NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily

Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama



Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013
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Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman

NSA Whistleblowers: "All U.S. Citizens" Targeted By Surveillance Program, Not Just Verizon Customers

A leaked court order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers. The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on an "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers, along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the contents of the communications.

We discuss the news with three guests: Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and two former National Security Agency employees turned whistleblowers: Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. "Where has the mainstream media been? These are routine orders, nothing new," Drake says. "What’s new is we’re seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records from any company."

Binney, who worked at nearly 40 years at the NSA and resigned shortly after the 9/11 attacks, says: "NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said: If Verizon got one, so did everybody else. Which means that they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information of all U.S. citizens."

TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A leaked top-secret order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Business customers. Last night The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on a, quote, "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the content of the communications. The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over records for both international and domestic records. It also forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the court order. It is unclear if other phone companies were ordered to hand over similar information.

AMY GOODMAN: According to legal analysts, the Obama administration relied on a controversial provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of, quote, "any tangible thing relevant to a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation." The disclosure comes just weeks after news broke that the Obama administration had been spying on journalists from the Associated Press and James Rosen, a reporter from Fox News.

We’re now joined by two former employees of the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the NSA. He resigned shortly after the September 11th attacks over his concern over the increasing surveillance of Americans. We’re also joined in studio here by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

First, for your legal opinion, Shayana, can you talk about the significance of what has just been revealed?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. So I think, you know, we have had stories, including one in USA Today in May 2006, that have said that the government is collecting basically all the phone records from a number of large telephone companies. What’s significant about yesterday’s disclosure is that it’s the first time that we’ve seen the order, to really appreciate the sort of staggeringly broad scope of what one of the judges on this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved of, and the first time that we can now confirm that this was under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which, you know, has been dubbed the libraries provision, because people were mostly worried about the idea that the government would use it to get library records. Now we know that they’re using it to get phone records. And just to see the immense scope of this warrant order, you know, when most warrants are very narrow, is really shocking as a lawyer.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, some might argue that the Obama administration at least went to the FISA court to get approval for this, unlike the Bush administration in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. Well, we don’t know if the Bush administration was, you know, getting these same orders and if this is just a continuation, a renewal order. It lasted for only—it’s supposed to last for only three months, but they may have been getting one every three months since 2006 or even earlier. You know, when Congress reapproved this authority in 2011, you know, one of the things Congress thought was, well, at least they’ll have to present these things to a judge and get some judicial review, and Congress will get some reporting of the total number of orders. But when one order covers every single phone record for a massive phone company like Verizon, the reporting that gets to Congress is going to be very hollow. And then, similarly, you know, when the judges on the FISA court are handpicked by the chief justice, and the government can go to a judge, as they did here, in North Florida, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, who’s 73 years old and is known as a draconian kind of hanging judge in his sentencing, and get some order that’s this broad, I think both the judicial review and the congressional oversight checks are very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is just Verizon, because that’s what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian got a hold of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other orders for the other telephone companies, right?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Like BellSouth, like AT&T, etc.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: As there have been in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Yeah, those were—those were companies mentioned in that USA Today story in 2006. Nothing about the breadth of this order indicates that it’s tied to any particular national security investigation, as the statute says it has to be. So, some commentators yesterday said, "Well, this order came out on—you know, it’s dated 10 days after the Boston attacks." But it’s forward-looking. It goes forward for three months. Why would anyone need to get every record from Verizon Business in order to investigate the Boston bombings after they happened?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Binney, a decades-long veteran of the NSA, your reaction when you heard about this news?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, this was just the FBI going after data. That was their request. And they’re doing that because they—if they want to try to get it—they have to have it approved by a court in order to get it as evidence into a courtroom. But NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. That’s one of the main reasons they couldn’t tell Senator Wyden, with his request of how many U.S. citizens are in the NSA databases. There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, let’s go to Senator Wyden. A secret court order to obtain the Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going asked senators, "Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?" The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Ron Wyden. He and Senator Udall have been raising concerns because they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee but cannot speak out openly exactly about what they know. William Binney, you left the agency after September 2001, deeply concerned—this is after you’d been there for 40 years—about the amount of surveillance of U.S. citizens. In the end, your house was raided. You were in the shower. You’re a diabetic amputee. The authorities had a gun at your head. Which agency had the gun at your head, by the way?

WILLIAM BINNEY: That was the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: You were not charged, though you were terrorized. Can you link that to what we’re seeing today?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s directly linked, because it has to do with all of the surveillance of the U.S. citizens that’s been going on since 9/11. I mean, that’s—they were getting—from just one company alone, that I knew of, they were getting over 300 million call records a day on U.S. citizens. So, I mean, and when you add the rest of the companies in, my estimate was that there were probably three billion phone records collected every day on U.S. citizens. So, over time, that’s a little over 12 trillion in their databases since 9/11. And that’s just phones; that doesn’t count the emails. And they’re avoiding talking about emails there, because that’s also collecting content of what people are saying. And that’s in the databases that NSA has and that the FBI taps into. It also tells you how closely they’re related. When the FBI asks for data and the court approves it, the data is sent to NSA, because they’ve got all the algorithms to do the diagnostics and community reconstructions and things like that, so that the FBI can—makes it easier for the FBI to interpret what’s in there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after he blew the whistle on mismanagement and waste and constitutional violations at the NSA. Thomas Drake, your reaction to this latest revelation?

THOMAS DRAKE: My reaction? Where has the mainstream media been? This is routine. These are routine orders. This is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records of—from any company that exists in the United States.

I think what people are now realizing is that this isn’t just a terrorist issue. This is simply the ability of the government in secret, on a vast scale, to collect any and all phone call records, including domestic to domestic, local, as well as location information. We might—there’s no need now to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond. And this is only just Verizon. As large as Verizon is, with upwards of 100 million subscribers, what about all the other telecoms? What about all the other Internet service providers? It’s become institutionalized in this country, in the greatest of secrecy, for the government to classify, conceal not only the facts of the surveillance, but also the secret laws that are supporting surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Drake, what can they do with this information, what’s called metadata? I mean, they don’t have the content of the conversation, supposedly—or maybe we just don’t see that, that’s under another request, because, remember, we are just seeing this one, for people who are listening and watching right now, this one request that is specifically to—and I also want to ask you: It’s Verizon Business Services; does that have any significance? But what does it mean to have the length of time and not the names of, but where the call originates and where it is going, the phone numbers back and forth?

THOMAS DRAKE: You get incredible amounts of information about subscribers. It’s basically the ability to forward-profile, as well as look backwards, all activities associated with those phone numbers, and not only just the phone numbers and who you called and who called you, but also the community of interests beyond that, who they were calling. I mean, we’re talking about a phenomenal set of records that is continually being added to, aggregated, year after year and year, on what have now become routine orders. Now, you add the location information, that’s a tracking mechanism, monitoring tracking of all phone calls that are being made by individuals. I mean, this is an extraordinary breach. I’ve said this for years. Our representing attorney, Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project, we’ve been saying this for years and no—from the wilderness. We’ve had—you’ve been on—you know, you’ve had us on your show in the past, but it’s like, hey, everybody kind of went to sleep, you know, while the government is harvesting all these records on a routine basis.

You’ve got to remember, none of this is probable cause. This is simply the ability to collect. And as I was told shortly after 9/11, "You don’t understand, Mr. Drake. We just want the data." And so, the secret surveillance regime really has a hoarding complex, and they can’t get enough of it. And so, here we’re faced with the reality that a government in secret, in abject violation of the Fourth Amendment, under the cover of enabling act legislation for the past 12 years, is routinely analyzing what is supposed to be private information. But, hey, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because we can get to it. We have secret agreements with the telecoms and Internet service providers and beyond. And we can do with the data anything we want.

So, you know, I sit here—I sit here as an American, as I did shortly after 9/11, and it’s all déjà vu for me. And then I was targeted—it’s important to note, I—not just for massive fraud, waste and abuse; I was specifically targeted as the source for The New York Times article that came out in December of 2005. They actually thought that I was the secret source regarding the secret surveillance program. Ultimately, I was charged under the Espionage Act. So that should tell you something. Sends an extraordinarily chilling message. It is probably the deepest, darkest secret of both administrations, greatly expanded under the Obama administration. It’s now routine practice.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Shayana, I’d like to ask you, specifically that issue of the FISA court also authorizing domestic surveillance. I mean, is there—even with the little laws that we have left, is there any chance for that to be challenged, that the FISA court is now also authorizing domestic records being surveiled?

AMY GOODMAN: FISA being Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I mean, you know, two things about that. First, the statute says that there have to be reasonable grounds to think that this information is relevant to an investigation of either foreign terrorist activity or something to do with a foreign power. So, you know, obviously, this perhaps very compliant judge approved this order, but it doesn’t seem like this is what Congress intended these orders would look like. Seems like, on the statute, that Congress intended they would be somewhat narrower than this, right?

But there’s a larger question, which is that, for years, the Supreme Court, since 1979, has said, "We don’t have the same level of protection over, you know, the calling records—the numbers that we dial and how long those calls are and when they happen—as we do over the contents of a phone call, where the government needs a warrant." So everyone assumes the government needs a warrant to get at your phone records and maybe at your emails, but it’s not true. They just basically need a subpoena under existing doctrine. And so, the government uses these kind of subpoenas to get your email records, your web surfing records, you know, cloud—documents in cloud storage, banking records, credit records. For all these things, they can get these extraordinarily broad subpoenas that don’t even need to go through a court.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, talk about the significance of President Obama nominating James Comey to be the head of the FBI—

SHAYANA KADIDAL: One of the—

AMY GOODMAN: —and who he was.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. One of the grand ironies is that Obama has nominated a Republican who served in the Bush administration for a long time, a guy with a reputation as being kind of personally incorruptable. I think, in part, he nominated him to be the head of the FBI, the person who would, you know, be responsible for seeking and renewing these kind of orders in the future, for the next 10 years—he named Comey, a Republican, because he wanted to, I think, distract from the phone record scandal, the fact that Holder’s Justice Department has gone after the phone records of the Associated Press and of Fox News reporter James Rosen, right?

And you asked, what can you tell from these numbers? Well, if you see the reporter called, you know, five or six of his favorite sources and then wrote a particular report that divulged some embarrassing government secret, that’s—you know, that’s just as good as hearing what the reporter was saying over the phone line. And so, we had this huge, you know, scandal over the fact that the government went after the phone records of AP, when now we know they’re going after everyone’s phone records, you know. And I think one of the grand ironies is that, you know, he named Comey because he had this reputation as being kind of a stand-up guy, who stood up to Bush in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004 and famously said, "We have to cut back on what the NSA is doing." But what the NSA was doing was probably much broader than what The New York Times finally divulged in that story in December ’05.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, will Glenn Greenwald now be investigated, of The Guardian, who got the copy of this, so that they can find his leak, not to mention possibly prosecute him?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Oh, I think absolutely there will be some sort of effort to go after him punitively. The government rarely tries to prosecute people who are recognized as journalists. And so, Julian Assange maybe is someone they try to portray as not a journalist. Glenn Greenwald, I think, would be harder to do. But there are ways of going after them punitively that don’t involve prosecution, like going after their phone records so their sources dry up.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw an astounding comment by Pete Williams, who used to be the Pentagon spokesperson, who’s now with NBC, this morning, talking—he had talked with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had said, when he goes after the reporters—you know, the AP reporters, the Fox reporter—they’re not so much going after them; not to worry, they’re going after the whistleblowers. They’re trying to get, through them, the people. What about that, that separation of these two?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I’ll give you an example from the AP. They had a reporter named, I believe, John Solomon. In 2000, he reported a story about the botched investigation into Robert Torricelli. The FBI didn’t like the fact that they had written this—he had written this story about how they dropped the ball on that, so they went after his phone records. And three years later, he talked to some of his sources who had not talked to him since then, and they said, "We’re not going to talk to you, because we know they’re getting your phone records."

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. William Binney and Thomas Drake both worked for the National Security Agency for years, and both ultimately resigned. Thomas Drake was prosecuted. They were trying to get him under the Espionage Act. All of those charges were dropped. William Binney held at gunpoint by the FBI in his shower, never prosecuted. Both had expressed deep concern about the surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for our hours of interviews with them, as well.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to be looking at top-secret trade deals the U.S. is involved with, and then we’ll be interviewing the new mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Stay with us.

A Massive Surveillance State: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Massive NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails

The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top-secret program, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs. "Hundreds of millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions – in fact, billions of people around the world – essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another," Greenwald says. "Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication." This comes after Greenwald revealed Wednesday in another story that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. "They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another … that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time."

TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business records section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.
SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?
JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.
ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily".

This is Democracy Now!,democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, a Democracy Now! exclusive. President Obama just announced that the U.S. did kill, over the last years, four Americans. We’re going to speak with the father of Anwar al-Awlaki. His name is Nasser al-Awlaki. We’re speaking to him in Sana’a, Yemen. He’s also a grandfather of another of the victims, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. He was born in Denver. He was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen. Stay with us.

Assange: “É bom que os governos tenham medo das pessoas”

O google sabe mais sobre você do que você mesmo. Frase digna do 1984. Não sabemos o que procuramos a três dias na rede, mas o Google sabe!

Assange: “É bom que os governos tenham medo das pessoas”

Do Estadão

“É bom que os governos tenham medo das pessoas”

Jamil Chade

LONDRES – A Internet está se transformando no maior instrumento de vigilância já criado e a liberdade que ela representa estaria seriamente ameaçada. A avaliação é de Julian Assange, criador do Wikileaks e que, há sete meses, vive na embaixada do Equador em Londres. Para ele, a web redefiniu as relações de poder no mundo, se transformou no “sistema nervoso central hoje das sociedades” e chega a ser mais determinante que armas. O problema, segundo ele, é que esse poder está agora se virando contra as populações.

O australiano recebeu a reportagem do Estado para uma entrevista sobre seu livro “Cypherpunks, Liberdade e o Futuro da Internet”, que está sendo lançado no Brasil nesta semana pela Boitempo Editorial.

Apesar de aparentar relaxado, não escondia a palidez de sete meses dentro de um escritório. Em junho de 2012, ele optou por pedir asilo ao Equador, diante de sua iminente deportação para a Suécia, onde é acusado de assédio sexual. Segundo ele, sua decisão de pedir refúgio ao governo de Quito tem como meta evitar sua extradição da Suécia para os EUA, onde seria julgado pela difusão de documentos secretos. O Equador lhe concedeu asilo. Mas a polícia britânica indicou que, assim que ele pisar para fora da embaixada em direção ao aeroporto, seria detido. O resultado tem sido um confinamento sem data para acabar.

Mas essa situação não o deixou menos polêmico. Segundo ele, ao colocar informações em redes sociais, internautas pelo mundo estão fazendo um trabalho de graça para a CIA. “Hoje, o Google sabe mais sobre você que sua mãe”, disse. “Esse é o maior roubo da história”.

Assange ainda defendeu seu anfitrião, o presidente equatoriano Rafael Correa, diante de sua ação contra jornais no Equador e que chegou a ser criticado pela ONU.

Sobre o futuro do Wikileaks, Assange já prometeu que, em 2013, um milhão de novos documentos serão publicados. Ao Estado, ele garantiu: “haverá muita coisa sobre o Brasil””. Ao aparecer para a entrevista, Assange vestia uma camisa da seleção brasileira, num claro esforço de criar simpatia no Brasil e numa operação de imagem cuidadosamente trabalhada.

Eis os principais trechos da entrevista e as fotos de Joao Castelo Branco, as primeiras publicadas por um jornal brasileiro desde que o australiano pediu asilo ao Equador.

Chade – A Internet é o símbolo da emancipação para muitos e foi apresentada como a maior revolução já feita. Mas agora o sr. traz a ideia de que há uma contra-ofensiva a isso tudo. O sr. considera que a Internet está em uma encruzilhada ?

Assange – Diferentes tecnologias produzem mais poder para estruturas existentes ou indivíduos e isso tem sido a história do desenvolvimento tecnológico, ao ponto que podemos ver a história da civilização humana como a história do desenvolvimento de diferentes armas de diferentes tipos. Por exemplo, quando rifles, que podiam ser obtidos por pequenos grupos, eram as armas dominantes em seu dia, ou navios de guerra ou bombas atômicas. E isso define a relação de poder entre diferentes grupos de pessoas pelo mundo. Desde 1945, a relação entre as superpotências dominantes tem sido definida por quem tem acesso às armas atômicas. Mas o que ocorre agora é que Internet é tão significativa que está começando a redefinir as relações de força que antes eram definidas pelos diferentes sistemas de armas que um país tinha. Isso porque todas as sociedades que tem qualquer desenvolvimento tecnológico, que são as sociedades influentes, se fundiram totalmente com a Internet. Portanto, não há uma separação entre o que nós pensamos normalmente que é uma sociedade, indivíduos, burocracia, estados e internet. A internet é o alicerce da sociedade, suas artérias, os nervos e está conectando os estados por cima das fronteiras. A Internet é um centro, se não for o centro, da nossa sociedade. Ela está envolvida na forma que uma sociedade se comunica consigo mesmo, como se comunica entre elas. Não é só simplesmente um sistema de armas ou fonte energia. Não é certo pensar como se fosse o sangue da sociedade. É o sistema nervoso central da socidade. Portanto, se há um problema na Internet, há um problema com o sistema nervoso da sociedade. Agora, víamos antes a internet como uma força liberatadora, que garantia às pessoas que não tinham informação com informação e, mais importante ainda, com conhecimento. Conhecimento é poder. Outras coisas tambem são poder. Mas ela deu muito poder a pessoas que antes não tinham poder. E não apenas mudou a relação entre os que tem poder e aquelas que não tem, dando conhecimento àqueles que não tinham conhecimento. Mas também fez todo o sistema funcionar de forma mais inteligente. Todos passaram a poder tomar decisões mais inteligentes e puderam passar a cooperar de forma mais inteligente. Agindo contrário a essa força está a vigilância em massa criada por parte do estado.

Chade – De que forma estaria ocorrendo essa vigilância em massa?

Assange – As sociedades se fundiram com a internet, diante do fato de que comunicações entre os indivíduos ocorrem pela Internet, os sistemas de telefone estão na Internet, bancos e transações usam a Internet. Estamos colocando nossos pensamentos mais íntimos na Internet, detalhes de comunicações e mesmo entre marido e muher, nossa posição geográfica. Enfim, tudo está sendo exposto na Internet. Isso signifca que grupos que estão envolvidos em vigilância em massa tem conseguido realizar uma transferencia em massa de conhecimento em sua direção. Os grupos que já tinham muito conhecimento agora tem mais. Esse é o maior roubo que de fato já ocorreu na história. Essa transferência de conhecido, de todas as comunicações interceptadas para agências nacionais de segurança e seus amigos corporativos. A tecnologia está sendo desenvolvida para essa vigilância em massa está sendo vendida por empresas de países, como a França, que vendeu um sistema de vigilância para o regime de Kadafi. Na África do Sul, há um sistema desenhado para gravar de forma permanente todas as ligações que entram e saem do país e as estocam por apenas US$ 10 milhões por ano. Está ficando muito barato. A população mundial dobra a cada 20 anos. O custo de vigilância está caindo pela metade a cada 18 meses.

Chade – Mas, justamente o sr. citou Kadafi. Muito acreditam que a Primavera Árabe só ocorreu graças à Internet. Não teria sido esse o caso?

Assange – Há uma série de histórias tradicionais de um longo trabalho de ativistas, de sindicatos e até de clubes de futebol que tiveram um papel importante na Tunísia e no Egito, os Ultras. O que é realmente novo? Bom, algumas coisas: o ativismo pan-arábico é algo novo e potenciado pela web. Diferentes ativistas em diferentes países se conectaram entre si pela web, trocando dicas, identificando quem era bem e quem era mau. O movimento dos Ultras vieram da Itália para os clubes da Tunísia e Egito. Como? Pela Internet. E então há o Wikileaks, jogando muita informação e essa informação então foi atacada pelo regime na Tunísia e depois pelo Egito. Mas também sendo disseminada pelo Egito e Tunisia. Mais importante ainda, essa informação foi disseminada para fora desses países, a tal ponto que ficou difícil para os Estados Unidos e Europa defenderem seus tradicionais aliados.

Chade – O sr. aponta para o poder de redes como Facebook e Google. Confesso que não tenho certeza que Mark Zuckerberg (criador do Facebook) pensou nisso tudo quando estava criando o site. Como é que se tornaram tão poderosos e como é que são, como o sr. diz, usados contra civis?

Assange – Google, essencialmente, sabe o que você estava pensando. E sabe também (o que vc pensou) no passado. Porque quando você tem algum pensando sobre algo, quer saber algum detalhe, você busca no Google. Sites que tem Google Adds, que na verdade são todos os sites, registram sua visita. Portanto, Google sabe todos os sites que você visitou, tudo o que você buscou, se você usou gmail ou email. Então ele te conhece melhor que você mesmo. Um exemplo: você sabe o que você buscou há dois dias, há três meses? Não. Mas o Google sabe. Google conhece você melhor que sua mãe. Claro, mas alguém pode dizer: Google só quer vender publicidade. Portanto, quem se importa que eles estejam fazendo isso. Mas, na realidade, todas as agências de inteligência americana e de aplicação da lei tem acesso ao material do Google. Eles acessaram isso em nosso caso.

Chade – Como fizeram isso?

Assange – Eles usaram instrumentos como cartas da agência de segurança nacional e mandados para buscar os dados de email das pessoas envolvidas em nossa organização. Isso saiu do Google, da conta do Twitter, onde pessoas entraram para acompanhar a nossa conta. No caso do Facebook, é algo impressionante. As pessoas simplesmente estão fazendo bilhões de centenas de horas de trabalho gratuíto para a CIA. Colocando na rede todos seus amigos, suas relações com eles, seus parentes, relatando o que estão fazendo, dizendo que vi aquela pessoa naquela festa, aquela pessoa naquela loja. É um incrível instrumento de controle. Países como a Islândia tem uma penetração do Facebbok de 88%. Mesmo que você não esteja no Facebook, você pode ter certeza que teu irmão está e está relatando sobre você, ou sua namorada está relatando sobre você. Não há como escapar. Agora, quando uma organização como Facebook diz que as pessoas querem fazer isso…

Chade – Claro, essa é justamente a minha questão: como o sr. explica que pessoas de diferentes culturas e religiões estão dispostas a revelar suas vidas diante da web?

Assange – Claro, sobre o que é que você está paranoico. Você pode dizer: bom, estou fazendo isso de forma voluntária e é mais importante estabelecer conexões sociais que se preocupar com um aparato de um estado totalitário. O problema é que isso não é verdade. As pessoas dizem que querem compartilhar algo apenas com meus amigos e amigos de meus amigos, mas não com meus amigos e com a CIA. É uma decepção o que está ocorrendo. As pessoas estão sendo enganadas em desenvolver essa atividade.

Chade – Entendo esse ponto claramente. Mas estamos vendo também censura na China, no Irã e em Cuba, países que parecem estar de fato mais temerosos da Internet. Isso não mostraria que a web é mais ameaçadora para esses regimes que para os civis?

Assange – Acho que você não pode generalizar “esses regimes”. Temos de olhar cada um deles de forma apropriada. Pessoas censuram por um motivo. Censuram porque tem medo, ou porque querem ter mais poder. Normalmente, eles querem manter seu poder. Porque o Irã censura?Bom, porque teme que pessoas dentro do Irã sejam influenciadas por material em persa publicado fora do Irã. E quem publica isso? Bom, alguns são de dissidentes genuínos. Mas também há empresas de fachada, criadas pelos israelenses, pelos Estados Unidos. Isso é umm fato. Inclusive pela BBC em Persa. Denunciamnos essas empresas de fachada no Wikileaks e suas estruturas de financiamento, e mesmo empresas israelenses. Agora, é algo saudável que governos estejam temerosos do que as pessoas pensam. Estranhamente, é um sinal otimista que a China, com toda sua censura e vigilância, está com medo ainda do que sua população pense. Por exemplo, a China baniu o Wikileaks em 2007. Pelo que sabemos, foi o primeiro país a banir. Temos tido uma espécie de guerra para superar o firewall chinês. De alguma forma, é um sintoma positivo.

Chade – Porque? Esse raciocínio não vai contra seu princípio de liberdade no fluxo de informação?

Assange – Sim. Mas é um bom sintoma. Em um país onde as relações estão tão fiscalizadas e a vigilância está enraizada que o poder não precisa se preocupar com o que as pessoas pensam, esse é o maior problema.

Chade – Voltando à questão da liberdade do fluxo de informação. Wikileaks teve um imenso impacto em alguns países. Mas há quem ainda questione: bem, os documentos foram obtidos de forma ilegal. Qual sua avaliação sobre esse argumento de que, por eles terem sido obtidos de forma ilegal, não são informações legítimas?

Assange – Generais não definem a lei. Ou pelo menos não deveriam. Se falamos da situação ameriana, há toda uma série de leis se queremos falar de legislação e foi perfeitamente legal.

Chade – A obtenção dos documentos ?

Assange – Sim, a forma que foram obtidos. Militares americanos não tem direitos na lei americana de encobrir crimes. De fato, isso é algo explícito. Não se pode usar apenas a classificação de documentos para manter um crime sigiloso. Mas também podemos dizer: quem é que fez a lei ? Obviamente são os interesses militares. Nós, como editores, temos de levar essas leis à sério? Nós não levamos elas a sério. Quer dizer, é um conflito em relação a onde você estabelece uma linha. Muito foi dito sobre isso e muito do que foi dito está filosoficamente falido. Há uma forma simples de entender. Não é Deus que estipula essa fronteira para todos nós. Diferentes organismos tem diferentes responsabilidades. As vezes, entidades policiais tem a responsabilidade de manter algo secreto. Uma investigação sobre a Máfia, deve ser mantida em sigilo.Outras organizações, como editores e jornais, tem a responsabilidade perante o público, que é de publicar nformação que ajude o público a decidir e entender o mundo. Essas diferentes responsabilidades não devem ser contaminadas uma pela outra.

Chade – Trazendo esse debate para a América Latina, como o sr. avalia o comportamento de governos diante da Internet e da imprensa em geral ?

Assange – É bem variado e tem vários problemas. Acho que, comparado com o resto do mundo, comparado com Europa, EUA, Sudeste Asiático, a região está bastante bem.

Chade – Alguns dos críticos apontam para o fato de que o presidente (do Equador) Rafael Correa ataca a imprensa. Como o sr. se sente sobre isso, e porque escolheu essa embaixada (do Equador) para vir ?

Assange – Pelo amor de Deus. Eles deveriam ser atacados com muita frequência. A primeira responsabilidade da imprensa e em primeiro codifo de ética é acuracy. Tudo começa com você precisando dizer a verdade. Essa precisa ser a primeira coisa. E também ser representativa. Não é porque sua organização é de propriedade de alguma família. Há um grande problema na América Latina com a concentração na mídia. Ainda que, se há seis famílias que controlam 70% da imprensa no Brasil, o problema é muito pior em vários países. Na Suécia, 60% da imprensa é controlado por uma editora. Na Austrália é muito pior, 60% também da imprensa escrita é controlada por Murdoch. Portanto, quando falamos em liberdade de expressão, temos de incluir a liberdade de distribuição, uma distribição adequada e uma das coisas mais importantes que a Internet nos deu é a liberdade na prática de distribuição, se as pessoas estão interessadas no assunto. Não quer dizer que você pode levar algo a um milhão de pessoas com publicidade. Mas você pode montar um blog e, se as pessoas já estão interessados, podem ler.

Chade – Uma pergunta pessoal. Para alguns, o sr. é um herói, outros dizem que é um criminoso, uma ameaça internacional, outros dizem que o sr. é um ativista. Em suas próprias palavras, quem é o sr. ?

Assange – Sou apenas um cara. Todos nós vivemos só uma vez. Todos temos responsabilidades de viver nossas vidas de acordo com nossos princípios e não disperdiácas. Eu só estou tentando fazer isso. Não acho que é necessário que me defina. Na verdade, quando as pessoas se definem, na maioria das vezes estão mentindo. Mas, no lugar disso, devem olhar as ações de uma pessoa e ver se elas são consistentes no longo prazo.

Chade – Porque é que o sr. evita ir à Suécia (onde a Justiça o busca por acusações de assédio sexual) ?

Assange – Porque eu seria extraditado aos EUA.

Chade – Por qual motivo exatamente ?

Assange – O EUA tem um procedimento contra minha pessoa e contra Wikileaks pelos últimos dois anos. O governo diz em seus próprios documentos internos que a investigação é de um tamanho e natureza “sem precedentes”, citando uma investigação “de todo o governo” americano. É algo sério e que envolve mais de uma dúzia de agências.

Chade – Quais são os próximos passos para o Wikileaks ? O sr. anunciou que vai publicar cerca de um milhão de documentos em 2013. Algo sobre o Brasil?

Assange – Sim. Publicaremos muito sobre o Brasil neste ano. Um material muito interessante.

Jamil Chade é correspodente do jornal O Estado de São Paulo na Europa desde 2000. Foi premiado como o melhor correspondente brasileiro no exterior em 2011, pela entidade Comunique-se. Com passagem por 67 países e mestre em Relações Internacionais pela Universidade de Genebra, Chade foi presidente da Associação de Correspondentes Estrangeiros na Suíça entre 2003 e 2005 e tem dois livros publicados. « O Mundo Não é Plano » (2010) foi finalista do Prêmio Jabuti, categoria reportagem. Na Suíça, o livro venceu o prêmio Nicolas Bouvier. Em 2011, publicou “Rousseff”.
http://blogs.estadao.com.br/jamil-chade/2013/02/02/entrevista-com-assange-e-bom-que-os-governos-tenham-medo-das-pessoas/