Delighted to be here. This place is a vibrent center celebrating its 10th anniversary. I am asked often for advice on how to promote a book after it has been published. Provocative coverage ever since he gave up practicing law nine years ago, to write columns and books. He started his first blog in 2005 because, as he says in the introduction of his new book, he had become alarmed by the bush administrations post9 11 their arrives executive power and wanted to make a broader impact in his career as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer allowed. By 2007 he had become a contributing writer at salon, and in 2012 he signed if one the guardian having himself as a dogged pursuer of stories involving government overrow. It was glenns aggressive coverage of such controversies arizona warrantless wire tapping by the nsa that led snowden to seek him out and enlist million in the release of the classified files documenting the nsas vast Information Collection apparatus. Glenn tells the story in fascinating, revealing and, impassioned detail in his fifth and latest book, no place to hide. A few months ago glen n left the guardian to launch a new online publication called the intercept part of first look media, the pioneering journalistic venture being backed by pierre, but he is far from finished with the snowden archives. He has been saying theres more to come, including even bigger revelations. As he told one interviewer, quote, i like to think of it as a fireworks show. You want to save your best for last. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming, Glenn Greenwald. [applause] thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for that extremely warm and generous welcome, and thank you for coming out tonight, and thanks as well to politics and prose for inviting me to this arena. I witnessed a large number of my friends being bar mitzvahed and i never was and i learned i had some singerring jealousy, so i have that surprise happiness about being here. Book tours are singularly exhausting, but theyre also really exhilarating and thats because when you work on an issue or a story like ive been working on the nsa archives, every single day for almost a year, you end up focusing on the documents and stories in a very casebycase basis and you dont have the opportunity to step back and think about the broader implications and profound consequences of the work you have been doing, and writing a book and talking about your book with people who have read and it have been interested in your work to are long time and having that dialogue is really provocative and interesting way to think about those issues, and as much as i like book tours i particularly like events like this as opposed to what i normally do on the book tour, which is sit in studios answering the same set of very predictable questions over and over by people who work as journalists, and i look forward to the question expands session, which i know will be great as long yaws dont ask me two questions we understand that mr. Snowden, ad to be carrying a rubiks cube, and last week general alexander said your journalism will result in the death of independent innocent people. Do you worry about the blood on your hands . So im sure those two questions will not be part of the questions so it will be infinitely better than the Television Interviews i do. I want to talk about what i did in first two chapters of the book, which is tell the story of how i came to meet and then work with Edward Snowden, along with my longtime friend and journalistic collaborator in hong kong, and the reason that i really wanted to write a book and tell the story is because so much has been said about all of those events and much of what has been said has been wildly false. And one of the really interesting things is that if youre somebody who really likes to bash the American Media, and im definitely somebody who likes to do that its one of my most favorite pastimes, it doesnt really come as a price to learn that much of what the media churns out is misleading in all sorts of ways. But when youre actually at the center of a story like this, and youre reading in the newspaper claims about what it is that happened, when you actually know the truth because you were at those events and were part of them, your appreciation for their capacity to mislead expands wildly. It really is shocking to have seen some of the things that have been said, given my firsthand knowledge how false they are. I remember in particular in hong kong, when we revealed ward snowdens identity at his insis steps on june 10th last year, from under10th until june 23rd, the instant consensus of the American National security elite here in washington, and of large numbers of the American Media, was that theres no question but that this is almost certainly a chinese espionage operation, that Edward Snowden is almost certainly a spy of the government in beijing. And then on june 24th, when he left hong kong and flew to moscow on his way to ecuador and got trapped in moscow by the u. S. Government which revoked his passport and bullied the cubans to rescind their offer of safe passage, those people accusing him of being a chinese spy, transformed into he is an agent of vladimir putin. Thats been obvious, and seamlessly switch, and if he flew to south korea, he would be accused of being an agent of that government. This oped in the wall street journal last week saying we know for certain either that this is this whole operation is either a chinese spy ring or a russian spy ring or a joint operation. So it was remarkable to see that. Then there was the issue of who Edward Snowden was. This actually stunned me. I was vaguely aware of this at the time but a little occupied in june in hong kong and wasnt pay too much attention to what people were saying but in writing the book i went back to see how the media narrative formedin the wake of our disclosures and our unveiling of our source, and it is really remarkable. I am mystified to this day how it happen that almost overnight, within 24 hours, all of these journalists who never heard of the name Edward Snowden before, had no idea who he was or what he did or what motivated him, were able instantly to diagnosis him medically, psychologically, in a remarkably coordinated way. This consensus arose that he was a fameseeking mars cyst, and persists to this dame attachment the people were maligning his character as a means of distracting attention from the revelations, he was telling me, and we were executing his plan, which was, im going to unveil myself one time and come forward and say, i am the person who did this, because i feel an obligation to stand up in public and explain why it is that i did what i do. I dont want to hide. I dont want other people falsely accused. I want to take responsibility for what i did because im so convicted it was the right thing to do, and after i do that, im going to disappear. I am not going to do Immediate Use interviews. Im not going to let them personalize the issue as a means of distracting attention, and every day i had every major American Television personality, the actors who play the role of journalists on television, calling me and pleading with me to arrange for them to have the First Television interview with Edward Snowden. They were willing to devote hours of prime time to letting him pontificate, whatever conditions he demanded, and he rejected every offer because he knew that would result in allowing the folk douse be on him personally and they would ask very probing substantive questions for which our American Media is known, which is tell us about our girlfriend, do you miss her . What is your life like in moscow, and he was determined not to let that happen. So he stayed off all television for a full year. Thats the behavior of a fameseeking person, and it was remarkable to contrast the reality with who he was and what was being disseminated about him. Then theres the issue of the the disclosures. There was the script read from by the american political establishment, which is that these disclosures will result in the deaths of innocent people and compromising American National security, and every interview ive done with every major media outlet since last june has entailed these accusations, this demand it take it seriously and address it. What is most remarkable to me about it is isnt that it is presented without my expectation of specificity or evidence to corroborate the accusation. I think none of us in this room are now surprised after witnessing what the media did in the runup the iraq war theyre willing to. A my identify claims of the government without ever asking for any evidence whatsoever to corroborate it. That isnt what surprised me most. What surprised me the most was the eagerness to completely ignore the fact that in every single case of every single whistleblower of every single quoteunquote unauthorized disclosure, which means your publishing information the government wants to hide, the same accusations are made, the same kinds of fear mongering is hauled out over and over again, going back to then 1971 leak of daniel els luring when he leaked the pentagon papers and informed the americans that the government was systematic include lying to them for years about the vietnam war. And samuel was my childhood hero. I have become friends and colleagues with him. Serve on a board with him. And i have had the opportunity to talk to him because he has become the leading, most vocal defender, not just of Edward Snowden but Chelsea Manning and other courageous whistleblowers, and he rope he says he does that and is devoted to doing it, even though he is 83, he said every single thing they say batted ward snowden batted ward snowden and Chelsea Manning was said about me. And telling the American People that Daniel Elsburg was almost certainly a russian spy. The accusation was continuously made tinge by the nixon officials that this disclosure would risk the lives of men and women in uniform and in general undermine the security of the United States and its knew essentially a consensus that all of that was fictitious, that the disclosures were noble and heroic and in the public interest, but there was no conception at all when accusations are made over and over again and disproven over and over again can might mean we ought to have at least as journalists an iota of skepticism. The reality is the disclosures we have made have been quite damaging to the reputations and the credibility of american officials who have been lying to the public and building this massive Surveillance System in secret for all of these years, but it hasnt in any way harmed any legitimate interest of us as american citizens. Its only strengthened the system of which were all a part because that requires us knowing, rather than being ignorant about the most consequential acts our government is doing in the dark. The last point i want to make about why i wanted to the the story and the misperceptions is about what Edward Snowden homes to achieve, what his actual desired outcome was. There is a very pervasive criticism i call as being from the right, by which i mostly mean from democrats, although you do hear it from republicans as well occasionally but nearly with the same frequency. That these disclosures have been incredibly reckless and disclosed without regard to american interests and even with an intention to harm american interests, this was vaguely treasonous, was on cspan this morning and every time the host said now we go to the democratic line i knew i would be called a traitor, and reliably thats what happened. So the idea there is reckless is in taking place, how the documents disclosed and Edward Snowden wants to harm the systems and so do we. Then theyre this much less wellknown strain of criticism that i would say that comes from the left and actually a much more serious criticism of the journalism we have done and the way these disclosurees have carried out. And its gotten much less attention, and that criticism is, why are we holding on to so many documents . Why dont we just publish the entire archive or publish huge numbers of documents rather than the careful managed process, and the answer to both questions lies in at the truth about what actually happened when Edward Snowden came forward and what his objectives were. So like most sources to whom to journalists with information, he had very clear ideas about certain types of information that he believed needed to get out. And then there was other information that he had that he was insisting not being pushed, and it common for sources to say you can publish this but not their and there twas a gray area he believed was a close call and didnt trust his own judgment to make those choices, and he said im giving you, meaning me and laura, these materials and i want you to make the judgment about which of these documents should be published. Many of the document us don want published, and he gave us categories of documents that he didnt think should be published, such as things that would reveal the communications of innocent people that the nasa has collected. Or things that would enable people easily to accuse him of treason by, for example, disclose showing surveillance methods that the u. S. Government use on al qaeda or actual adversaries of the u. S. Government. Agree or differ agree, thats the framework he insisted upon, and we agreed to that framework. There was a good reason why he wanted that, which was he did not come forward in order to harm the United States. If he wanted to do that, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to do. He could have just taken all those documents and passed them to every american adversary, he could have sold those documents for tens of millions of dollars to virtually any Intelligence Agency on the planet. He could have taken them and uploaded them all to the internet himself if thats what he wanted. He didnt want any of that. And the reason he didnt want any of that, the main reason, is because he wanted to make sure that there was some benefit, pragmatic benefit, in the world, to the choice he made to unravel his life and bring these documents to the public, and that pragmatic benefit would be that the government wouldnt be able to distract everyones attention from the revelations by saying lets focus on howed a ward snowden is an irresponsible traitor, or wouldnt be able to did effectively, and wouldnt be able to say we found in pain 5,862 of the documents that have been released the name of this innocent person who now is jeopardized, and has the immediate you townously obsess on that one small case as a means of demonizing the disclosures. He was very acutely aware of the need to have the public debate be on his side. That was important to him. He wanted the public to be focused on the substance of the revelations and not on all of these ancillary tactics he knew would be used if we did any other sort of course, and that meant that he wanted to us go one by one by one in each and every document and each and every story and publish it journalistically, meaning report it, describe to the public what it actually meant, let it linger so that people had time and space to react, and so that it could grow, and then once we were ready to do solid reporting on the next one do that and keep doing it until the stories were ready, and you can agree or disagree but as a journalist and as a human being who promised him i would adhere to that framework, i really didnt care from that point forward about that debate because that was the framework i was going to use. And i think his strategic sense has been remarkably vindicated. Here we are year after the first story on a top yuck i have been writing about for eight years, surveillance and privacy in the nsa that can be incredibly ethereal and rather remote and actually complicated to people, turkly when pitted against the visceral fear that their children and they are going to be blown they dont acquiesce to these policies. Its very difficult to get people even to think about any of this seriously, let alone care about it, and after a year, the interest level on this story, think, is evidenced by the audience here and the interest in the book and the way in which these policies continue to be debated and Reform Movement around the world is greater than ever, and that is a direct byproduct of the very careful and aggressive simultaneously careful and aggressive choice that Edward Snowden made about how he wanted to bring these documents to the world and a big part of why i wrote the book was to correct all of the misperceptions and set fortha definitive series of events about what actually took place. So thats the part about snowden in terms of correcting the record. I just want to take a few minutes to talk about what i think is the even more important part of the story, and by the story i mean the first two chapters when i say this is what happened. Theres a really profound lesson to be learned by thinking about what happened here and why it happened. I know its been a profound lesson for me personally. When i went to hong kong, i think as most people now know, my assumption was was going to meet a source who was probably 60 or 70 years old and i thought that for a variety of reasons, beginning with the fact he had already demonstrated to me he had access to enormous amounts of top secret information, which made me think he was senior in the u. S. Government. Secondly, have spent many weeks talking to him online, and his insight was invariably sophisticated. A little bit cynical but always just very smart and thoughtful and avoided cliches and was just a very kind of original and deep thinking way of looking at the world. Thirdly, from the very first moment that i talked to him, he was adamant, adamant, about the fact that he was going to be identified as the source very early on in our reporting, and he said in the very first conversation i ever had with him that i know that almost certainly means im going to spend the rest of my life in an american prison. A