Actually irresponsible to see these critical hours, when citizenry is most engaged and in an metion and emotional and very riveted way, to let government message goes unchallenged. They dont wait before they start politicizing. Not just the event but even these well intentioned emotional rituals that spring up around them. I think its worth talking that as well. But the most significant part of this dynamic, and i want to spend the bulk of my time talking about, is the way in which we have been persuaded to ink about the world in a drastically different way than reality ought to suggest. By that i mean that we have been persuaded to think about our own societies and our own governments and our own behavior in the world that theres very little recentral wlens to the reality of what weve allowed our society and governments to do in the world. And to illustrate that as best as i can, i want to share with you a little anecdote. That involves canada. The very first story from the snowden archive that i was able to report that specifically involved canada, i mean, all the stories involved canada in the sense that theyre all about the internet and we all share the same internet, but the first story i was able to report from the surveillance that pertained to canada was back in october of last year and reported this story with the large Brazilian Television network, globo. And what this story revealed, it used documents from your version of the n. S. A. , which is csac, and what it revealed is that csec had been spying on the communications of the Brazilian Ministry of mines and energy. Which oh, so constituent dently just happens to be the coincidentally just happens to be the agency in brazil of greatest interest the to the canadian timber and logging industry. When i reported this story, before i reported it, i knew it was going to be a huge story in brazil. In part because theyre very concerned about the way in which surveillance is being used to essentially cheat in the economic marketplace to gain unfair economic advantage. Also because it has it smacks of the kind of colonialism and imperialism with which that country has been plagued for so long by its neighbors to the north. But also i knew that while it would be a huge story in brazil, i didnt actually expect it to be a very big story in canada. And the reason i didnt think it would be a big story in canada is because from experience i know that when ive done reporting along the lines of country a is spying on country b, country b, the country being spied on, cares a huge amount. But typically country a, the country doing the spying, doesnt really care at all. People care about the stories that show that theyre being spied on. They dont care very much about the stories showing their government is spige on other people around the world. And yet my expectations were completely thwarted once we did the reporting. It was a huge story in canada. It led the nightly news i think four or five consecutive nights. I was deluged with requests from canadian journalists to do interviews and to help them do further reporting. A lot of them did further reporting. And i was surprised, very surprised, at how much that story resonated here in canada. And i spoke to a couple of canadian journalists who i know pretty well. In fact, i spoke with three or four of them. And i asked them, why has this story become so big in canada . This idea that canadas spying on this ministry in brazil. And they said, well, basically there are two reasons. Why the story ended up being so big. They said, number one, there were a ton of canadians, probably most, who didnt even know there was such an agency called csac. That canadians just didnt know that they had an agency engaged in this very farreaching and invasive electronic surveillance. They were watching the snowden reporting, they knew the n. S. A. Did it, they knew the british had the gchq but a lot of canadians did not know that there was an agency engaging in this kind of activity. Secondly, they said, and ive ground it found this even more meaningful, they said, the selfperception that canadians have, nationalistically, is completely at odds with what this story revealed. The sense essentially they were saying the ideas that canadians think, were canadians, we dont do that kind of thing, we dont spy on democratically elected friendly governments for unfair economic advantage. And i found both of those points to be profoundly significant. If you think about the first point, the idea that theres this agency called csac that throughout the world engages in incredibly consequential behavior, which the very existence of which has been kept from canadians, let alone the broad sorts what have they do, think about what that means for the claim that were living in a meaningful democracy. Whenever people ask me, and i get asked this all the time in interviews, what is the most meaningful revelation that youve discovered from the snowden archive, what i always say is, obviously the threat to privacy posed by this surveillance, the vast amount of communications they collect every day is very significant. But even more significant than that is the threat posed to democracy. It is stunning that these five governments, the u. S. , the u. K. , us a frailia, new zealand and canada, have instituted a system as selfevidently consequential, with such profound, farreaching implications, as asome of system of mass surveillance, without a whiff of closure or debate among the denries that are supposed to hold them democratically accountable. I did a story i think about four months ago that came from the n. S. A. Archive that was one of the most significant ones i think we did, even though it didnt get a lot of attention compared to the other stories. And the story was essentially about this magazine that the n. S. A. Publishes internally, they like publish, they have a magazine thats top secret, its only for themselves, and it looks like every other magazine that you would buy at a news stand except its really creepy. They constantly boast of all the wonderful ways theyve invaded other peoples communications and they have little profiles of the technological nerds who have figured out how to break into somebodys email account and they highlight them and its like snoop of the week. That kind of thing. One of the issues that we had in the snowden archives contained an interview, they do interview, just like every other magazine. The interview was with the top official at the n. S. A. In charge of foreign partnerships. He manages the n. S. A. s relationship with the gchq and csac here in canada and European Countries and every other agency with which the nsa cooperates and the interviewer asked him this question. The interviewer said, theres this incredibly strange phenomenon that a lot of us cant figure out. Which is, and all of these other countries with which we partner, you have wild swings in the outcome of political elections. Sometimes conservatives win, other times liberals win. You have the far right that can govern, you have the far left. And it almost makes no difference, the interviews said, nothing ever changes. Our partnerships with these other countries continue as strong, no matter who wins or loses the election. Why is that . And one of the really fascinating things, and unusual things, reading these documents from the snowden archives, that you encounter this things you never otherwise see, which is government officials who when they ask the question, actually tell the truth, because they didnt ever think that anybody would know what their answer was, because it was all supposed to be secret. And what this official said in response to that question to me was incredibly significant. He said, the reason these partnerships never change, based on the outcome of elections, is because there is almost nobody outside of the military structure of these countries that even knows that these partnerships exist. In other words, the people that we go to the polls and elect as our political leaders have no idea and never learn about the existence of these surveillance activities and therefore cant change them because they dont know about them. And over and over in all of the countries in which i did reporting over the last 16 months, i constantly had top officials or members of parliament or congress say to me, i was responsible for overseeing this agency and yet i learned so much more from reading your articles that were published than i ever learned from the oversight committees on which i staffed or the government meetings which i attended. Its almost like a state within a state. And the state that is within the state is one that has been completely removed from democratic accountability or from transparency of any kind. And that experience in writing about csac for the first time and the way in which it resonated here really underscored that for me. Think of how little we have learned prior to that reporting about the most or one of the most profoundly consequential programs that our government has implemented and think of how genuine a democracy we really have how meaningful it really is if we go to the polls and pick the leader that we want if we we have no idea what it is theyre doing. Its not just surveillance but all sorts of our poims implement policies implemented in the name of policy terrorism. The implications for democracy are incredibly profound. Now that leads to the other reason they gave which i found just as fascinating. This idea that canadians reacted to the story because its inconsistent with their selfperception. Were canadians, we dont do this sort of thing. Obviously that perception was wrong. Canadians do do that sort of thing. The documents we published demonstrate that they did exactly that. And when you think about what that means, that the reality of what our government is doing on the one hand is inconsistent with the perceptions that we have about our government on the other, thats another way of saying that the citizenry has been prop and goized. That is the definition that have term. That they have been led to believe pleasant things about their government that actually is dessparet to the reament of what the government disparity to the reality wraff the to what the government does in the realed world. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that, a little bit more in depth. I remember really vividly the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attack. Im talking about like the days and weeks after 9 11. I was in manhattan on 9 11. I had lived and work there had for 10 years and so i recalled that experience and still recall it very, very clearly. And the prevailing emotion that was triggered by the 9 11 attacks in the immediate aftermath, not months down the road once the government began massaging the messaging, but the immediate aftermath was not one of anger or vengeance or sadness. It wasnt those things. The immediate prevailing emotion was bafflement. Shock. And surprise. And the question that was on almost everybodys mind is, why would somebody possibly want to do this to the United States . Why would somebody have such hatred for americans that they would be willing to blow themselves up in order to kill as many people indiscriminantly whom they dont know . What kind of causes could have led them to that mindset . And this is being asked not rhetorically. It wasnt a the pro station of innocence or anything like that. It was a genuine question. Most americans genuinely did not understand the answer. And the u. S. Government knew that it had to provide and answer because everybody knew there was some reason. Everyone knew it wasnt random. The group that was responsible for it didnt put the names of all the countries into a hat and happen to pick out the United States. There had to be some reason and the government knew it had to provide some explanation. And the explanation that it ended up providing was one that we now 12 years later can scoff at pretty readily. But at the time its what huge numbers of americans believed. Because their government told them that. And the media told them that. And the answer was, the reason they hate us isnt because of anything weve done, it has nothing to do with anything that weve done, the reason they hate us is because were so free that they hate us for our freedom. That was the genuine answer with a straight face of the u. S. Government and the u. S. Media delivered to the american population. And what was so extraordinary about that, if you look back on it, is that it was not difficult at all to find out the reason. There was a long list of grievances that not only the group that perpetrated the attack but a huge part of the muslim world had been openly discussing for many, many years. You could have gone and read muslim newspapers, could you have visited muslim countries, you could have talked to somebody who was muslim, you could have sought out any of that dialogue. And the grievances were all very clear and they were all imbedded into the culture for a long time. It wasnt just things like the u. S. Putting troops on what is per received as holy soil in saudi arabia, it was much more substantial. Things like, imposing a sanctions regime on iraq that killed several hundred thousand iraqi children. Or overthrowing their democratically elected leaders and propping up the most heinous tyrants such as the ones that ruled egypt and that still rule saudi arabia. Or steadfastly supporting militarily, economically and diplomatically the country of israel as it engages in all sorts of violence against its neighbors in palestine, lebron and elsewhere. This list of grievances was fully aired in that part of the world and yet remarkably americans didnt just reject the validity of those grievance, they didnt reach the conclusion that it didnt justify the attacks, they literally were completely unaware of the existence of that dialogue from that part of the world. They had no idea that their government was even doing these things. And that is stunning. The fact that for so long critical parts of what the u. S. Government were doing in the world were simply suppressed in most u. S. Discourse. To the moint where americans literally didnt even know the existence of it. If you look at polling data and other surveys of the muslim world versus the western world, and by the muslim world i simply mean shorthand for predominantly mostly muslim countries you find radical differences in how people in that part of the world think about things versus how people in our part of the world think about things. We often like to tell ourselves that the reason for this disparity view is because disparate view is because they dont have a free press and theyre primitive and they get misled and they have propaganda. Theres all kinds of polling data that shows if you ask people in that part of the world which countries are its greatest threat to world peace, people in that part of the world dont say iran and china and russia and north korean are north korea. Overwhelmingly they say the greatest threat to world peace are two chris, two close allies of canada, which is the United States and israel. It may be true in some case what is explains this disparate perspective in the world is that that part of the world is prop and goized but sometimes what explains it is that we are. And i think its critical to accept that fact and to confront it. Nobody likes to think of themselves as living in a society thats propogandized. I think the most vivid example demonstrating how this works that is a seemingly narrow one, but to me a very powerful one, is one that happened in 2009. In 2009 this woman who is an iranian american journalist named rocksana a was detained while in iran doing journalism work. And the iranian government said they had detain her and arrested her because they suspected that she was a spy. And she was imprisoned in an iranian prison for three months, until an Iranian Court ordered her released on the grounds that there was no evidence to justify her detention. And during that three month, when she was in prison in iranian prison, her cause, her case was one of the most celebrated cases in American Media circles. Almost every prominent journalist would go on twitter every day and say free roxana. They would report on it at night. They would demand it. There was this outrage over the idea of, look at iran, theyre a country thats so tyrannical, they actually imprisoned journalists and there was indignation and horror over what they had done. And the same thing happened a few months late when are north korea imprinced for a short period of time two american korean journalists and ended up releasing them when al gore went in and visiting. Huge amounts of attention paid, huge amounts of anger andingny indignation. At the same exact time that all happening, the United States government had been imprisoning over two dozen journalists as part of what it calls the war on terror. Including the case of somebody named sammy. He was an al jazeera photo journalist and cameraman who was arrested and detained by the u. S. Government when he was crossing into the border of afghanistan to cover the war for al jazeera in late twoun. And he was taken 2001. And he was taken first to a prison in afghanistan and then shortly after he was taken to guantanamo. Where he remained for the next six years without being charged with any kind of a crime, given no due process of any kind where he was interrogated overwhelmingly about his work for al jazeera and almost none about anything to do with terrorism or al qaeda. The reason thats so amazing is because the word sack sammy alhok were almost never mentioned in american discourse. To this day americans have no idea that their government imprisoned two dozen journalists as part of the war on terror or kept an al jazeera photo journalist imprisoned in guantanamo for six years without any kind of trial. In fact, i once did a search where i looked up the word roxana and found the number of mentions during that threemonth period, just three months, when she was detained in an iranian prison, and it was Something Like 8,000 mentions in American Media accounts of her name. If you search the name sammy alhok for the seven years he was kept in guantanamo, it is less than 100. I think the number is Something Like 71. Americans have no idea who he is. In the muslim world, however, hes a huge celebrity. When he was released it was major Headline News all over that part of the world. People in that part of the world know that it isnt just iran and north korea which imprisons journalists, but also the United States that does so. Its we in this part of the world from whom that has been largely kept. And this disparity between what our government is doing in the world and what we actually ourselves are aware of i think is central to so much of what has gone wrong in the post9 11 era. And all of this was the back drop for what i watched this week in canada. And what prompted me was the main impetus for me to write the article tha