WikiLeaks, The Internet And Democracy

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Daniel Ellsberg, Former State and Defense Dept. Official prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers

Clay Shirky, Independent Internet Professional; Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

Neville Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman, ThoughtWorks

Peter Thiel, President, Clarium Capital; Managing Partner, Founder's Fund

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University; Co-founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

MODERATOR:

Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network


Bio

Clay Shirky teaches the theory and practice of social media in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and its Journalism department, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence. He is the author of, Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without Organizations and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. In 1967, Daniel Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Ellsberg is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," in Stockholm, Sweden, ". . . for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example." Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. Paul Jay is the CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network. 9-11 and the Iraq war were turning points in history and it had an irreversible effect in Paul Jay's life. Alarmed by the inability of major media to ask the underlying questions, Paul decided to combine his film and television experience and his quest to know the undercurrents of news to build an independent television network. Three years later The Real News Network is on it's way. Paul is an internationally acclaimed, award winning filmmaker whose films include Return To Kandahar, Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, Lost in Las Vegas, and Never-Endum-Referendum. For a decade, Paul was the Executive Producer of counterSpin - Canada's flagship debate show on CBC Newsworld. He was also the Founding Chair of Hot Docs!, International Documentary Film Festival (Toronto), now the largest in North America. Roy Singham is founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, Inc. With more than 20 years of technology and executive management experience, Singham is a globally-renowned information technology thought leader. Sigham and ThoughtWorks are recognized experts in Enterprise Architecture, Agile development, large scale software development including highly distributed teams, Open Source Software, Ruby, .NET and Web Services. During the last five years, Singham has provided management services to clients in the insurance, mortgage, energy, leasing, retail and software development industries. He has also directed multi-million dollar projects with clients including Caterpillar Financial Services, Dixons Group, Progressive Insurance and Transamerica. One of Sigham's passions is evolving cultural and organizational patterns to create the most advanced internally and externally socially networked Consultancies in the industry. Singham drives the innovative cultural changes that enable ThoughtWorks to remain the world's most influential company in the arena of bespoke business software development. Peter Thiel is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He has founded and helped launch numerous companies--from PayPal to Facebook--and runs Clarium, a global macro hedge fund manager. He also works to promote and protect freedom through the Thiel Foundation and by sponsoring many nonprofit organizations. Mr. Thiel earned a BA. in philosophy from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. He lives in San Francisco. Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a member of the Board of Trustee of the Internet Society and is on the board of advisors for Scientific American. His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and now as part of the OpenNet Initiative he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering," and its sequel, "Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. " His book "The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It" is available from Yale University Press and Penguin UK.

Transcript

Part 1

And now it's my privilege to introduce our moderator, Paul Jay. Paul is CEO and senior editor of The Real News Network, which is a nonprofit organization that he created in 2005 to create uncompromising global news. Paul has been a force in the Canadian media for over 20 years. He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and is currently working on a feature documentary film called Report from the Middle East. Paul's films have been shown on television around the world through groups such as A&E, Turner, BBC, and CBC. But not content with just documentaries, Paul created and was the executive producer of CBC Newsworld's daily flagship debate programs Face Off and CounterSpin, which for ten years were the primetime Canadian national debate shows about the news of the day. And we're very happy to welcome him back to our stage at the Churchill Club. Please give your warmest welcome to Paul Jay.
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: This is far too long an introduction for me, because one of the things we're going to try to do tonight is not have very long introductions, because as one of the local newspapers said, we have a stellar panel, and we--it really is, the brainpower on this stage is enormous. So we're going to try to make as much room for people to speak from the panel as possible. This topic we're dealing with is an issue of rights. And I think that's going to be the theme that will run through the evening. The rights of government to keep secrets. The rights of people to know what their government is doing. The right to have transparency. In the most recent case with WikiLeaks, the issue of foreign policy: does government have the right to carry on a foreign policy that's publicly one thing and in reality something else, and do the people have a right to know that? It's also an issue about private companies. When do private companies have the right, or do they always have the right, to put commercial interests first? Meaning, if you get a call from a senator--in the case of this specific situation, Senator Lieberman's staff, we're told, calls Amazon, whether it's coincidental or not, 'cause Amazon claims that phone call did not lead to Amazon taking down WikiLeaks, but they did, and they weren't the only company that took down WikiLeaks--the right of a private company to say, this is in our commercial interest not to get into a war with a senator. And the right of public discourse on a platform that's primarily privately owned. What happens to public discourse when it's all moving to the Internet but the Internet is delivered primarily by private companies? So what do we do about that? How will the public interest be defended there? But it's also very much an issue about whistleblowers. And in this day and age, the only place whistleblowers are really going to get to the public opinion, both in the United States and globally, is on the Internet. And right now there's a fight taking place about that. And there's obviously a very zeroed-in campaign to try to close down WikiLeaks altogether. So to start us off, probably the best-known whistleblower in the United States, and certainly renowned for his courage--and I'm not going to go on and on about him, 'cause I promised you no long introductions. Daniel Ellsberg is a former state and Defense Department official, and as you all know, he was prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers. Daniel. So in terms of the significance of the attempt to close down WikiLeaks on the Internet, the great amount of pressure to try some way to prosecute Julian Assange--and I believe there's a grand jury deliberating that now--what does your experience teach us?
DANIEL ELLSBERG, FMR. DEFENSE DEPT OFFICIAL, LEAKED PENTAGON PAPERS: Well, I had the very unusual experience of being the first person ever prosecuted for a leak to the press or the public in the United States. The act under which I was prosecuted, namely, the Espionage Act, had been designed for espionage and had never been used for anything else, other than against spies with the intent specified, to harm the interests of the United States or help a foreign power. My prosecutors did not charge that of me. On the contrary, they used the clause in the Espionage Act--which they're using against Bradley Manning also, and which they would use against Assange if they decide to do it. And that makes no distinction, by the way, in its target. It had never been used, as I say, for--in connection with a leak or a disclosure of classified information, and the reason for that was really that it had been always understood that that was intended to cover spying and that we did not want, Congress did not want an official secrets act of the British kind which criminalizes any and all disclosure of classified information, of government secret information. And the people working on that act or other proposals by administrations to have an official secrets act, Congress had always rejected that on the grounds that that went against the core of our democracy--the First Amendment; the necessity--if the public is to be in any sense sovereign, it had to be informed; that the press played an essential role in that; and that it was the role of the press to inform the public of information of the most embarrassing and sensitive kind, namely, information about mistakes, errors, crimes, reckless policies, incompetence, the sort of thing that I can tell you, as somebody who was in the government, is subject to the closest guarding from its political rivals, from the electorate, and from the public. So we've never had an official secrets act. Actually, Congress did pass one in the year 2000 and Clinton vetoed it. Let me ask how many in this elect audience knew either of those facts? Can I see hands? I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay. How many did not know either of those? Okay. We would have an official secrets act if Clinton had not been led to veto that act, and it would criminalize what Assange did, it would criminalize what Bradley Manning did, definitely what I did. And actually it would go a lot further, because the wording of that act, the only act that the government has found to be--claimed to be applicable makes no distinction between officials, press, bloggers, anyone without authorized access to the information, passing it on to anybody unauthorized. And that means--and this sounds absurd, but it's the way it's written--that would mean that any reader of The New York Times reading a story saying--this is not a joke--saying this is a classified document to which we've been given access, the reader is not authorized--passing it to her husband or her child, her sister, whatever, would be passing it to an unauthorized person and just as prosecutable, in terms of the wording of the Act, as an official or a consultant, as I was, or Bradley Manning, or Julian Assange, or anyone who--you know, this could apply to everyone. Extremely broad. It was always assumed that that would be unconstitutional if it were applied to disclosures. And that's why prior to Obama there were only--in a world where leaks occur every other day, there were three prosecutions, of which mine was the first. The third, AIPAC, was dismissed for a variety of reasons (mainly its being AIPAC, I believe). But--AIPAC. But we would have had to admit that Israel was a foreign country to which they passed the information, and so they didn't want to get them under spying, which otherwise they could have done--[Section] 794. But--different act. But only one person has actually been convicted by a jury and gone to prison, Samuel Loring Morison. So if Supreme Court refused to address that case [inaudible] Two other people have pled guilty, so their cases didn't go up. The Supreme Court has never actually ruled on whether it's constitutional to put this much material--we're talking billions to trillions of pages of classified documents over the last 60 years--to put that all beyond public discussion, not just by threat of firing or clearance, which is very effective and has kept far too many secrets, but to add to that criminal sanctions. Is that constitutional? The Supreme Court has never yet addressed that. I think that is related to the strange fact that President Obama, who came in promising transparency, who has in fact, in the area of national security and homeland security, been as secretive as any prior administration, including George W. Bush, and in some ways more secretive, in one way in particular I'm about to mention. I said [that] before Obama there were three indictments. Obama has brought five in these two years. If he brought it against Assange, if they did six, it would be twice as many as all previous presidents put together. And what's going on here? Well, it's part of a policy of, generally, use of state secrets privilege, use of--against dismissing lawsuits, being totally secretive, not being at all forthcoming on freedom of information in terms of these areas. So it's part of a policy. But why more than others? I don't--I'd be interested to hear anybody's suggestion. In fact, I think you were asking me that the other night, Peter [Thiel]. Why is it that Obama is pressing this so strongly? This is before WikiLeaks, remember, except for Bradley. The previous four were before WikiLeaks, and two of them were for acts undertaken under Bush, which Bush had not indicted--Thomas Drake and Shamai Leibowitz, who is in prison now. So in other words this we're not looking back applies to the myriad crimes of the Bush administration--torture, aggressive war, warrantless wiretapping, crimes that actually strike at the heart of our Constitution, as well as our domestic law. No looking back on those. The only looking back is on whistleblowers Drake and Liebowitz revealing what they thought were great wasteful practices. So there is a war on whistleblowing. To me--and again, why Obama so much? I have a hypothesis. It's really--this is just very speculative. I think he's more--feels more vulnerable to whistleblowers than either [of] his predecessors, because he's doing many of the same things. One of the great secrets in the cables released is how little difference there is from 2008 to 2009. They're the same practices, the same torture. Not that much difference. But Bush was proud of it. He did it secretly at first; it was all covert at first. But when it came out, Torture? We don't torture. But what we do we do, and I don't apologize for it. NSA warrantless wiretapping? No problem. Need it. I think Obama's a little more embarrassed about all that coming out, that he's acting in the same lines, that he has a new war that he's escalating, added to Bush's war in Afghanistan. And he really wants to do what other presidents have always wanted to do: shut down leaks that they don't control, the leaks they don't make. But I think he's really doing it more aggressively than any previous president, and specifically he's doing it by treating the act that I was charged under as on official secrets act, as an act that criminalizes all leaks. And if he gets a conviction of any of these people, not just Manning or Assange, if he gets Drake or Kim, if they go up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court takes it and doesn't notice that it is unconstitutional--which is not a bad bet: earlier courts would almost surely have called it unconstitutional; this one might not. And if he gets that, he has a very broad official secrets act, and from then on, all he has to do to find out who is the source of any leak, one day to the next, with a clear-cut crime, is to call in the reporter whose byline is on the head of that column and say, we're not charging you with anything, we're not against the press, we're for the press; just who committed the crime? And if the person can't take the Fifth Amendment, he or she is not being charged with anything, they just either tell or they go to jail indefinitely for contempt. Judith Miller lasted 85 days. And some of them will last longer, but a lot of them won't. And from then on, no source will have any basis for assuming or hoping that their name for this whistleblowing will be anonymous. Their only recourse will be WikiLeaks. So WikiLeaks matters.
JAY: I should have said in the beginning what the format for this evening is. Each speaker will speak for about five or so minutes, and then I'm going to open it up to the panel to question or comment on what the first speaker spoke about. And over the course of the evening each speaker will get a chance to speak. So I now throw it to the panel. Any questions or comments or argument with Daniel Ellsberg?

End of Part 1