And international affairs. And from 2008 to 2009 was president of the association, has won several awards for his work including two awards, at st. Our Journalism Award and american library. Joining an onstage is chris hedges who has spent two decades as Foreign Correspondent in the middle east, africa and the baltics. And has worked for the Christian Science monitor, National Public radio, Dallas Morning News and the new york times. And a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for global terrorism. He is author of several bestselling books including wars of force which gives this meeting and his new book wages of rebellion, the moral imperative. We are here tonight to celebrate the release of teds newest book snowden. Without further ado please welcome ted rall and chris hedges. [applause] thanks for coming. And i will talk about my book. And we will talk about whatever he is going to talk about and we will have a little discussion and throw it out to the audience for q a. If you have any questions or comments or insults, keep them and we will absolutely field of them. And and grab a copy of the book and look at it. Before you buy numerous copies of. And closer i will so anyway this book was not my idea. My publisher is here tonight. Just as we might want to do a graphic novel by biography of Edward Snowden. I was immediately intrigued. Was really into it. I was concerned someone else would do a biography in some format in prose or otherwise and one of the things i wanted to do was make the book discreet and its own thing that would be different from snowden autobiography, and the hardest thing was for matt, how do you get into this topic. We know that ed snowden is a controversial land fascinating figure and what he did involved lot of strong opinions on all sides of the political spectrum but the question for me was how do i get what is the book . When asking people, what is in this project, i am working on a graphic biography of ed snowden and i was shocked how many people told me they didnt know who he was. Including people who are well read, very aware of privacy issues, and what is it the most important story of my lifetime, it has faded into obscurity. Among people who knew who he was very vague on the particular. Is a russian spy or isnt he the guy who says something, quote i heard over and over, something about nsa or cia, they were doing something wrong. It is laid out in very clear, concise way that could be easily digested by just about anybody. I realize part of the book would be about laying out these nsa program that were revealed in june of 2013 in the guardian, n. Y. Times and Washington Post and to lay from out because the only program that has been discussed in congress or by president obama in the Metadata Program which is the nsa spying with the cooperation of telecoms like verizon and at t and sprint, the information on your phone call, telephone metadata, what time you made a call, where the person was, what their phone number was, what your phone number was, that was it. You can get a lot of information from that if you are calling an oncologist, you might have cancer or someone close to you might have cancer, if you are calling mother jones magazine to call about your prescription lawyer magazine not arriving, you can tell a lot about people from telephone metadata and clusters of people and subsets of clusters and there have been a lot of articles about that. But then there has been a lot of misdirection purposely by the government and the press largely controlled by or allied with the government. For example they keep saying you dont have to worry about it because that program doesnt actually intersect the voice content of your call. That is true. They are telling the truth about that because they have another program that does that. People who defend that program say you dont have to worry about that program because it doesnt store the calls, only intersects the calls and that is totally true because they have another program that stores the calls for five years or longer, part of the data farm in utah. To make it really frightening a lot of these documents snowden pool are years old. The technology has only improved since 2012, 11, 10, when those documents are dated. So is more efficient, search the ability is better no doubt. I knew lastly the third part above the book, telling his story, explaining what the program is due, the third thing would be about the existential dilemma faced by this man, really two in the one. 4 million. There are 1. 4 million americans who had access to some or all of the classified documents that Edward Snowden put in the nsa, cia, and 1. 4 Million People who saw brazen violations of the Fourth Amendment here. Lets be clear on this. No one on the political spectrum says these programs are legal. They are not legal. They say they are defensible but necessary. They dont see that they are legal because they are not authorized by the patriot act, they are not authorized, they are massive violations of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, no question about that. So the issue really is why did all of these i wondered about the kind of society we live in that over a Million People could see this lawbreaking on a mass scale and only ed snowden and tom drake who did a similar thing but tried to work within the system 10 or 15 years ago, these two guys are the only ones who have stepped forward in the last 15 years since 9 11 at all to talk about these programs. Bear in mind there have been previous whistleblowers and the nsas efforts to su but every bit of information possible has been something that dates back at least until the 1980s, bearing in mind also that the nsa charter from 1947 is only for an signal intelligence. What that means is nsa is not legally under u. S. Law to spy on foreigners and americans when they are talking to a foreigner but not allowed to talk to an american, intercept americans talking to americans or texting and american or whatever so they are doing this on a mass scale and they started doing it on a mass scale with a program called echelon in the 1980s that was not widely reported upon in the United States but was wellknown in europe. In that program essentially made the effort to intercept every transmission, bank wire transfer, all these communications at the time and at the time general hayden who was head of the nsa brad that the u. S. Did successfully intercept any communication in the United States back in the 80s, not talking about anything terribly new, goes back a long way. Just much more efficient. I opened the book, where people are followed by cameras through the streets, telephoned drones and planes and helicopters and memorably, the tv that is on the wall, you watch it but it watches you. Whenever the government wants to they can see what you are doing in your remanded is positioned in a way that theres almost no privacy whatsoever in your room. The nsa has literally, opened in 1984, the others thing is smart tvs and ed snowden revealed the nsa can watch you through the camera on your computer or the camera on your smart tv. If you have a smart tv, it is kind of insane. A contract you through the movement, the street since 1984. And the Boston Police tracked the brothers add to the Boston Marathon bombings and they sat in the control room to watch this. Theres a question about efficacy. In this end was really nicotine addiction that caught him because the city was on lockdown and a guy hankering for a smoke went out in his backyard and found him hiding out in his boat full of bullet holes. If we ever could captured terrorists and probably save trillions of dollars on the nsa because theres no evidence whatsoever that the nsa has ever successfully post 9 11 intercepted a real terrorist plot against the United States of america. No evidence whatsoever. Maybe it happened, nobody knows, no one on the Senate Intelligence committee can say it. We have this just the the world that a society that has been so morally corrupted, the moral issue is huge here. Is a matter of right and wrong. Lawbreaking occurring at your job. If i cant go through the system, the problem with the system and the reason it is broken, and you have to report wrongdoing to people most responsible for it. If we make that sacrifice as whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and many others but not nearly enough, there is literally no liability whatsoever for this system which is sell off the rails in terms of militarism and being behold in to corporate interests and so on. End in 1984, at 52 years old, seemed like a possible future and now the absolute it would not be a dystopian what we are living in today. And get to the discussion, that is a little bit [applause] thanks, ted. This book begins from that point, the dystopia that kid described, the greatest living political philosopher, inverted totalitarianism and by that it is not classical totalitarianism, doesnt find expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader but the anonymity of the corporate state. You have a fascist communist revolutionary reactionary party and replaces it. Inverted totalitarianism corporate forces that support field to a little politics, iconography and language of american patriotism and internally have seized all the levers of power to render this citizen important. We have as john ralston saw, as aptly pointed out, and undergone a corporate coup detat in slow motion and as ted explained, in this book that i wrote, really how does one resist . How does one rebel . Against this dystopia . Especially given the effects of Climate Change. We just saw through the l. A. Times this massive investigative project that came out today showing the exxon mobile was well aware, there scientists were well aware of Climate Change and Global Warming decades ago and yet like the Tobacco Industry denied that reality in the name of corporate profits. Not only a criminal offense but an offense that may at this point, given the extent of the catastrophe, may mean the extinction of the human species itself. In this book i talk about the moral imperative of revolt which snowden exemplifies and i argue that given the incredible power of the security and surveillance say that is arrayed against us coupled with militarize Police Forces coupled with the dissertation of our civil liberties, finally we have to rise up not so much for what we can achieve but who it allows us to become, that we cant use the word hope if we dont resist and that means physical resistance, civil disobedience, sustained civil disobedience and jail time. This is a passage from the book on snowden. It was kind of act to talk tonight, ted ralls book. I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warrior have moral courage. For moral courage means to defied the crowd, stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of konradship, to be disobedient to Authority Even at the rest of your life for iron principle. And with moral courage comes persecution. The American Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of u. S. Soldiers, ten terrified vietnamese civilians. He ordered his gunner to fire his m60 machine gun on the advancing u. S. Soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. For this act of moral courage thompson, like snowden, was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the state as treason, the army attempted to cover up the massacre and Court Martial of thompson. It is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel l. Berg had it. Martin luther king had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about snowden. My country, right or wrong, is quote morally equivalent of my mother drunk or sober, chesterton reminded us. So let me speak to you about those drunks with power to suite of all your email correspondence, your tweets, your web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live chats, your financial data, your medical data, your criminal and Civil Court Records and your movements. Those who are awash in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars. Those who have banks of sophisticated Computer Systems along with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones, those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy, and yes, your liberty. There is no free press with out the possibility of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. And omnipresent surveillance state, and i covered that east german stasi state, creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflicted full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state. It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today. It will use it. History has shown, should it feel threatened, or seek greater control. The goal of wholesale surveillance as Hannah Arendt wrote, is not in the end to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked, and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves. And those who wield this been checked power become delusional, general keith alexander, former director of the National Security agency hired a hollywood set designer to turn his command center at fort meade into a replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise so he could sit in the captains share and pretend he was jean luc p a pica picard. James clapper, director of National Intelligence had the audacity to lie under oath to congress, the spectacle was a rare glimpse into the absurdist theater that now characterizes american political life. A congressional oversight committee, public hearings, it is lied to. I know is being lied to and the person who lives, they know he is lying. To protect security clearances say and do nothing. These lawyers listen to everyone and everything. They have a bunt the conclave that selected the new pope, they the german chancellor angela merkel, they but most of the leaders of europe, they intercepted the talking points of u n secretarygeneral bond imus ban ki moon. What Security Threat was posed by the conclave of catholic cardinals, the german chancellor, the u. N. Secretary general bj but did business like the Brazilian Oil company. And for shrimp and closed cigarettes. And the major eavesdroping effort focused on the United NationsClimate Change conference in 2007 they bugged their ex lovers, wives and girlfriends and the nsa stores data in perpetuity. I was a plaintiff before the Supreme Court in a case could challenge the warrantless wiretapping, the case dismissed because the court the assertion that our concern about wholesale surveillance was in the words of the government attorney speculation. No standing, no right to bring the case, we had no way to challenge this assertion which we now know to be a lie. Until ed snowden. In the United States, the Fourth Amendment limits the states ability to search and seize to a specific place, time and event approved by a magistrate. And it is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications. Former Vice President al gore said correctly that snowden disclosed evidence of crimes against the United States constitution. We have been fighting against mass surveillance made no head way by appealing to the Traditional Centers of power. Was only after ed snowden methodically leaked documents that disclosed crimes committed by the state, the genuine public debate the band. But officials for the first time promised reform. Suppressant who had previously dismissed our questions about the extent of state surveillance by insisting strict congressional and judicial Oversight Panel to review intelligence, three judges since the ed snowden revelations, and nsa spying was unconstitutional and the third backing it, none of this would have happened, none of it without snowden. Snowden access to the full roster of everyone working at the nsa. He could have made public the entire intelligence community, under cover assets worldwide. He could have exposed the locations of every clandestine station and their commissions, could have shut down the Intelligence System as he had said in an afternoon. But this was never his intention. The want to lead to halt all sales surveillance. Was being carried out without our consent or knowledge. Politicians including democratic candidate Hillary Clinton argue ed snowden could have turned internal mechanisms to have his grievances heard. I can tell you from personal experience tha