Stand up for your rights, Snowden urges
NSA whistleblower calls Canada’s proposed security bill ‘fearmongering’
TORONTO — Edward Snowden, the American cyber espionage whistleblower who has found political asylum in Russia, delivered an inspirational address via webcam to a Toronto private school on Monday night.
Snowden’s address to a world affairs conference at Upper Canada College, just days after his revelations about a massive Canadian online surveillance program known as Levitation, showed him to be as grandiose of vision as Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, but more modest and cautious in his tone, downplaying his dramatic personal story in favour of highminded rhetoric about changing the world.
“I don’t want to call the shots about what people should or should not know because I have a political bias,” Snowden said. “So I entrusted this to journalists.”
He denounced the “over-fascination with myself” that has gripped the media ever since 2013, when he bolted from Hawaii for secret meetings with journalists in Hong Kong, and from there to Russia, where he lives today. He said the narratives of hero or traitor that dominate discussions of him are distractions from the meaning of his revelations.
“Whether or not I’m Adolf Hitler or Mother Teresa, that has no bearing whatsoever on the content of the reporting,” he said.
More than once, he made the distinction between legality and morality, and said his filtering of his leaks through established media absolved him from the blame that so many are so eager to throw at him.
“When we combine these steps (of leaking to media) in aggregate, there is a very strong case to be made that the public interest was maximized and the public risk was minimized,” he said. “Very little harm has been done.” That is a lot to hang on a reporter, but it was a mantle eagerly accepted by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has broken many Snowden stories, and who also addressed the conference via webcam.
He described the Canadian political climate of “fearmongering” used to justify over-reaches in cybersecurity, most notably last week’s news about a federal bill to expand domestic security responses.
Both Greenwald and Snowden used bathtub falls and lightning strikes as examples of ways to die that are more likely than terrorism, although Greenwald’s point was undermined by his placing of St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, site of a recent lone wolf terror attack, in “northern Quebec,” when it is in fact south of Montreal.
“The chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are infinitesimal,” Greenwald said. “And yet your government continually hypes the threat.”
“We’re losing our way as a society,” Snowden said. “If we don’t stand up, if we don’t say what we think those rights should be, and if we don’t protect them, we will very soon find out that we do not have them.”
He spoke of the recent “departure from the traditional models of intelligence gathering,” which used to involve the use of “extraordinary powers only in extraordinary circumstances.”
Now, he recalled how Michael Hayden, his former boss at the U.S. National Security Agency, once said: “We use metadata to kill people.”
Conor Healy, 18, the UCC student who organized the appearance, said Snowden is “more respectable” than Julian Assange, that the men are “two very different animals,” with the “total modesty” of Snowden contrasting with the grandiosity of the similarly exiled Assange.
He said he had no idea the appearance, arranged via the American Civil Liberties Union, would coincide so neatly with such a politically significant revelation from Snowden as the Levitation story.
Snowden, whom Healy introduced as “the most wanted man in the world,” said the names of many government online surveillance programs take their names from American Civil War battles, such as Bullrun, which he said reflects the fact they target not just people on the outside, but on the inside too.
“Inside, we’re looking at everyone in a new way,” he said.