Here’s The Transcript Of Glenn Greenwald’s Speech At the Socialism Conference In Chicago

And thanks as well to the organizers of this conference for not only inviting me to speak for the third straight year but allowing me to speak when I said that I wasn’t going to be able to actually physically come to the United States, from the comfort of my little Skype prison. Which, now that I think about it, is actually definitely preferable to an actual prison, so I probably shouldn’t complain. (Laughter.) And it’s interesting I was talking to the organizers yesterday about the logistics of how this was going to work. And they had suggested that I speak sitting behind a desk in a chair similar to what I’m doing now. And I tried that out a couple of hours ago and it was very strange. I actually felt like I was like Vladimir Putin or Ronald Reagan or something addressing the nation, announcing why I had just ordered an air strike on another country. (Laughter.) But the alternative was to sort of stand up at this makeshift podium which I knew was going to prompt all kinds of reactions like, ‘He’s in this room by himself. Why is he standing up talking? That makes no sense.’ So, this was the least weird of all the alternatives. So I hope you can bear with me through some of the weirdness.

Um, I would be remiss before I began if I didn’t acknowledge an extremely prestigious award that we at the Guardian received yesterday for the journalism that we’ve been doing in publishing the NSA stories. A lot of journalists and editors and the like have debates about what the most prestigious journalism award is. Is it a Polk Award, or a Peabody or a Pulitzer? And those are definitely all prestigious awards, but I actually think the one that we got yesterday is a significant level above them all. And I’m very humbled and honored to have received this award. The U.S.Army announced yesterday that it was blocking access at all army facilities across the world to the Guardian website in response to (audience cheers and shouts obscure remainder of sentence).

Apparently, (unclear) army are old enough and mature enough to risk their lives to fight in wars but not mature enough to read news articles that the rest of the world is reading. But the reason I say that that’s actually flattering, and I mean it, it is very flattering, it’s because I’ve long looked at journalism through this prism that defines the two polar opposites of what I consider journalism to be. And one of those polar opposites has long been defined for me by this speech that the great war correspondent David Halberstam gave in 2005 to students at Columbia Journalism School. And he was asked by the speech organizers to speak about his proudest moment in his career, in his journalism career. And what he said what his proudest moment in his journalism career was when he was stationed in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 as a very young war reporter. He would go out into the field and see what was actually happening. So when he went to the press conferences of U.S. generals that afternoon and they made all sorts of claims, he knew that those claims were lies. And instead of disseminating those lies as truth, he was standing up at these press conferences in the middle of Vietnam in a war zone and very aggressively challenging these generals, and saying to their face that he knew what they were saying was false. To the point where those generals went to the editors of the New York Times and demanded that he be removed from his position covering the war. That was his proudest moment in journalism, when he so angered the government officials that he was covering (unclear).

And that event, that episode, stands in stark contrast to what I consider to be the other polar opposite which was this interview that Bill Keller gave, who was the executive editor of the New York Times throughout the Bush Administration, in which he was talking about the newspaper’s publication of some of the materials that they received from Wikileaks. He was giving a BBC interview, and he was very eager to distinguish what the New York Times did from what Wikileaks does. Which, you know, makes sense one level, since I don’t recall Wilileaks ever publishing a bunch of false articles that led the nation to war. (Hoots and laughter from audience.)

That wasn’t actually the difference that Bill Keller was referring to. Bill Keller was trying to say that he, the New York Times is radically different than what Wikileaks does because, unlike WikiLeaks which simply publishes whatever it wants, the NYTS under Bill Keller went to the Obama Administration ahead of time and said, ‘These are the things that we think we ought to publish, do you think we should?’ And if the U.S. government said, ‘You shouldn’t publish this, and you shouldn’t publish that, and you shouldn’t publish this other thing, because to do so will endanger national security,’ Bill Keller proudly said the NYTs didn’t publish it. He was very — he was beaming like a third-grader who had just gotten a gold star from his teacher. And he said in this BBC interview, ‘The Obama Administration has continuously said that we have been very responsible in how we publish (unclear).

And the reason why that to me seems like polar opposites is because David Halberstam viewed the measurement of good journalism as defined by how much you anger the people in power that you’re covering. Whereas Bill Keller defines good journalism — and I think most modern establishment journalists define it this way as well, by how much you please the people in power that you’re covering. And for me, if you are pleasing the people in power with the things that you’re disclosing, you may be very good at your job. But your job is not journalism.

(Unclear) I’m printing out this article that talked about what the army did and I’m going to have it laminated and framed and hung very prominently on my office wall very proudly.

Um, the last thing I want to say before I begin with the substance is, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the brave, patriotic men and women of the National Security Agency. Um, because they spend a great deal of time watching over me, making sure that I’m okay. (Laughter.) And I do really appreciate it. You know, they’re a little shy. They don’t like to be seen. (Laughter.) If you turn the lights on, and shine the lights at them, they sort of scamper quickly under the kitchen counter. (Sentence unclear.) I think I speak for all of us when I say that I feel them here in my heart. Look, they’re people, they have feelings. And so at the beginning of almost every conversation I do insist that whoever I’m speaking with say hello to them because it’s just rude not to. (Shout from the audience.) Even though I’m quite certain that this is not the first socialism conference that they’ve attended. (Shrieks and laughter.)

So I accepted the invitation to speak here several months ago. And when I realized a couple weeks ago that for a variety of reasons I wouldn’t be able to physically travel to the U.S. to actually speak, I was the one who asked the conference organizers if I could speak in this manner by Skype because I really wanted to speak even though I couldn’t be there. And that was true for a lot of reasons. One is I really do love this conference. There’s no conference quite like it in terms of the vibrancy and diversity and electricity and energy of the people who attend. I genuinely leave inspired each time that I have attended.

There’s another reason, which is these last four weeks have probably been the most intense, and exhausting, but invigorating four weeks of my life. But I haven’t really had a moment to stop and reflect on the ramifications of what has happened. And I knew that speaking about it for the first time, which is what I’m doing tonight, would sort of compel me to do that, and I wanted that. But the real reason I was eager to speak at this conference is because, unlike a lot of conferences that I attend and events, political events I speak at, this conference is really focused not only on identifying political grievances, which is an extremely important thing to do. But also thinking about how to construct activism designed to find solutions to those grievances, which is crucial.

(Unclear)…at every single speech that I give practically about any political issues one of the first questions in the Q&A session is always, ‘Well, what is it that we can do about these things?’ And that question is one that’s asked at this conference. But it’s more than just a question: I think it’s really the predominant theme. It’s this idea that there’s really no point in talking about political problems and systemic injustices if you’re not simultaneously grappling with the question of what is it that I as an individual can do about it.

And I just want to spend a little bit of time describing to you what has happened to me over the last four weeks from a somewhat personal perspective. Um, because it probably has been the most eye-opening experience for me with regard to this question, this ‘What can I do about these things?’ question.

And so I just want to share with you what happened that kind of led me into this, this story. It was many months ago that I was first contacted by Edward Snowden. He contacted me by email. He was anonymous. I had no idea who he was. Um, he didn’t say much. He simply said he had what he thought would be some documents that I’d be interested in looking at, which turned out to be the world’s largest understatement of the decade. (Laughter.) And, but he didn’t tell me much about himself. And several months went by because we talked about creating an encryption system, and other things. And it wasn’t really until he was in Hong Kong with the documents that we really began to have substantive conversations about who he was and what he was doing and what kind of documents he had. And I spent many hours with him talking online when he was in Hong Kong. But I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know anything biographical about him, his age, where even he work. And he was trying to get me to come to Hong Kong to speak with him, and before I would do that, fly all the way across the world, I wanted some assurance that it was really worthwhile. That there was some-, that it substance behind what he was saying. And so he spent me a little appetizer. Sort of like, if you have a dog, you kind of put the biscuit in front of the dog’s nose to get it to where you want it to go, that’s what he was doing to lure me to Hong Kong.

And these documents, even though there was was just a little sampling, were the most extraordinary things I had ever seen. I remember after I read the first few pages literally being dizzy. Dizzy with ecstasy and elation. Over what it is that he had. And so like most of us do when we’re interacting with somebody exclusively online, I began to form a mental impression of who he was. And I was pretty certain that he was older. Even like in his sixties, that he was probably like a senior bureaucrat within one of these national security state agencies, kind of grizzled and nearing the end of his career. And the reason I thought that because he had… such obviously penetrating access to such top-secret documents. Um, he also had incredibly sophisticated and well-thought-through insight into the nature of the national security apparatus and his own relationship to it, that I thought must mean that he had been thinking about these things and interacting with them for decades. But the real reason I thought that he was that age, sixties, nearing retirement, nearing even the end of his life, was because he was very emphatic from the beginning, when I first began talking to him, that he absolutely knew what he was doing would essentially unravel and probably destroy his life. That the chances that he would end up in prison for the rest of his life, if not worse, were very high. Probably close to inevitable. Or that at the very least that he would be on the run from the world’s most powerful state for the rest of his life.

And I just didn’t, I didn’t really conscientiously think about it but I think that I tacitly assumed that anybody who was willing to make a sacrifice in their life that extreme, was probably somebody who had just endured so much, and was near the end of their life anyway, that they had worked up the bravery to do that.

And when I got to Hong Kong and I met him for the first time, I was more disoriented and just completely confused than I think I had ever been in my life. Not only was he not 65, he was 29, but he looked much younger. And so when we went back to his hotel room and began questioning him when — it was Laura Poitras the filmmaker and I — who went back to his hotel room, what I really wanted to understand more than anything else was what was it is that led him to make this extraordinary choice. In part because I didn’t want to be part of an event that would destroy somebody’s life if they weren’t completely open-eyed and rational about the decision that they were making. But also in part because I really wanted to understand just for my own sense of curiosity what would lead somebody with their entire life in front of them who had a perfectly desirable life: living with his longtime girlfriend in Hawaii, with career stability, a reasonably well-paying job. What would lead somebody like that to throw all of that away and become an instant fugitive and probably spend the rest of their life in a cage.

And the more I spoke with him about it, the more I understood. And the more I understood, the more overwhelmed I became. And the more of a formative experience it had for me, and will have for the rest of my life. Because what he told me over and over in different ways, and it was so pure and passionate that I never doubted its authenticity for even a moment, was that there’s more to life than material comfort. Or career stability. Or trying to simply prolong your life as long as possible. What he continuously told me was that he judged his life not by the things that he thought about himself, but by the actions that he took in pursuit of those beliefs. (Audience applause.)

And when I asked him why it was that…how did he get himself to the point, I mean that sounds good in the abstract, to get himself to the point where he was willing to take the risk that he knew he was taking. He told me that he for a long time he had been looking for a leader, somebody who would come and fix these problems. And then one day he realized that there’s no point in waiting for a leader, that leadership is about going first and setting an example for others. And what he ultimately said is that he simply didn’t want to live in a world where the U.S. government was permitted to engage in these extraordinary invasions, to build a system that had as its goal the destruction of all individual privacy. That he didn’t want to live in a world like that, and that he could not in good conscience stand by and allow that to happen knowing that he had the power to help stop it.

But the thing that was most striking to me about all of this is that I was with him for 11 straight days. I was with him when he was unknown because we hadn’t yet divulged what his identity was. And I watched him watch the debates unfold on CNN and NBC and MSNBC and every other channel around the world that he had really hoped to provoke with the actions that he had taken. And I also watched him, once he was revealed, realize that he had become the most-wanted man in the world. That official Washington was calling him a traitor, was calling for his head. And what was truly staggering to me, and continues to be staggering to me, is there was never a moment, never an iota, of remorse or regret or fear in any way. This was an individual completely at peace with the choice that he had made because the choice that he made was so incredibly powerful. And I was incredibly inspired myself by being in proximity to somebody who had reached a state of such tranquility because they were so convicted that what they had done was right. And his courage and that passion infected me to the point where I had vowed that no matter what I did in my life with this story and beyond that I would devote myself to doing justice to the incredible act of self-sacrifice that Edward Snowden had made. (Applause)

And that energy I watched then infect everybody who I work with at The Guardian, which is a very large media organization. And I’m the last person that would ever praise any media organization, even one that I worked for, probably especially one that I work for. And yet I’ve watched over the last four weeks, the editors of The Guardian, the top editors that run the newspaper and have for many years, engage in incredibly intrepid and fearless journalism as they have day after day dismiss the fearmongering and threats of the United States government by saying we’re going to continue publish whatever it is that we think should be published in the public good.

And if you talk to Edward Snowden and you ask him as I did, what is it that inspired him, he talks about other individuals who engaged in similarly courageous behavior. Like Bradley Manning. Or the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire and spawned one of the greatest democratic revolutions of the last four or five centuries (word unclear).

And what I actually started to realize about all this is two things. Number one, courage is contagious. If you take a courageous step as an individual you will literally change the world because you will effect all sorts of people in your immediate vicinity who will then affect others who will then affect others. You should never doubt your ability to change the world.

The other thing that I realized is that it doesn’t matter who you are as an individual. Or how formidable or powerful the institutions that you want to challenge are. Mr Snowden is a high school dropout. His parents work for the federal government. He grew up in a lower-middle class environment in a military community in Virginia. He ended up enlisting in the United States Army because he thought the Iraq war at first was noble. He then did the same with the CIA and the NSA because he thought those institutions were noble. He’s a person who has zero privilege, zero power, zero position and zero prestige and yet he by himself has literally changed the world. And therefore so can you.

You know, one of the things that I realized early on was that not only he, but any of us who were involved in reporting these stories, were going to be attacked and demonized in the way that Jeremy was just referencing. And you know you see all sorts of attacks on him that are completely absurd and contrary to the facts. You hear claims from these sudden armchair psychologists that he’s narcissistic. I don’t even think they know what that means; but it’s just become the script that they all read from. Here’s that’s somebody that could have sold these documents to intelligence services for millions of dollars and spent the rest of his life secretly enriched beyond his wildest dreams. And did none of that. He instead stepped forward and made himself a target for the good of all of us.

Or they say that, they try and impugn his motives. They say, we’ll he’s just a fame-monger or a famewhore is the phrase of choice at the moment. I have spent the last three weeks being harassed by telephone by the most ridiculous media stars in the United States who are completely desperate to interview Edward Snowden and put him on their show every single day. He could have been one of the most famous people in the world by now. He is far more a recluse than a famewhore. He has refused every single one of those interviews because his real motive in doing what he did is exactly what he said, which is not to make himself famous but to make the people of the United States and the world aware of what is being done to them by the United States government in secret.

But the reason that it’s always so common for people like Edward Snowden to be demonized, the reason it’s so important to attribute psychological illness to him, the way they did with Bradley Manning, the way they do with all whistleblowers, they way they tried to do with Daniel Ellsberg, is precisely because they know what I just said. Which is that courage is contagious. And that he will set an example for other people to similarly come forward and blow the whistle on the corrupt and illegal and deceitful things that they’re doing in the dark. They need to make a negative example out of him so that that doesn’t happen. And that’s the reason why people like Edward Snowden are so demonized and attacked and it’s why it’s up to all of us to defend him and hold him up as the noble example that he is. So that he (phrase unclear.) (Applause.)

So that was the eyeopening effect that all of this has had on me personally. And I’m sure I haven’t even thought through all the implications and I’ll continue to do so as the months go by. But I do know for certain that this experience will form me and shape me and millions of other people around the world in all sorts of ways.

So I just want to spend a little bit of time talking as well about the substances of the revelations and about what it is that we know about the U.S. surveillance state. And you know I”m somebody who has written about the surveillance state for years now. It was actually the topic of the speech that I gave to this conference last year. And …I kept trying to work through today how it is that I feel having watched all of these documents be revealed and have all these secrets spilled that prove that the surveillance state really is as menacing and ubiquitous as many of us have long been saying. And I keep coming back to this scene, this sort of iconic scene in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, where Woody Allen is waiting in a movie theater line, and he sort of has this fantasy that we all wish would happen but never does. There’s this pompous pontificating pseudo-intellect standing behind him in line who’s bombastically talking about the media theories of Marshall McLuhan. And Woody Allen turns around and says, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve gotten Marshall McLuhan all wrong.’ And this pseudo-intellect says, no you don’t know what you’re talking about. And Woody Allen says, ‘Well, I just happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here.’ And he goes behind this little tree nearby and pulls him out. And uh Marshall McLuhan says, ‘I’m Marshall McLuhan.’ And he turns around to the guy behind Woody Allen and says, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Woody Allen is absolutely right about my theories. And he’s vindicated in the best possible way.

The reason why I feel a little bit like that…(Laughter, applause and hoots.) I’ve been engaged in so many debates over the last several years. I’ve written endlessly about the fact that the goal of the U.S. surveillance state, the National Security Agency and the entire national security apparatus on which it’s based, is to make sure that there is no such thing as individual human privacy. Not just in the United States but in the world. And I have repeatedly been told that this is absurd, hyperbole, that this is conspiratorial thinking. That the NSA is constrained by all these wonderful legal frameworks. And I feel a little bit like being able to say, ‘Well you know I just happen to have a huge stack of top secret NSA documents right here.’ And you know these issues involving surveillance and the surveillance system that they’re building are complex. They’re legally complex, they’re technologically complex, it is difficult to simplify them in a way that is digestible for the news cycle. So I just want to spend a little bit of time talking about not just the stories but just some of the facts that have been revealed already by us. And it’s a small fraction of what is coming. But I think the picture already is quite clear. Just yesterday, or two days ago, we published a document by one small part of the National Security Agency called the Secret Source Operations, one of the most secretive units of the NSA. And there was an internal document in this SSO unit dated December 12, 2012, so the end of last year. And what this document did was it was celebrating a milestone the way other people celebrate their birthdays. What it said was, ‘Congratulations to us, the, this unit of the SSO, we have just collected our one trillionth piece of email Internet metadata.’ That’s one trillion with a T.

And what that means is that every single day they are collecting hundreds of millions of our email records, and the email records of people around the world to find out who is emailing us, to whom we are sending emails, what our IP address is when we open the emails and read them, which means what our physical location is, and then being able to piece together what our network is. Who are associations are, what our life patterns are, what it is that we do on the Internet, what our interests are, what animates us — a whole variety of information that they are sucking up and vacuuming, not about individuals who they think are guilty of terrorism, but about human beings indiscriminately.

Another document that I probably shouldn’t, but since it’s not published, but I’m going to anyway, share with you. And this one’s coming soon but you’re getting a little preview. It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to direct, redirect into its own repositories one billion cell phone calls every single day. One billion cell phone calls every single day. What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without its being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn’t mean they’re listening to every call. It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time. And it does mean that they’re collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records. It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy. And what’s incredibly menacing about it is that it’s all taking place in the dark with no accountability and virtually no safeguards. And the purpose of our story and the purpose of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing is not singularly or unilaterally to destroy those systems. The purpose is to say, if you the United States government, and the governments around the world, want to create a globalized surveillance system in which we no longer have any privacy in our individual lives or on the Internet, you at least ought to have us know about it, have you do it in the sunlight so that we can decide democratically whether that’s the kind of system and the kind of world in which we want to live.

So the last point I want to make is that I think that one of the things that I know I set out to do, and I think that Mr. Snowden set out to do, and that I know that the people at The Guardian set out to do, was not simply to publish some stories about the NSA. It was to really shake up the foundations of the corrupted and rotted roots of America’s political and media culture. And the reason I say that is that that there’s an economist, Dean Baker, who yesterday on Twitter wrote that he thinks that the stories that we’re doing are shining as much light on the corruption of American journalism as they are on the ongoing operations of the National Security Agency. And I think that that is true for several different reasons. Number one is that if you look at the quote unquote “debate” over the very charming, endearing debate about whether or not I should be arrested, prosecuted and then imprisoned under espionage statutes for doing journalism, what you find is that that debate is being led by other people who are TV actors who play the role of journalists on TV. They’re the ones who are actually (feeding?) the debate. (Applause.) And the reason that they’re doing that is because they purport to be adversaries of political power or watchdogs over political power, but what they really are are servants to political power. They’re appendages of political power. And so what you find is that they always lead the way in attacking whoever challenges the political system in Washington because that is the system of which they’re apart. That’s the system that props them up, gives them oxygen and provides them with all of their privilege, wealth and access. And I think their true role ,which is not to serve as adversaries of people in government power or to expose what they’re doing but to protect and shield them and amplify their message, has become more vividly exposed in the last four weeks than it has in quite a long time.

And the thing that really amazes me, is that if you look at how whistleblowers are treated, whether it be Bradley Manning or Wikileaks or Thomas Drake at the NSA or Edward Snowden, I can understand why Americans in general, just ordinary Americans, have ambivalence about those whistleblowers. Some people think security is more important. Or that secrecy is something that should be decided by democratically-elected officials and not by individual whistleblowers. That I all get. But what I don’t understand and can never believe is that anybody who at any point thought of themselves as somebody who had a journalistic ethos would look at people who are shining light on the world’s most powerful factions and do anything but applaud them and express gratitude for them since that’s supposed to be the function that they the journalists themselves are serving. And yet what you find is the exact opposite.

What you really find is that if you look at who hates Bradley Manning, or who has expressed the most contempt about Wikileaks, or who has led the chorus in demonizing Edward Snowden, it is those very people in the media who pretend to want transparency because transparency against political power is exactly what they don’t want. Because those are their masters. And the stronger they stay, and the stronger that system stays, the more rewarded they will be. And what is really amazing most of all about it is that while they purport to hate leaks they are themselves are the most prolific users of leaks. I was on Meet The Press last week, the first time I ever ventured into the belly of the imperial beast. And some of you probably know but it got a lot of attention because David Gregory all but called for my prosecution during the interview. And the reason why, there were a lot of reasons why that was pretty amazing. But one of the the most extraordinary things about it was that 90 seconds or so before he actually called for my prosecution, because I committed the crime of doing journalism, of showing the public what the government is doing in the dark, he and I had an argument about a FISA court opinion that had been issued in 2011 that found many of the things that the National Security Agency was doing to be unconstitutional and illegal. And I had described this opinion based on the documents that I have in my possession that talks about them. And he objected, he said, ‘Oh no, the way you’ve described this opinion is not inaccurate. I’ve had government officials tell me that what’s actually in this opinion was not a finding that the government did anything wrong or illegal or unconstitutional, perish the thought! This was nothing more than the government going to the court and saying, ‘Can we please have permission to do this spying that we would like to do in the future but haven’t yet done?’… And the court said, ‘No, you’re allowed to do this and this and this but not this and this and this, and then the government went and obeyed the court.

Now, David Gregory’s claims about what that court opinion were were completely false. As I well know because I’ve actually seen documents talking about them as opposed to having government officials whisper in my ear about what it says. (Laughter.) But what was really amazing about it was that 90 seconds later he was calling for my prosecution for having disclosed classified information, and yet he 90 seconds earlier had just gotten done saying that somebody in the government had come to him and described this top-secret court document which he then disclosed to the public into the world by telling me what it said. (Laughter and applause.)

And the same exact thing happened on CNN when Barbara Starr, who is the Pentagon spokeswoman who works for CNN as the Pentagon reporter (laughter), she went on the air and she said, ‘Government officials have informed me that the revelations from Edward Snowden published in The Guardian have helped the terrorists by enabling them to evade our systems and change the way that they communicate.’ (Very loud laughter.) It is — it’s hilarious. Because apparently there are terrorists in the world who don’t actually, haven’t heard and don’t know that the U.S. government is trying to eavesdrop on their telephone calls and read their emails? These same terrorists are going to be sophisticated enough to detonate very powerful bombs on U.S. soil But, leave that aside, what Barbara Starr did was she had people in government come and leak classified information to her which she then went on the air and spilled to the world things that the intelligence agency supposedly learned the terrorists were doing. And yet nobody called for Barbara Starr’s prosecution or dug into her past. And nobody did that to David Gregory, including David Gregory, because what they do in their minds the only kind of leaks that are bad are leaks that the government doesn’t want disclosed to the public. The only crime that you commit is when you do reporting that the government doesn’t want you to do. When you expose things to your readers and to your viewers that embarrass political officials. The only thing that is journalism to them is when they carry forth the message that has been implanted in their brains by the political officials whom they serve. And I think this behavior highlights the true purpose of establishment journalism more powerfully than anything I or anybody else (sic) have ever written.

The very last point I want to make, the thing that I really want to leave you with, the thing that I am trying to get myself to be sort of left with, as the thing that is defining how I look at everything from this point forward, is that one of the things that has been most disturbing over the last three to four years, has been this climate of fear that has emerged in exactly the circles that are supposed to challenge government. It has emerged among investigative journalists, including the ones at the most protected media outlets like the New York Times and others. The real investigative journalists who are at these institutions who do real reporting are petrified of the U.S. government now. Their sources are beyond petrified. The investigative journalist Jane Mayer who did so much excellent work uncovering the torture regime during the Bush years has said that because of the Obama war on whistleblowers in journalism that Jeremy’s described, investigative journalism in the U.S. has come to a quote ‘standstill.’

If you talk to anybody in journalism, or in the government, they are petrified of even moving. We have had almost — it has been almost impossible get anyone inside the government to call us back with regard to any story. Because people are so scared that if anything on their phone record shows that they’ve called me or called The Guardian they will be held in extreme suspicion as leakers.

And it’s not just journalists but also dissident groups that have been infiltrated. And Muslim communities that have been monitored in all sorts of ways. There’s a climate of fear in exactly those factions that are most intended to put a check on …those in power. And that has been by design. And one of the things that I set out to do as one of my principle priorities in how I’ve done this story, and how I’ve gone about that, is to show that you don’t actually need to be afraid. You can stand up to the United States government and be defiant when they deserve it. And exercise your constitutional right to (unclear.) (Applause.)

And so that is the message that I hope more than anything is conveyed on a visceral level. The revelations about the NSA are important, things that we learn about journalism is important. But ultimately the thing that matters most is that the rights that we know we have as human beings are rights that we ought to exercise and that nobody can take away from us. And the only way those rights can ever be taken away is if we give in to the fear that is being deliberately imposed. And so that I hope is the message of Edward Snowden and of the reporting that we’re doing, which is you not only shouldn’t be afraid, but do not be afraid.