Meeting Snowden

One, two, three, go.

Go, what we're gonna do.

Change is gonna come,

it's gonna cart me away

doesn't matter what you do or say.

Moscow, December 2016.

Vladimir Putin is the new king of the international scene.

Donald Trump is about to become President

of the United States of America.

A new world order is coming.

Is this the end of democracy?

And is defending it becoming a crime?

Edward Snowden has dealt with these questions

like no one.

The NSA sub-contractor unveiled the US programs

on mass surveillance.

He has lived in exile in Russia since then.

- I don't go out to nightclubs, you know,

I never have.

I don't go to bars, I don't drink alcohol.

It's just not interesting to me.

So, I've described myself before in interviews

as an indoor cat.

- Do you have special requirements regarding phones

and everything or?

No, not here, I mean.

There's so many people.

I think anybody who wants to know

we're here probably already knows we're here.

My name is Edward Snowden.

I'm, (laughs) I guess 33 years old now,

you know, the years kinda slip by

when you're out in limbo.

I thought when I was first transiting Russia

that it was a terrifying, temporary trip

because I never planned to stay here.

And you've gotta remember, I came from the CIA,

I came from the NSA, right?

If you have a picture of Russia on the wall there

it's probably got a big target sign around it.

But, I must say, although,

it was never my choice to end up in Russia,

I'm glad that I'm not in jail.

- Four years ago, he left his job in Hawaii.

In an hotel room in Hong Kong,

he gave classified information

to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald,

two independent journalists he had carefully picked.

Exposed, Washington launched a manhunt.

- No, I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.

They revoked his passport

as he was transiting in Moscow.

Stuck for 39 days in the airport,

he sought asylum in 21 countries.

Germany, Switzerland, France,

they all bowed to the US pressure.

Exasperating American authorities,

Russia granted him a resident permit.

It is due to expire in six months.

The relationship between the US and Russia

has become unreadable.

Snowden's time in Russia is in jeopardy.

The idea that great powers and countries

can trade people away without regard to human rights

is of course possible.

Do I have any influence over it?

No.

If they want to do it, can I stop it?

No.

Will I worry about it?

No.

If my priority were safety,

I never would have left the NSA.

I'd still be spying on you today.

There are things that matter more than safety.

And I think the things that I believe in

are worth the risk.

- Edward Snowden belongs to a long tradition

of whistle blowers, and is not alone,

raising his voice in defense of citizenship

and of a free internet.

With American Larry Lessig

and Icelandic Parliamentary Birgitta Jonsdottir,

among others, they have been alerting us,

crying into the void.

As a law professor, Lessig got Snowden to talk

to his Harvard students.

I come from a, a government family.

- As a Parliamentary, Birgitta Jonsdottir

has been maneuvering to secure political asylum

for whistleblowers in Iceland.

All those years they have supported each other over the web.

Trump in power, they lose a battle.

They have never met in person.

We gather them in Moscow as rumors of Russia interference

in the US presidential elections come out.

As Russia mourns its Ambassador killed in Turkey.

As Snowden carefully picks interviews,

and Harvey appears in so-called real life.

As the world gets ready for Christmas.

They come together to discuss the only issue

that matters, their common fight,

how to save democracy.

So, I'm Larry Lessig.

At Harvard,

Lessig heads a research center on corruption.

A member of the establishment,

he has lectured and written

on the influence of money in politics for years.

He has launched citizen mobilizations

to have representatives vote campaign finance reform,

for him, the root cause to all of our problems.

Last year, he tried to run for the presidential election.

The Democratic Party excluded him.

- The last decade, I've been obsessively focused

on how to revive a sense of democracy

in America and around the world.

I've tried an increasing number of crazy ideas

to try to bring about fundamental change.

Because there is an increasing gap

between who the democracy represents and the people.

And increasingly, the people feel that gap.

Trump was elected because he tapped into

an extraordinary frustration Americans have

with their government, with the sense that

their government does not represent them.

And the more outrageous he was,

the more politically incorrect he was,

the more he convinced the people

that the elite hated him, so they should love Donald Trump.

Because, between the authenticity of a person

willing to be completely politically incorrect

and the fake integrity of every other politician on stage,

it was an unfair fight

for an America so cynical about their politicians.

My name is Birgitta Jonsdottir.

A poet, a single mom punk.

In 2010, Birgitta produced the video Collateral Murder,

about US Army helicopters gun firing at Iraqi civilians.

In the wake of the financial crisis,

she entered politics to help citizens

get all of their decision of their destiny, again.

I am a poetician.

And I actually decided, in the wake of the crisis,

to establish a political moment

that should go inside the system in order to understand it

so we could actually create alternative systems.

And I established the Pirate Party, with others.

And we got elected in 2013.

And we got recently an election,

10 members of Parliament out of 63.

I think our uniqueness is mostly about

the possibilities of engagement

to bring the power back to the people,

or take it from the powerful

and give it to the general public,

to be Robin Hoods of power.

Biggest service we can do right now

is just to think of innovative ways

for people to feel that they are part of democracy,

to help them understand that our systems

are not separated from us, that we are the system.

- What was revealed was not just about surveillance.

That's what people get,

because that's how the news covered it.

But the larger question was,

how did we end up in this system

where everybody in the world is being monitored,

watched and recorded, and we never got a vote.

We never even knew it was happening.

Our officials that were supposed to be voting on our behalf

didn't even tell us.

Increasingly, governments are considering hacking

to be completely legal, as long as they do it.

And there are cases where this is a valuable authority

and you can understand why they would want to do this.

The reality,

and this is not my claim, this is from the White House,

is that mass surveillance has never stopped

a single terrorist attack in the United States.

These programs were never about terrorism.

They're about diplomatic manipulation,

economic espionage,

and social influence.

They're about power.

When we were exposed for doing it,

in violation of human rights and laws around the world,

we made only the narrowest reforms.

We only tailored it at the edges.

And as soon as public attention

began to be distracted by some new controversy,

they started thinking,

can we pressure our allies

to adopt the same laws that we had,

to make us less vulnerable to criticism?

The most extreme and intrusive surveillance laws

in the history of the West

have now been passed into law in the United Kingdom.

Germany has been pressured to pass similar laws.

France has now passed new laws on mass surveillance.