law which actually protects informants. So what should future Edward Snowden's do?

Come to us? I think it's an interesting thing with the concept of whistleblower laws. My feeling is that there are pushes within nations to try and strengthen their laws. I think that actually the reality, the real politic of the situation

is that if you get someone like an Edward Snowden, they're not actually going to be able to have, in real terms, the protections that they need within their country. They're just battling too large an opposition. I think that actually what is needed internationally is something a bit more like the Refugee Convention

or an international treaty where if there's a whistleblower from one country, there is an obligation from other countries to take them. I think that that's a much more realistic solution. I think that's about all we have time for, I'm afraid.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.