First time with Mister Snowden himself with this book. In combination with the aclu Mister Romero hill discussed the how and why of the why he did it. Mister snowden leapt a cache of documents to journalists, journalists he believed would release them without tolerating government interference in censorship. Those documents showed us our rights are being violated on an unprecedented scale. Intelligence agencies were engaging not in targeted surveillance as they told us but gathering up everything they could scoop up on us. A personal private data of anyone and everyone who uses a cell phone or the internet. A data from the underwater cables crossing the ocean through which all that traffic travels. They required the telecomsto build backdoors so that they can hack us. Doing so they acquired a lot. A lot on us. So much in fact that in one points i think itslowed down the internet. The officials engaged in this line to congress, said they were not doingit, many of them regulate now appear on Cable News Networks as pundits. One program perhaps the creepiest allowed Intelligence Officers to read their lovers orexlovers emails and in some cases i believe while they were writing those emails. It was in Mister Snowden selling an unprecedented crime made up of violations of privacy of us citizens. The government Mister Snowden worked for stopped caring about what they should do and started pursuing as aggressively as possible what they could do. According to the wartime law he reminds us of in current record, Mister Snowden performed his duty while facing a great sacrifice, that of exile. We hear not only how he plans to gather evidence of the wrongdoing, how to protect his loved ones by hiding his plans from them which is a heartbreaking part of the book but you even hear from his then girlfriends journal in a moving section which is entitled why he suddenly left and learned with the rest of the world on tv. While hes performing the role of spaces, citizen ownership rights and openness, it is a pleasure to welcome our two gueststonight before i bring them out , you have index cards and get to be part of the debate and that 8 05 hour ushers to come up with a blank card. Hold it up and we will pass it down the aisle so you can ask Mister Snowden questions. We wont get to them all. It is our pleasure having said all this to welcome the aclus executive director Anthony Romero will come out now and are guest author who will magically appear behind me now, computer whiz and author Edward Snowden [applause] okay. Hello everyone. Thank you for that introduction, joel. It is a pleasure to be here with you tonight in brooklyn where i live. And to spend some time with eachof you today. Hello ed, we will get to you in a second. Im really thrilled to be talking to you about this incredible new book, permanent record. If you havent read it, you must. It is beautifully written, it tells a very personal story thats relevant notjust to the one man who is the author but a personal story about every single one of us. And its necessary to have these debates around these issues that and has put in the book and framed so well for the readers. It is so good that is number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Congratulations. And the Us Government is suing the author as an effort to try to shut the book down and perhaps is helping get promoted infact. As you heard from joel, ed sparked a historic worldwide debate about privacy and technology when he exposed evidence of the mass surveillance having on the nose to the American People or even to members of congress. This is not our first conversation and i have had a chance to facetoface a couple of times in moscow, a couple of times with a robot, a couple of times on video chat but ive been looking forwardto this one. We first met in 2014. It was a quiet moment of two guys trying to understand and get to know one another and through the book, i feel like ive gotten to know you even better than i ever thought. So i want to just underscore the fact that we will be broadcasting this interview on our podcast liberty. You can subscribe to it, go to our website. We will make sure we get questions at the end. I have a couple questions to kick off the conversation. But before i turn it over to my first round of questions i wanted to show you this audience, ed. Its a remarkable room. [applause] only a couple fbi agents are in the audience. So i thought i would organize our talk, ed, into three sections. The talk first on a more personal level, the memoir. Its a story about you and your life and to switch years and talk about you evolving as an activist as a human rights leader of the 21st and 22nd century and then to talk to you a little bit about the way forward. Where are you now, whereare you heading . Where are we heading, most importantly lets talk first personally and again, a little bit of themeasure of the man if you will. As ive gotten to know you over the last six or so years , im kind of stunned that you wrote a memoir. Ora man who is as private as you are , there are conversations although i could interrogate a rock and get answers out of a rock you are much harder than that. Talk to me about how an intensely private person tackles this issue of writing a memoir and talk about how you feel now about having revealed so much about yourself to theworld. The answer is carefully and with great difficulty. Ive been writing for about well, six years since i came forward that i hadnt been writing this story of me cause its always been difficult for me to talk about myself. For those in the audience who are familiar with what happened, they are filling familiar with me, to the extent that for example anthony might be. I came forward in june of 2013 and i revealed evidence that the government had secretly constructed a system of global mass surveillance without our knowledge, without our consent. None of us to avoid area in the majority of members of congress did not realize what was happening. The courts were excluded from this and suddenly, i was the most famous and most wanted man in the world. At least 43 period. But i didnt get a single interview for more than six months after that first disclosure to journalists. The reason why is i didnt want the story to be about me like you said anthony, ive been actively trying to avoid the spotlight. But what i learned from all that period of silence is that if we dont tell our own stories, others will tell them for us. And they wont have the same care and concern that we do. And what happens, this is an important thing for all of us. I am a privacy advocate. And it was very hard, it was harder to tell this story, to tell my story and it was to come forward and really actually risk my freedom, potentially my life to tell the world about everything that was going on. However, disclosure is a skill. Its something that we practice and we get better at it with time. And since i came forward, previously ive been with the nsa, cia and ive always been kind of a private guy. I had never had to talk about myself month after month, year after year and that men like you anthony that really taught me we can do so much more together and we can do on our own and when i looked around at the world of 2018, and when i look around at the world today, i see how much we need to have this conversation. How much we need to talk about the balance of power between the public and the government. We need to talk about surveillance and data collection. In a way thats not what is the latest scandalthat facebook is involved in. Because facebook is not the problem. Facebook is the product of the problem. We have to correct the system. That means going deeper. That means more than a news story or more than a clip that yousee on the internet. It means books. It means ruptured thinking and the only way i think that we can get people to take us seriously today about these things that do seem really abstract, that are mechanized, that are automated, that our algorithms area they are literally in human , is to attach the human elements. Its to explain to someone that you dont know why you care. How you came to care and who you are, where you came from and in that moment of vulnerability, i think , and really thats what surveillance is about real surveillance is about constructing vulnerability to people who have not consented to it. And one of the ironies of this process is realizing that by creating our own vulnerabilities, by saying that we are not afraid, i found a voice i had never been able to use before. I found a message i had never been able to express before and ultimately , it is not a change in what i did before. Its a new way of expressing the same thing that got me forward and gave me the courage to face the world so many years ago and that this idea that we all have something to say and i have something thatmatters. I think you did a remarkable job of helping paint the story, tell the narrative of how you came to be who you are and remember, we have these conversations when you are getting ready for your big and we were having a discussion where i said i need a human being whos going to show up, aspirations and love and fallibility and the book is brilliant because i think you paint that picture of how you came to be and who you are so lets talkabout some of the fallibility and im going to put you on the spot as only a buddy can. I didnt know what kind of mediocre student you were. Talk at one point about how the more you got into the computers and internet, the more time i spent online, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular and you talked about the fact that you really develop your own path of education and knowledge and this quest for learning. I was reminded of the conversations going on in the country about whether or not college or University Get in the way of smart innovative people. People like peter thiel, preventing scholarships so people can drop out of college and become leaders. Reflect about the role of education or formal education and how you went four wheel driving through the life of learning and knowledge that you felt. Because youre a maronite man with Incredible Knowledge that comes out of the book but in an unorthodox way that you got there. I think the mediocre student. [inaudible] im not going to use peter thiel as a role model. Got a lot of nodding faces. The reality is were all a little different, we have strengths and weaknesses and we all do have something we can learn and something we need to be taught. And this is another part in your previous question that i think came out in this process of writing. I think weve all had those moments where we felt like the smartest person in the room. Weve all had a thing in a classroom where weve seen the future get something wrong and theyre a little embarrassed, they dont want to admit. But then we also have been on the other side of and one of the beautiful things about learning is not just becoming more capable as an individual learning how to learn. And that means understanding the rules, discovering those strengths and weaknesses. That means doing thingslike i did, joining the army and finding out that was really not something that i was designed for. I wanted badly to succeed there and i broke my leg when i ended up being pushed out in the process of writing this book i discovered a lot more about myself as well. Thing thats not in the book though. We didnt have spacefor it. Its that during all this time that i was obsessed with computers, learning so much about technology and i was so good at it. Picking through the window of your father said as he was locking up his computer, pretty remarkable. I was fascinated with technology, it was my first love. I didnt want to be defined by. I when i was in highschool when i first started going to Community College wanted to be an english teacher. And so writing was always something i enjoyed even though i had difficulty with it but when i started trying to write a book, instead of trying to write my own thoughts, instead oftrying to persuade , i realized i was out of my element and this is where i learned to lean on people who knew more than i did, who had read more than i did. And this book would not have been as good as it is. Im proud of it, i hope you are too. People like ben wisner in the audience, people likethe whole team at old. The editors sarah birch. Jillian blake, all these people make this book and but theres one person in the audience right now i think almost none of you know it unless they announced themselves. Theres a man named joshua cohen and this is one of i believe the greatest living authors in the country. And hes a friend of bens, ben is my lawyer. Then it works at the aclu and he made an introduction and the education that i did not finish in high school, i got sick, i left early, like got in the way. He in a real way complete and i remember arguing withhim, debating with him. We fought over commas and clauses. He developed my thinking. He developed my ability to write and he gave so much to this book. I mentioned in the acknowledgments, that cant be expressed, icant thank him enough. If you enjoyed the book i think you should as well because if i was the heart of the story, he was the soul. He made a book into a work of literature. [applause] i think hes blushing, its a little dark but i believe hes letting. A few other things on a more personal note for research into how you evolve and develop. The relationship with lindsay who i think some of the most poignant pieces of it were the diary pages that you published, what she was feeling or thinking when you left in hawaii. When you were in hong kong and then russia and then you talk about how you fell in love. You gave her a 10, she gave you an eight on a hot or not website. You talked about how she was your soulmate and ive known that be the case from the years ive gotten to know you and have had a chance to interact with her. Whats the price of, for those years that you so much to yourself, you talk about the evolution of how you became an activist and you as you evolve into a whistleblower and you were conscious enough to share everything with her because you would put her in perils way and it was a price in that you couldnt share a big part of what was occupying your heart and mind with the person you love the most and then that incredible break and then marriage. Talk to me about how your relationship evolved and changed as you evolve and change in this moment with the spotlight and now that its all out on the table, better, happier days now . Are there fewer secrets to keep and secondly, reflect for me a little bit on the vulnerability. You talked about in the book around breaking your legs when you went to go into the military and the section when you develop when you had your first epileptic seizure. And how it racked your body and really rock your world and your confidence. And this image i have of it is this man who could take on the Us Government and win. Almost infallible. You pulled it out. And then theres kind of a fallibility and human weakness elements, around struggling with illness and struggling with your leg struggling with epilepsy. Reflect on love and the role of sickness or fallibility in your personal life and then will switch gears. That was a very small question. But weve got time. Yes, let me start with the fallibility. One of the things that i really tried to express as i was writing this is how imperfect i am. How much ive always struggled and i think this is something that is important, because so many people write these memoirs and its like look how great i am. Look how much i did. And so much of the conversation about me and about really a lot of these public figures and things that have any kind of political importance, they divide people into good and bad. Youre a hero, youre a traitor. Youre the best person in the world or worst person on earth. But peoplearent like that. We try and we fail. We hurt and ive done my share of hurting. But we also strive. And when i was failing constantly so many things, the thing that kept me going was the fact that i got better. We all have the ability to improve and we only have to better in degrees because fortunately we live a long time that this is the most important thing. When we got that worldview where we go this person did a great thing, there the hero or that person did a bad thing, their ability. What were doing is worsening these people arenot like us. They did something exceptional, they did something greatand i cant because im normal. The reality is those people are normal to. Thats not something that diminishes them. Thats something that empowers all the rest of us. Because the only thing that differentiates you from them is actually Business Decisions that we make. We are never more than one decision away im doing something heroic and it can just be walking by on the street. But i have hurt and ive hurt others and this brings me in the lindsay. I love her dearly. We had been together for the betterpart of a decade before i left. And we had had, every relationship is complex. We fought, we broke up, we got back together but we loved each other and we still love each other. And think about what itmeans. To have someone you love more than anyone else, to have someone you trust more than anyone else on the planet and to not be able to tell them the reason that youre about to destroy your own life. It created distance and eventually it created anger. I couldnt tell her even though i wanted to because the fbi would accuse her of a crime. They would say she is part of the conspiracy. She was an accessory because she didnt pick upthe phone and say help, some of going to talk to a journalist. A definitely interrogated her. Interrogated her, they harassed her, they tried to make her intellectual, into an informant and through all of that, she stood strong. And not for me, but for her. And the thing is after all of the things that i put her through because of that decision which makes me besides all the other things ive been bad in life also probably the worst boyfriend in the history of the United States and im probably in the running or worst boyfriend in the world. She would give you a six today, not a. Thats how you know how good a person she is. She gave me an eight. She found out what i had done at the same time everybody else did. She saw me on tv when she was with a friend. And although she would be completely justified in hating me and she was angry, she turned to her friend and she said in that moment he had been drifting apart in our relationship for sometime cause of all the distance, because of all the secrecy, because of all the lies, he said what she saw on tv,that was the reason she fell in love with me. And we are together agai