write paper

‘

THE MUNK DEBATE ON STATE SURVEILLANCE – MAY 2, 2014

Rudyard Griffiths : Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to this extraordinary debate on

state surveillance. My name is Rudyard Griffiths, and it’s my privilege to act as the organizer of

this semi -annual series and to once again serve as your moderator.

I want to start t onight’s proceedings by welcoming the North American -wide television and

radio audience, tuning into this debate, everywhere from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

to CPAC, Canada’s public affairs channel to C -Span across the c ontinental U.S. A warm he llo

also to the thousands of people watching this debate live right on the internet on the

intercept.com and MunkDebates.com and it’s terrific to have you as virtual participants in

tonight’s proceedings. And finally, hello to you, the over 2500 people who ’ve once again, filled

Roy Thomson Hall to capacity for a Munk Debate. We just thank you for your enthusiasm for

what this series is all about: bringing together big thinkers to debate the big issues transforming

the world and Canada.

The presence on this stage in a matter of moments of four really outstanding thinkers on the topic

of state surveillance would not be possible without our hosts tonight, so please join me in an

appreciation of the Aurea Foundation and its co -founders Peter and Melanie Munk.

Well, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, let’s get our debaters out on stage and our debate

underway. Speaking first, for the motion, Be it Resolved: State Surveillance is a Legitimate

Defence of our Freedoms, is acclaimed trial lawyer, Harvard scholar and storied civil libertarian,

ladies and gentlemen, Professor Alan Dershowitz. Joining Professor Dershowitz on the pro -side

of tonight’s debate is none other than the former head of the NSA, the National Security Agency,

the former head of the Central I ntelligence Agency, he’s a retired four star U.S. General, ladies

and gentleman, Michael Hayden.

Now, one great team of debaters deserves another and we have not let you down tonight. Ladies

and gentlemen, please welcome serial technology entrepreneur, th e co -founder of the global

social news phenomenon Reddit, and best -selling author Alexis Ohanian, Alexis. Alexis’ partner

tonight is a person who has been at the very centre of this global debate since Edward Snowden

stunned the world last June with his un precedented leak, his exposure of America’s cyber -

espionage programs and in the ensuing year our presenter has become, in the words of the

Financial Times of London, the most famous journalist of his generation. Ladies and gentlemen,

First Look Media’s Gle nn Greenwald.

Ok, before I call on our debaters for their opening statements, I need the help of everyone in this

hall and those of you watching at home with three simple tasks: first, you don’t often say this in a

gracious concert hall like this, but power up your smar tphones. We have an open WiFi network

broadcasting throughout the hall, you can tweet to our hashtag #MunkDebate. Also we’ve got a

rolling opinion survey of our audience tonight and that’s both for you in the hall and those of you

watching online, pop open your browser and enter the URL www.munkdebates.com/vote . And ‘

third, this is important, those of you in the hall, when you see our dastardly countdown clock

appear on the screens at the end of the allotted ti me for opening statements, rebuttals and closing

statements, please join me in a round of applause for our speaker. This is going to keep them on

their toes and of course, our debate on time.

One last thing, before we get to opening statements, let’s find out how all of you, the 2500 of you

voted at the outset of this evening’s debate on the resolution, Be it Resolved: State Surveillance

is a Legitimate Defence of our Freedoms, let’s have those results now. Hmm. Thirty -two %

agree, 47% disagree, 21% undeci ded. So, a debate in play. Now, a very important question since

what these debates are all about is which one of these teams can sway public opinion, who can

change the minds of the 2500 people in this hall over the next hour and a half . So who was open

to changing their vote, let’s have those numbers. Wow, 87% of this audience are open to

changing their vote, a very open -minded crowd. Only 13% of you are committed resolutely to

the pro or the con side.

A great set of results to kick off our opening statem ents, which I’m going to do now. As per

convention the pro -side will speak first, six minutes for each opening remark, General Hayden,

the floor is yours.

Michael Hayden: Well, good evening , thanks for the introduction and thanks for the warm

welcome. Aft er I read your morning newspaper and saw that Alan and I were identified as two of

the most pernicious human beings on the planet, I just wasn’ t really sure.

State surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms. Well, we all know the answer to that.

It depends. And it depends on facts. It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find

ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of

danger? And that’s why facts matter. In having this debate, in tryi ng to decide whether this

surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedom, we really need to exactly what this

surveillance is. And I freely admit, that’s hard. This stuff has been pushed out into the public

domain and you’ve had a chance to look at it and sometimes it has been pushed out there in a

way that, well let me be kind, it’s not clear. Sometimes it’s been pushed out there in a way that is

just wrong.

Let me give you an example. And by the way, no one has to have ill intent to make it wrong.

This is actually really complicated stuff. There was one piece of information that was pushed out

into the public domain over a program called Boundless Informant. If I were actually thinking of

names that would eventually become public that is probably no t one I would pick, ok? But what

it was, was a heat map of the world, and it showed the meta data events that NSA, in one way or

another, acquire in different parts of the world. And it revealed tens of millions of meta data

events that NSA was getting, acco rding to the map, from France and Spain and Norway. So

immediately the story was, hey, these guys are ripping off the phone bills of a whole bunch of

Europeans. ‘

The reality of the story was the French, Spanish and the Norwegians services were providing

NS A data that their services had collected, not in their own countries, but in internationally

recognized theatres of armed conflict. It was a team effort but it got rolled out as very much an

aggressive, individual effort on the part of NSA. So it’s hard, i t’s complicated. And sometimes

this stuff just gets rushed to the darkest corner of the room. All ties go to the most ominous

description of what’s happening. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a tie; it just goes to the

most ominous description.

Do you remember something called the Prison Program? That’s NSA having access through

Google and Microsoft and Yahoo to materials on their servers in the United States, materials

affiliated with a legitimate intelligence target. That got shoved out the door as, the NSA is free -

ranging on the servers of Google and Microsoft and Yahoo. It was portrayed as an uncontrolled

NSA expiration of this data. That’s just not wrong, that’s incredibly wrong. Now that story got

pushed out, the Washington Post was one of the pap ers that pushed it out. Yes, they corrected it,

on their website over a period of several days, without notifying people the article had been

changed.

But let’s skip all that, let’s just all assume that we can get to hard truth, that we can actually boil

this down to what CSEC ’s doing here and what NSA’s doing across the lake and what GCHQ is

doing in Great Britain and what ASD is doing in Australia. Even then you’ve got a problem

because even then you’re walking into a movie theatre late in the third reel and you’re looking at

a scene, a snapshot of the third reel and you’re saying, Aha! The butler did it! Actually, you need

to go back and look at the whole movie. You need to see what went on before, because if you

know what went on before you might have a different interpretation of what it is you think the

butler is guilty of.

There are three or four things that happen, that NSA and all these organizations have tried to

solve. The war with volume – how do you conduct signals and intelligence to keep you safe in a

tsunami of global communications? The answer to that is collection and meta data. Another issue

that is out there prominently is, you know, NSA is mucking about in those global

telecommunication grids and they have your emails. No one complained when NSA was doing

Soviet Strategic Forces Microwave Signals. Well the equivalent of those Soviet Microwave

Signals are Proliferator Te rrorist Narco -Trafficker Money -Launderer emails co -existing with

yours and mine out there in gmail. And if you want NSA to continue to do what it was doing, or

CSEC to continue to do what it had been doing to keep you safe, it has got to be in the stream

where your data is.

There are a couple of other things too. After 9 -11, the enemy was inside my country. That is 215

program metadata – who might be affiliated with terrorists inside the United States? And finally,

when the enemy wasn’t in my country h is communications were. It’s an accident of history, but

it’s a fact that most emails reside on servers in the United States. They should not deserve

constitutional protection if the email is from a bad man in Pakistan communicating to a bad man ‘

in Yemen. And the Prison Program is what allowed us to get those emails, to keep everyone safe.

There’s a lot more to talk about, but you’re going to start clapping in about nine seconds, so I’m

going to go back to the podium. Thank you.

RG: The command presence of a four -star General. It’s bred in the bone. Alexis Ohanian, you

are up next.

AO: Hello Canada, thanks for being here while there is a basketball game going on. I really

applaud you. Now, we Americans and Canadians have a long history of shared values. Nei ther

one of us wants to take responsibility for Bieber, but that notwithstanding, one of those values is

a right to privacy. It’s something encoded in our governments and in our societies. It’s something

fundamental to who we are. We balance this with security but the technological leaps that we

have made in the last couple of decades has enabled a surveillance state that goes at odds with

these very fundamental rights. And the internet has made my career possible, as an entrepreneu r,

as an investor, but it’s also enabled a surveillance state that is simply unacceptable.

You see, state surveillance is a threat to us for three reasons: it is a threat economically, it is a

threat technologically, to the very backbone of the internet and finally, and somewhat

paradoxically, it actually undermines security. It actually makes us more vulnerable. Let’s talk

about that. Both of our countries are hug e draws for talent and money from all over the world,

because our tech sectors are leading the way. It made my career possible, it made so many others

possible.

Forrester, however, in light of our surveillance state, has estimated that the U.S. tech secto r alone

stands to lose over $180 billion because now our global user base is thinking twice before

signing up for our services. They’re taking it to other servers where they know they still have

that integrity. You see, I just got done visiting over 70 uni versities across the United States and

Canada, even the University of Toronto and Waterloo and I got to meet with founders who have

every right to believe they can create the next Google, however now their users are going to

think twice about running that search query because they don’t know which intelligence agency

is using it. This is real cost.

There is national security in economic security and that has been undermined by this mass

surveillance. The NSA’s insatiable appetite for data has polluted the n etwork. And we’re all

online now, right, as citizens, as companies, as governments, we all share in this online network.

But the very infrastructure, the technology behind it, has been threatened, and it is no longer

healthy because of our brazenness.

Now , what do I mean by that? Well, from a technological standpoint, the worldwide web only

works if it has ‘worldwide’ in it, right? And now we hear countries like Germany and Brazil

talking about Balkanizing the internet. I’ll tell you, Steve and I could nev er have started Reddit

with the hope of it becoming a truly global platform if we thought that we didn’t have access to

anyone with an internet connection, right? The internet works because the more people that get ‘

on it, the better it gets. And this is th e environment that we have created, you see, we’re not just

talking about law. We’re talking about the very technology. We are keeping things insecure for

the purposes of hopefully using it for surveillance somewhere down the road.

Let me put it another w ay. In layman’s terms, it is as though law enforcement found out that

there was a flaw in every lock, in every door in the city of Toronto and they didn’t tell anyone.

They kept it safe so that one day they could maybe use it to take advantage of some unsu specting

bad person. Now, the obvious problem with this is that there is nothing stopping some other bad

actor from taking advantage of that very flaw in the system, except that we’re not just talking

about the city of Toronto, we’re talking about the worl d. And this is a reality right now and this

is simply unacceptable. A rising tide, when it comes to security, a rising tide really does lift all

boats or secure all locks, in this case. And this is something we are undermining with our actions.

And it is d one in the name of counter -terrorism but it is actually making us less secure. And that

is a technological fact.

Now, speaking of security, it is not that there is this trade -off that I’m talking about between

privacy and security. I’m not talking about that trade -off. I’m talking about the trade -off between

security that works versus security that does not work and security that does. Instead of

encouraging our government to leave these flaws open so that we can one day exploit them, we

should be fixing them. Because if we were to invest even a fraction of those dollars in making

the network more secure, we would also be making our governments, our free societies more

secure.

And that brings me up to an interesting point. You see, I was lucky enough as a teenager to get

my first modem. Changed my life. Dorky kid in suburban Maryland. I was able to get online and

it changed my life. It has made me the entrepreneur that I am today. It’s allowed me to invest in

over a hundred companies that are hoping to do the same that Steve and I did with Reddit. But

it’s enabled so much good and it’s also enabled so much bad and that is where the surveillance

state has gotten out of control and that is the problem. Because you see, in the last century,

technology and the laws gave us a certain amount of direct surveillance that was possible. You

see, the laws allowed for a strict, very specific type of direct surveillance and the technology was

rather limited. There was only so much we could do.

Now thanks to the internet , and thanks to some poor decisions on the part of our governments,

the laws are now much weaker and the technology is much stronger. Thanks to the internet it is

now cheaper and easier than before to conduct mass surveillance on innocent citizens. And so,

while the internet must be defended, while the values we hold so dear that make these stories

possible in Canada and the United States must be protected, it must not be done at the cost of our

security and that is what the surveillance state is doing.

Th e internet is a fundamentally democratic, global platform, and it must stay that way. It

embodies all the values we as citizens in a democracy love, and we have not been good stewards ‘

of it. But now is the chance to change all that, and I hope you’ll work with me and Glenn to vote

against this motion. Thank you.

RG: I’ve got to say, Alexis, those shoes are killer. Professor Dershowitz, you’re up next.

AD: Thank you very much. I know some of you are wondering if I’m on the right side of this

debate. I’ve devoted my life to protecting privacy and civil liberties and yet I’m for this

proposition. I am because I sincerely believe that surveillance, properly conducted and properly

limited, can really and truly protect our liberties. Look, no state has ever survived without

surveillance and no state deserves to survive if it has too much surveillance, particularly against

its own citizens. A balance has to be struck, but that balance cannot eliminate the power of

government to obtain information necessary to the defence of our freedoms.

A proper balance requires a proper process for deciding when surveillance is justified, when the

need for preventative intell igence is greater than in any particular case than the need for privacy.

And in striking that balance, it’s importance to distinguish among different types and degrees of

surveillance. There’s a considerable difference, for example, between street cameras that are

observing the external movements of people in public places and hidden microphones that can

listen to what you are saying in your bedroom. There’s a difference as well, between accessing

the content of phone calls and emails and cataloguing the ex ternalities of such messages – to

whom they were sent, when they were sent.

There’s also a considerable difference between surveilling our own citizens and surveilling

foreigners, including foreign leaders who are probably trying to listen in on our leade rs’

conversations. To fail to face our policies on these differences is to fail in the very act of

governance, which requires nuance and calibration. Matters of degree matter and differences of

degree can differentiate pragmatic democracies who are genuine ly seeking to protect their

citizens against real harms from self -serving tyrannies that seek only to protect their leaders from

accountability.

We will hear tonight that terrorism and the need to protect our citizens is only a pretext, that

there are oth er motives, sinister motives for why we collect this information. So I will throw a

challenge out to our distinguished opponents: what are those motives? Why would the Obama

administration have continued this policy of surveillance after being brie fed? Was it because

President Obama has some sinister motive that he won’t tell anybody about for gathering

information and is only using information as a pretext, an excuse, the way the Nazis in Germany

used the Reichstag fire as a way of suppressing civil libert ies? I don’t believe that.

I hope you won’t either.

Motives matter though they too are difficult to discern and are frequently mixed. Many who

supported the surveillance conducted by the FBI against the Ku Klux Klan, and other racist

groups, during the civil rights movement, opposed the very same surveillan ce techniques when ‘

they were used many years later against the Black Panthers. And many who now applaud the

decision to record the illegally recorded private statements made by Donald Sterling to his

mistress would express outrage if equally pernicious sta tements that were made in private by

people they admire and respect were subject to public disclosure. Privacy for me but not for thee

is as common as it is cynically self -serving.

Now we ought to be concerned about surveillance. There is virtually nothin g that is immune

from the pervasive eyes, ears and even noses of the new generation of Big Brothers. This is

absolutely true. But the most dangerous approach to our liberties is the all or nothing one,

proposed by radical proponents or opponents of all gov ernment surveillance. Those who oppose

all surveillance are as dangerous to our liberties as those who uncritically support all

surveillance.

We need to know what harms our enemies, external and internal, are planning, in order to

prevent them from carryi ng them out. But we also need to impose constraints, and that is why

process comes into play. We need a demanding process but we need to make sure that the burden

is realistically designed to strike a proper balance between two equally legitimate and compe ting

values: the need for preventive intelligence to stop attacks against us and the need to protect our

privacy from those who place too high a value on security and too low a value on privacy.

I believe it is possible to strike that balance in a manner that protects our freedoms, and that is

where our efforts should be directed: surveillance, properly limited and appropriately conducted

can promote liberty, protect life and help us defend our freedoms. Our enemies, especially those

who target civilians, have one major advantage over us: they are not constrained by morality or

legality.

We have an advantage over them, in addition to operating under the rule of law – we have

developed, through hard work and extensive research, technological tools that allo w us to

monitor and prevent their unlawful and illegal actions. Such technological tools helped us break

the German and the Japanese code during the Second World War. They helped us defeat

Fascism; they helped us in the Cold War. And they are helping us no w in the hot war against

terrorists who would bomb this theatre if they had the capacity to do so.

You’re going to hear again that there are only excuses that are being offered, that terrorism is

really not a serious problem or that American policy is as terroristic as the policy of al Qaeda. I

don’t think you’re going to accept that, are you, ladies and gentlemen? We must not surrender

our technological advantage. Instead, we must constrain it within the rule of law by constructing

appropriate processes g overning its use.

I urge you to vote against rejecting all state surveillance, properly regulated, as a legitimate

defence of our freedoms. I urge you to vote yes. Thank you very much. ‘

RG: You can tell, a trial lawyer, through and through, right down to the final second there.

Congratulations Alan, that was terrific. Glenn, you’re going to get the last word in the opening

statements. This next six minutes is yours.

GG: Good evening. So I want to begin by doing something that I am very unlikely to do for the

next hour and a half, which is vehemently agree with something that General Hayden said. And

what it is that he said at the beginning is absolutely right, which is that in order to assess the

resolution that we are debating tonight, which is, is state surveillance a legitimate defence of our

freedoms, the first – and I think most important – question to ask is, what is state surveillance.

And the reason I say that is because if state surveillance were about targeting in a discriminating

and focused way people who are plotting terrorist attacks against our country or other countries,

or are otherwise planning harm, there would be no debate.

There would be no controversy. We could all end right now and go home. Professor Dershowitz

referenced the sinister radicals who are opposed to all surveillance and who never want the

government ever to spy on anybody. I’ve been writing about this topic fo r eight years and I have

never met a single person who believes that. That is a straw man fantasy that does not exist.

Unfortunately, the actual system of state surveillance that the United States and its surveillance

partners have constructed almost enti rely in the dark has almost nothing to do with that. It is not

what Professor Dershowitz spend the last six minutes defending, a limited system of focus,

surveillance designed to protect us from people who want to blow up the auditorium. If it were

that, t here would be nothing to debate.

What state surveillance actually is, is best understood by the NSA’s own documents and own

words, which as I think you know I happen to have a lot of. That phrase that they use over and

over again, to describe what the sys tem of surveillance is that they’ve constructed is, collect it

all. There’s this remarkable and very poignant point which is that the United States government

and its officials and defenders like General Hayden have become extremely adept, because of the

secrecy behind which they operate, as presenting this very mild, moderate, pleasant picture about

what it is that they do when they talk in public about those programs. They’re very good at doing

that.

Unfortunately, those descriptions are wildly disparate from what they actually do and what they

actually say in private, when they think that nobody’s watching them. Over and over in the

documents of the NSA are not these mild paeans to the need for targeted surveillance, but the

opposite. It is aggressive bo asting about the system of indiscriminate, suspicionless surveillance

that they have constructed in the dark . Entire populations, hundreds of millions of people, who

are guilty of nothing, have their communications routinely monitored, surveilled and store d.

There’s one particular document that I find incredibly striking, that was presented by the NSA in

November of 2011 at a conference they called the Signal Development Conference where they

boast to their four partners about what it is that they have done and this document is entitled New ‘

Collection Posture, Our New Collection Posture. And it says, in a chart, collect it all, snip it all,

know it all, process it all, exploit it all.

A federal court in the United States, a George Bush appointee, right -wing, pro -national security

federal judge, in December of last year, ruled that what the NSA is doing is a profound violation

of the rights of millions of Americans and he described this program as quote, the almost

Orwellian technology that is unlik e anything that could have been conceived in 1979. William

Denny, a mathematician with the NSA for thirty years who resigned in protest over what the

NSA has become , told the Democracy Now program in 2012 quote, they’ve assembled on the

order of 20 trillio n transactions between U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.

The Washington Post, in 2011, before Edward Snowden even emerged, reported that the NSA

every single day, every day, collects 1.7 billion emails and telephone calls simply between and

among American citizens, let alone what they collect on foreign national s. That is the

surveillance state that we are here to debate. It is unlike anything even science fiction writers in

the 1950s could conceive of and it is the opposite of the limited and focused program that our

opponents are attempting to convince you exis ts.

Now I just want to make one point before my time is up about something that is often asked

which is what is the reason for this? Because as citizens I think we all understand the inherent

inappropriateness of having the government monitor and collect data about all of its citizens and

with whom we communicate and who is emailing us and what it is we are saying. And so the

answer that they say over and over again, that they are going to tell you tonight over and over

again, is one word: terrorism. They use that word because it packs a very powerful emotional

punch. And Professor Dershowitz said, if you understand it, if you want to claim that it is a

pretext, then that is some sort of conspiracy theory.

The U.S. government has used terrorism as a pretex t for everything that it has done in the past 12

years from erecting a torture regime, to invading and destroying Iraq, to imprisoning people

without charges in Guantanamo, to collecting the communications of all citizens throughout the

globe including its own. One need not be a conspiracy buff to think that as a pretext but just

having basic knowledge of history, but U.S. courts and government institutions over the last year

have all said these programs have nothing to do with terrorism.

RG: Ladies and ge ntlemen, four very formidable debaters, what talent on the stage tonight.

We’re going to allow them to extend their arguments a little bit further now with timed two

minute rebuttals, where they are going to weigh in on what they’ve heard from their oppone nts.

We’re going to ask the pro -team to go first as a pair. General Hayden, you spoke at the top of the

debate so let’s hear your rebuttal now.

MH: Ok. Two minutes is not enough time to unpack all the inaccuracies of the last 24. Alexis, I

actually agree with a lot of your stuff. The Balkanization of the internet would be a human

tragedy, and we can talk about that in the after -prom party, how we might want to make sure that ‘

doesn’t happen. Glenn, I don’t agree with anything you said. A couple of quick poi nts because

time is short, Alexis, you just need to put the surveillance state out there as a given. We need to

define that. I agree that the American technology industry has suffered because of the stories that

some people have written , but American indus try is doing nothing more than what industries

around the world are doing for their own intelligence services, and American industry is being

unfairly singled out and punished because of that.

A whole bunch of other things: mentions of massive surveillanc e. We do bulk collection, that is

different from massive surveillance. We can talk about it later. Glenn says, we collect everything

there is. NSA actually, on any given day, collects – listen up carefully, it’s a big number –

collects .00004% of global in ternet traffic. I have no idea what 1.7 billion intra -American email

collection means. That is simply not happening. What we have here are people trying to keep

you safe and I’ve got an image coming out that the people who work and lead NSA are like that

character in The Simpsons, you know, Mr. Burns, after finally they get to go “Excellent,

excellent!”

We’ve got a lot more to unpack, but you get the drift. Thanks.

RG: Extra points at the Munk Debates for any Simpson references. Alan Dershowitz, your

rebuttal.

AD: I think we’ve heard two straw men from the other side. The first straw man is raising the

issue of torture and rendition. That proves my point. I am a lib eral Democrat who voted against

President Bush, who voted for President Obama, I hate torture, I hate rendition, I’m against all of

that. But does anyone doubt that all of that was motivated genuinely, but erroneously, by a desire

to stop terrorism? Do you think that President Bush ordered these horrible things to be done just

because he likes torture or likes rendition? He may have been wrong but that was his motive, that

was his goal, that was his purpose, to stop terrorism. And so let’s debate the merits of whether

surveillance is good or bad, not the motives.

Second, the argument is that, well, if only we could just surveil terrorists. If we could only just

focus on terrorists, just point out terrorists. If only we could live in a world like that. That is a

real straw man. Of course, we wouldn’t be having this debate because we wouldn’t be debating

you. If you can figure out a way of identifying terrorists and only terrorists without the need to

sometimes be intruding on the conversation of somebody who might be talking to a terrorist, or

who might know somebody who is a terrorist, I would be thrilled. But it is in the nature of life

that of course one has to over -predict. We all know that when it comes to guilt or innocence and

punishment, better ten gui lty go free t han one innocent man be wrongly confined, but that is not

the rule for preventive intelligence.

When it comes to preventive intelligence, it is far better that a few people have some intrusion

than that one innocent person, whose death could have been prevented by surveillance, is harmed

or killed. We have to over -predict. We have to over -use. The question is, how much? How to ‘

control it? How to constrain it? I think we can have enough surveillance that is consistent with

liberty.

RG: Thank y ou. Glenn, let’s have you up and then Alexis can close out the other side. Alexis is

chomping at the bit here to get at Alan and Michael.

GG: So just on the question of motive, I actually don’t care at all about motive, primarily

because I don’t think I o r anyone else can divine it. I don’t know why George Bush and General

Hayden and the other officials in the United States invaded Iraq and destroyed it and why they

tortured people and why they put people in prison without charges. I only know that it was

incredibly wrong to do and that is the same of surveillance. And I bring it up because it is the

same mindset, the idea that if you say the word terrorism over and over and over enough you can

put people in prison and justify whatever it is you want to do.

As far as whether or not this surveillance is actually about terrorism, let me share with you what

people inside the U.S. government have said on that question so that you don’t have to take

either our word for it or theirs. The federal court I reference d earlier, that ruled that the NSA was

violating the rights of Americans, said about the claim that it was for terrorism quote, the

government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s voluminous metadata

collection actually stopped a terr orist attack. A presidential review panel, appointed by President

Obama of his closest aides, on December 18, issued a report saying, our view of the information

used contributing to terrorism investigations by the use of metadata was not essential to

prev enting attacks and could readily have been attained in a timely manner using conventional

court orders, which is my answer to Professor Dershowitz about how else we can target people

and find out what we need to know.

Three Democratic senators in President Obama’s own party who are on the intelligence

committee and have access to all classified information wrote an oped on November 25 th in the

New York Times and they wrote quote, the usefulness of the collection process has been greatly

exaggerated . We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting

national security.

They hope that they will blind you with emotion and I hope that you will focus on the evidence

and the facts.

AO: Now it’s my turn, right? Bring in the ne rds. Well I’m happy General Hayden, that we’re in

accord at least to the technological costs to all of this. I spoke earlier about the economic costs,

but I want to reiterate the fact that I am the nerd here, right? And you all here didn’t hear a

rebuttal about the real technological problems, the fact that the mass surveillance we are doing

actually makes us less safe, less secure, and this is from a technological standpoint. And this is

something that we, as Canadians, as Americans, have every reason to b e worried about. We

should be working to make the internet stronger, to make it more secure, because it benefits all

of us. ‘

And on the issue of, oh well, I suppose everyone else is doing it too, well, I don’t know about

you but I don’t want to settle for, our nations have never settled for, gosh, it’s good enough for

everyone else. Our nations have been founded on principles that cherish things like a right to

privacy and a right to freedom and encourage the kind of amazing things that come out of it as a

result of those policies and so what we’re offering you here is this: the surveillance state has run

amok. Technology that has enabled us to send selfies 24/7 – not that valuable – has also enabled

us to be spied upon 24/7. And there is a way for due proces s. It was good enough for centuries

before we had this technological innovation and there is still a method to rein in this madness but

it starts by making the network more secure and not less, and not doing the things that make

every day Canadians and Ame ricans wonder, who’s listening…who’s watching?

That’s not the America I was raised in, that’s not the Canada I presume you all were raised in

and I hope, I hope, with all of us together we can get this right. Thank you.

RG: Well, the battle lines in this debate could not be clearer. Now we’re going to move on to our

cross -examination period where we’re going to get these two teams of debaters to engage with

each other directly. I want to start with a question that I think comes out of the real points of

clash here in the opening part of this debate and it’s around what are the risks that we are

defending ourselves against by virtue of having these programs and you know, General Hayden,

let me ask you, you were there on September 11 th. If these programs were in place back then –

what we have now – could you have stopped that attack? Could you have prevented it from

happening? I think that is the big litmus test that is on a lot of people’s minds.

MH: First of all, let me point out – and I appreciate the question on terrorism – that this isn’t just

about terrorism. This is about legitimate foreign intelligence activity on the part of free people to

keep themselves safe and free. Terrorism is a big deal but we do this for lots of good, legitimate

reasons. Now, to answer your question, if this program – and here we are talking about the

metadata program which is about terrorism, because the only reason you can use the metadata is

to stop terror attacks, no other purpose – if we’d have had this program in place we would have

known that two of the muscle guys on the Pentagon flight, planning to hit the Pentagon, the

American Airlines flight, we would have detected that they were in San Diego. That was Nawaf

al-Hazmi and Khalid al -Mihdhar. Now they had gone to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur and we had

last lock on them there and we lost them there. Shame on us, I wish we had kept it. But then they

came to the United States, unbeknownst to us. NSA actually intercepte d their phone calls from

San Diego, where they were staying, back to a known al Qaeda safe house, in Yemen. We

listened in. Now, the trigger, the selector, as it’s called, why we were listening to that particular

phone call, was because we were covering th e safe house in Yemen, and then as the call was

made and as it went through the global grid, NSA selection devices saw the number of the house

in Yemen and we listened to the call a little more than half a dozen times. Three or four times

there was enough stuff interesting on the call that we actually completed an intelligence report

about it because that safe house in Yemen was notorious. Nothing in the content of the call,

nothing in the physics of the intercept, told us that the other end of the call was in San Diego. ‘

The way it was intercepted, the San Diego number doesn’t show up in the technology and they

didn’t say anything in the call like, “lo ve the weather, the F leet’s in and we’re going to the zoo

tomorrow”, which would have suggested they were in San Diego. If we would have had the

metadata program, the 215 program, as a matter of routine we would have thrown that selector at

that mass of American phone bills and phone selections and simply would have said, hey, did

anybody in here talk to this nu mber in Yemen? And kajing, the San Diego number would have

popped up. Now there’s a lot NSA can do with that. NSA would have handed that number to the

FBI. The FBI would have kicked in the door in San Diego and would have found Nawaf al -

Hazmi and Khalid al -Mihdhar, two people legally in the United States. They probably would

have leaned on them enough though and found some reason to push them out of the country and

off they would have went. And so two of the muscle guys on the Pentagon flight wouldn’t have

been there. To answer your question, I suspect al Qaeda then may have called the raid, the attack

off, thinking, we don’t know what these guys gave up to the FBI, we don’t know what else the

Americans knew, they found these two guys, what if they are layin g in wait, call Mohamed Atta,

call the other guys, we’re off. I suspect that would have happened, I can’t guarantee it. But wait,

there’s more .

RG: Well , I’d like to bring the other side in…

MH: One more point, it’s very brief.

RG: Alright.

MH: If that w ould have happened, we still would not have gotten credit for stopping a terrorist

attack because we would not have known what we had done.

RG: Thank you. So Glenn, sounds kind of convincing.

GG: Well, I have a lot to say about that although I will try a nd make my remarks actually brief. I

understand why General Hayden wants to claim that he didn’t have the capabilities to stop 9 -11

because he was the head of the NSA at the time that the 9 -11 attacks took place and wants to say

that I didn’t have the abil ity to stop it, but that claim, is incredibly inflammatory to Americans

and to people throughout the world and the West, that we could have stopped 9 -11 or disrupted

this plot had we had the NSA programs that are now being debated, has offended the leading

experts on al Qaeda in the United States who almost always defend the United States in the war

on terror. One of them, about this claim, wrote on CNN on December 30, 2013, “is it really the

case that the U.S. intelligence community didn’t have the dots in the lead -up to 9 -11? Hardly.

The failure to respond to these warnings was a policy failure by the Bush administration, not an

intelligence failure by the U.S. intelligence community.” The other expert, Lawrence Wright,

who wrote the definitive book on al Qaeda in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize, similarly wrote in

the New Yorker in 2014, after reviewing all of the evidence in their possession already, was that

the reason that 9 -11 happened was that they had collected so much information that they had no

idea what they were collecting and therefore didn’t share with each other the information that ‘

could have stopped the plot. And I think that’s a vital point, which is that the more indiscriminate

surveillance that you do when you’re collecting billions of ca lls a day, that’s from the

Washington Post pre -Snowden, it’s throughout all of the Snowden documents that the NSA

collects billions of calls every day. Their main problem right now is that they collect so much

that they can’t even physically store it all, even though you can store gargantuan information on

a small little drive and when you collect that much it’s impossible to know and to detect when

somebody is plotting to attack the Boston Marathon or to blow up a plane because they are

collecting everythi ng about all of us rather than the people that they should be keeping their eyes

on.

RG: So Alexis, come in on that, you’re the self -professed tech expert, which you are, I mean, are

we buried in data? General Hayden is saying that is precisely the challenge. There is too much

data, we have to respond to it, we have to systematize it, we h ave to drill down into it. Are you

just saying the technology is overwhelmed by the data itself?

AO: Yes. I mean, this is a very, very, very hard problem to solve. I mean, the gift and the curse

of all the data, aside from all the civil liberty violations , is that yeah, there may be some signal in

there but there’s a lot of noise. And it’s a very hard software problem to solve. And that’s still

only part of it, right, because through the efforts of this mass surveillance we’ve also undermined

the technolog y that makes the internet work, that keeps us safe, everyone of us safe. So it

becomes more than just rather offensive use of surveillance on innocent civilians. It becomes

much more because it threatens the technology of how the internet works and works w ell.

RG: Professor Dershowitz, come on in on this one.

AD: Well intelligence is always a work in progress. Intelligence in the context of newly -

developing technology is always a work in progress. I think we’re asking for too much right

now. And that is w hy motive is so important. And that is why it is so important to understand

that Mr. Greenwald has conceded his major argument. He had said that this is all a pretext. Now

he says, I don’t care about motive. But pretext is all about motive. If you are prep ared to concede

that the motives are good and that it is a work in progress, we have to work to make it better.

Now not Greenwald, because he says it’s a pretext and if it’s a pretext then there is no use in

trying to make it any better. I argue that it is well -intentioned and well -motivated though there

are problems. Too much information, too much gathering, perhaps not always gathering the right

information, that’s why we need to reform the FISA court, that’s why we need to have a range of

other changes t hat allow us to take this work in progress and make it fit in a nice way into our

war against terrorism without diminishing civil liberties. I think we can do it. We’ve done it with

other technologies in the past. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water, let’s not restrict

ourselves from using our tremendous technological advantage that we have worked so hard to

achieve. Let’s work to strike the appropriate balance. ‘

RG: So Glenn, to understand your argument, can you see a policy where bulk data exi sts that

strikes the right balance?

GG: No. There is no, bulk data means indiscriminate mass collection. Keeping track of who it is

that you’re talking to, who’s calling you, who is emailing you and the government, the legitimate

government, has no busines s monitoring entire populations who are guilty of absolutely nothing.

There is this attempt to suggest that well, there are different kinds of surveillance, that you can

listen to phone calls or read emails or you can just collect metadata. They’re doing b ulk but when

they say just metadata, there are all kinds of studies including from a professor at Princeton,

Edward Felton, who have demonstrated that collection of your metadata can actually be more

invasive than reading your emails or listening to your p hone calls. Imagine if you call an

abortion clinic or an HIV specialist or a drug addiction hotline or if you call someone who isn’t

your spouse late at night repeatedly, or you call a suicide hotline. Why should General Hayden

and all of the national secu rity officials and your government and mine know that I’m calling

those people so that they can use that however they wish. I do think that is illegitimate. What is

legitimate is to have targeted, focused surveillance on people who courts have become convi nced

are actually guilty of some wrong -doing. It worked to keep us safe when the Soviet Union had

massive intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at every one of our major cities, it can

certainly work to keep us safe from a few thousand people hiding in some caves.

RG: Now General Hayden, in interviews and elsewhere you have said that there is a fundamental

difference between collection and surveillance, that these are two different activities.

MH: Yes, there is a difference between massive surveilla nce and bulk collection. Then let me

piggyback on a thought that Glenn put out there. He just suggested to you that the way we

conducted surveillance against a slow -moving, oligarchic, technologically inferior but incredibly

dangerous nation -state is the w ay we should protect you against a nimble, agile, fanatical,

individually -motivated, low -threshold in terms of ability to detect threat. And my point at the

beginning was, you know, doing that Soviet ICBM signal thing kept you safe then, but the new

threat s cannot be attacked the way we attacked the old threats. Now, back to the metadata where

I’m going to find out who is calling their abortion clinic and you know, I mean, I started out with

saying facts matter, so I assume on the metadata issue, we’re talk ing about the 215 program, not

the phone records, alright? Because frankly, that is the only bulk metadata N SA has on American

citizens, but…

GG: And Canadians too.

MH: Well, we’ll talk about foreign nationals…

GG: We should talk about everybody, especially in this room.

AO: No actually, not just Americans matter. ‘

MH: Accusations fit on a bumper sticker. The truth takes longer.

RG: Good. You keep going.

MH: NSA gets from American telephone providers the billi ng records of American citizens.

What happens to the billing records is actually really important. I didn’t make this phrase up but

I’m going to use it. They’re put in a lockbox, alright? They’re put in a lockbox at NSA. Twenty -

two people at NSA are allowe d to access that lockbox. The only thing NSA is allowed to do with

that truly is a jillion records sitting there, is that what they have is called a seed (?) number, a

seed number about which they have reasonable suspicion that that seed number is affiliat ed with

al Qaeda. He rolls up to a safe house in Yemen, he’s got pocket litter that says here’s his al

Qaeda membership card, he’s got a phone you’ve never seen before…Gee, I wonder how this

phone might be associated with any threats in the United States. So now, I’m being a little

cartoonish about this, NSA gets to walk up to the transom and yell through the transom and say,

hey, anybody here talk to this number I just found in Yemen? And then, this number, say, in

Buffalo says, well, yeah, I call him abou t every Thursday. NSA then gets to say, ok, Buffalo

number – by the way, number, not name -- who did you call? At which point, my description of

the 215 metadata program is over. That is all NSA is allowed to do with the data. There is no

data mining, ther e are no powerful algorithms chugging through it, trying to imagine

relationships. It’s, ‘did that number call someone in the United States?’ The last year for which

NSA had full records is 2012. I’ll get the 2013 numbers shortly but in 2012, NSA walked up to

that transom and yelled, hey, anybody talk to this number, 288 times. Now that still may offend

you, but that is not what was described over there.

RG: Alexis, let’s have you come back on that. What he has described is a fairly minimalist

system and o thers have described something that is pretty maximalist and pretty scary . Who’s

right?

AO: Well, you could listen to the technologist about this. As a technologist I’m telling you, yes,

that metadata poses a very serious threat to us because it is simply being gobbled up, sucked up,

without any concern for due process, without any concern for the Fourth Amendment of the

United States, without any concerns for our right to privacy and in aggregate, yes, it is far more

surveillance than is necessary, than i s required to do that job and I can’t help but wonder, well,

who watches the watchers? At this point, we are going on what, trust? We know plenty that we

have learned now and the response is don’t worry, it’s ok. And I don’t think that’s good enough.

It’s not good enough because in democracies we rely on transparencies, we rely on what is going

on and for too long, we have had no knowledge of exactly what was going on and when we

found out, well, it was not the kind of thing we wanted to be done in our name and it was, like I

said, from the very start actually making us less secure. And at the end of the day I think we all

agree we want security above all, but the actions we’ve been taking through mass surveillance in

fact make us less so. ‘

RG: So Alan, the middle ground between these two points as it exists, the government right now

may be, as you think, benign, but what about some government in the future? What happens to

this capacity, not today but tomorrow, ten years from now, twenty yea rs from now?

AD: James Madison said if men or women were angels we wouldn’t need the Bill of Rights. And

we need the Bill of Rights because we don’t trust government and that is why we need to impose

constraints, we need to have warrant requirements. We ne ed to limit the ability to use these

warrants, to use these surveillance methods. But I think we have one, big fundamental difference

here. I think the other side assumes you can only surveil people who are guilty. Let me give you

an example that I’m sure occurs right here in Toronto. It certainly occurs in London, it occurs in

New York. Among the new primitive technologies , we now have silent cameras on street

corners, that has had a major impact on reducing street crime. Now those cameras capture

images o f innocent people, all of us, walking along the street and doing our own thing. It doesn’t

capture what we say but it watches us. It’s Big Brother. It’s Big Brother writ small perhaps, and

it doesn’t focus only on guilty because criminals don’t walk around with big Cs on their heads.

We have to have these cameras in order to send a message to criminals that if you commit a

crime, there will be a video and you will be captured. That has a big impact. So you don’t have

to be guilty in order to surrender a lit tle bit of your autonomy and privacy in the interest of

preventing major crimes. So we ought to understand that we live on a continuum, a continuum of

dangers, a continuum of rights violations. Not all rights violations are the same. Having yourself

monito red, walking through Times Square is, as I said in my opening, very different from having

the government intrude and listen to what you say in your bedroom. And that’s the kind of

debate we should have. Not have debates about innocence or guilt. Due proces s is very nimble

and very flexible. It is the process that is due you based on the degree of intrusion compared to

the degree of benefit the government gets out of it. That is the way we ought to have this debate.

We ought not to end all surveillance and a ll intrusions and although Mr. Greenwald keeps

denying this, when you really listen closely to what he is saying, he really sounds like he is

against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the al Qaeda card, wearing an al Qaeda

baseball cap and al Qaeda uniform and if you can’t identify him with 100% certainty, don’t you

ever dare to try to find him by intruding even slightly on the privacy interests of innocent people.

That is not the way government works, nor should it work that way.

GG: You kno w, I completely understand, I really do, why Professor Dershowitz wants to

attribute to me these positions that are completely laughable and ridiculous, because it is so much

easier to debate people when you can pretend that they hold moronic positions tha t they don’t

actually believe. It’s super easy and if I believed what he just said, I would urge you to vote

against me. But I don’t believe any of that. There is a process that is in place from the time the

United States was telling the world that the Sov iet Union was this evil empire that was the

greatest threat known to man, that all presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, understood

was the way to keep America safe by following, which was going to a court before you

surveilled somebody and listened t o their phone calls and not present definitive proof positive ‘

evidence that they are guilty of something but enough reasonable cause so that there were

safeguards over who it was that was being monitored and surveilled and to have enough of an

ability to t hen listen and see whether or not there was cause enough to believe they should

continue to be surveilled,,,

AD: Would you require for that camera on the street that I talked about?

GG: No, and I want to explain why. The example of, let’s just put a camera on a street corner

and watch what people do on the street I think proves our point: because invading what you do

on the internet is radically and fundamentally different. The internet is not simply a place that

you pass by on the street and I think one of the reasons why, around the world, younger people

have been so supportive of Edward Snowden and view him as a hero and have been so

supportive of these disclosures is because they understand what the internet now actually is for

the world, which is not si mply a place that we pass by to do other things, it’s the place where we

explore who we are as human beings, it’s where we make our friends, it’s where we read, it’s

where we think. It is everything about who we are and to allow the internet, not a street corner

but the place of this virtual reality where we exist and grow and explore, to have all privacy

removed through this collect it all mentality, which remember is not my phrase, it’s theirs, is a

kind of invasion unlike anything that has taken place. L et me just leave you with one quote from

James Vampert (?) who is an NSA historian, who has worked on these issues for a long time

who said that, if you allow the NSA the ability to invade people’s online activity you are

allowing them to invade people’s m inds, their thoughts and their very person. And I think we all

understand the value of privacy, even though those of you who voted yes on this resolution at the

very beginning, I can guarantee, you all put passwords on your email and social media accounts,

and locks on your bedroom and bathroom doors, you wouldn’t want me or General Hayden or

anyone else trolling through it, because as human beings we all understand that privacy is a

unique guarantee of human freedom, it’s where creativity and dissent and e xploration reside and

when that is gone so too is a crucial part of human freedom.

RG: So that is a perfect segue to now call for a video that was created especially for tonight’s

Munk Debate. It touches on what the internet means, how surveillance impacts on it, its brief but

it focuses on the point of accountability which I want to come ba ck to and get the panel to weigh

in on. Ladies and gentlemen, please listen now to Edward Snowden, especially for the Munk

Debates.

ES: So this is a part of what today’s state surveillance looks like but it’s important to remember

that it doesn’t stop wit h phone calls. It covers your emails; it covers your text messages; your

web history; every Google search you’ve ever made and every plane ticket you’ve ever bought;

the books you buy at Amazon.com. The transactions are sent in plain text where it’s unencr ypted

and anyone, whether it’s the NSA or some other foreign intelligence service, can collect this and

store it for an increasing period of time. It includes who your friends are and how you

communicate with them. It shows where you go and what you want t o be. It also shows people in ‘

charge of state surveillance who you love and it shows them where these people live. Now

defenders of this kind of unconstitutional dragnet surveillance might say that there is no room for

abuse because we have policies in pla ce to address these concerns. But can policies that change

with every president, with every new congress, with every new director of the NSA, really

address the threat of building inside our own country this kind of architecture of oppression?

What about o ther countries that don’t abide by our policies? Is leaving our communications

insecure so that the NSA can monitor them and those of our adversaries really worth the cost?

And we have to remember the policies aren’t perfect. Despite policy, I, as an NSA a nalyst,

sitting at my desk, had the technical authority to wiretap anyone, from a federal judge to the

President of the United States, without getting out of my chair, as long as I had a private email

address. And that’s not a boast.

RG: So that’s a snipp et of a special seven minute statement that Mr. Snowden recorded for the

Munk Debates tonight and it’s live right now on our website, www.munkdebates.com/snowden

for those watching online who want to have a look. So, Alan, let me come to you on a number of

points there that we’ve covered, but a key one that I think is on the minds of this audience which

is accountability. I mean, to what degree do we have a system in place now that is powerful

enough to har ness this technology in the ways that you want to see it when Edward’s claiming

that he can get on his computer, not even as an NSA employee but as a contractor, and log in to

the president’s email?

AD: First of all, I think General Hayden should answer t hat question and I’d love you to come

back to me, but whether or not that is true or false that is a factual statement.

RG: Ok, well, let’s start with facts. General Hayden?

MH: Facts, ok. If Edward Snowden were able to do that, that would not only be a v iolation of the

laws of the United States, it would also violate the laws of physics. He had access to NSA’s

administrative network. He did not have access, thank God, to NSA’s operational network.

That’s not the first time he’s said that. There’s no one i n NSA who believes there is any

possibility that that could be true. Factually true. He may claim it’s artistically true in the sense

that somebody at NSA who actually had authority and was on the right network might do that,

but that’s my segue to Alan, b ecause this is very, very carefully overseen. You can’t, actually,

the rest of the Snowden statement is actually quite interesting. For the first time, I think this

might be Snowden 2.0., because he actually makes a distinction between what is possible and

what is actually being done, something that a lot of folks don’t do.

AD: Well let me follow up on that. The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday of this week

heard one of the most important arguments that it will hear this year. And the issue that was

before the Supreme Court was that if I were to get arrested today for jay -walking or for driving

my car without a seatbelt, under current rules, the person, the policeman searching me, can seize

my iPhone and can access all the data in my iPhone, including my medical records, my tax ‘

records. This isn’t the NSA. This is what happens when modern technology confronts the fourth

amendment. The Supreme Court heard argument: nine justices, eight of them expressed their

views and then there was Justice Thomas. But eight of them expressed their views and they were

deeply divided, and I really urge you to read the transcript because it’s really shows how our

Supreme Court works. You can tell that they were deeply confused, deeply troubled and trying to

figure out a way of applying the intentions of the framers, who wrote in 1793 and couldn’t

imagine this modern technology and the words of the fourth a mendment which talk about

‘reasonable’ to the modern technology and the Supreme Court doesn’t only write for today it

writes for next year, and next decade and the decades after that. Again, this is work in progress.

We must get accountability. We are tryi ng to get accountability. Technology is always ahead of

the law. I try to teach my students in 50 years at Harvard not how to practice law today but how

to practice law when you’re my age, 50 years from now. It’s always a quest. The struggle for

justice ne ver stays still, but that doesn’t mean you make cellphones or iPhones illegal, it means

you try to work to constrain things and to create accountability. And the answer to your question

is, we don’t have enough accountability now but we’re getting there an d you can help us get

there. By the way, this is not only an American problem. The five eyes (‘I’s?) work together: the

United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and England. They share intelligence and

information. You’re not foreigners when it comes to your own government. Your government is

trying to protect you as well, and your Supreme Court is trying to struggle with these issues.

Don’t make it a debate, as Mr. Greenwald still is making it, between good and evil. There are

good people struggling t o do the right thing, let’s keep the struggle going but let’s not throw out

surveillance which requires sometimes surveilling innocent people. For example, the videos. It

might catch a woman…

RG: You know Alan, equal time here…

AD: …going to an abortion cl inic. It will catch Donald Sterling going to his mistress’…

RG: Let me bring Glenn in.

GG: So I am going to begin by saying that U.S. national security officials are very adept and

very skillful at presenting a public image that is wildly different than t he reality. And, of course,

the whole NSA scandal began when James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, went

before our Senate and was asked whether or not the NSA is mass collecting data about millions

of Americans and he looks the senators in the eye and said, no sir. And then, the very next story

that we reported, from the Snowden archive, two months later, proved that the NSA was doing

exactly that, which the top national security official of the United States government falsely

denied to the Senate and to the public and so we hear things like, Mr. Snowden, who whatever

else you think of him has never been proven to prevaricate, is not telling the truth when he says

that sitting at his desk he could have wire -tapped anyone. I guarantee you tha t is exactly what

NSA analysts have the capability to do that and the evidence for that, don’t rely on my word or

his. It’s the Xkeyscore program which we reported on in the Guardian in September of 2013, ‘

ample documents that show an analysts’ training man ual walking them through and saying, when

you want to eavesdrop on a particular email here is the screen where you do it, and you enter the

email and the justification, nobody checks what it is that you’re doing, you simply then start

getting those emails exactly as Mr. Snowden said. And the question of whether there’s really any

safeguards, he said, oh it’s in a lockbox, don’t worry, we’re collecting all your data but it’s very

well protected. Aside from the fact that history proves that you cannot trust g overnments to

collect information and not abuse it, think about this fact, the NSA is an agency where Edward

Snowden sat for many months and downloaded all of their most sensitive documents and they

had no idea that he was doing it. To this day, they have no idea what he took. They say that all

the time, even though they spent tens of millions of dollars trying to figure it out. Does that

sound like a very well -managed system to you that you can trust all of your data not to be

abused? And the last point I want to make, and you know Professor Dershowitz for some reason

keeps returning to the issue of motive which I said from the beginning I don’t think matters.

AD: What does pretext mean, then?

GG: If somebody invaded Iraq because they were an evil person or was incredibly misguided

and amoral, but here’s what I do know. Here’s what I do know. In an interview before the event

that he gave, Professor Dershowitz said, the NSA talks about this FISA Court as oversight and

yet the FISA Court is pretty much of a joke, it just gives out warrants like, as he said, like

lollipops. And I agree with him on that. And the reason is this, whatever the motives are, the

climate in the United States after 9 -11 got out of control. 9 -11 was a very traumatic event. I was

in Manhattan on that day. I remember the emotions it triggered to this day. And the balance that

we always had or tried to maintain got completely out of whack so that everything that was

justified in the name of terrorism, from destroying a country of 26 million people to putting

people in prison without charges to torturing them, to spying on everybody’s emails and

telephone calls, anything that got justified in the name of terrorism, got done. That is what is

wrong, that is what is dangerous, and that is what I hope you’ll reject tonight by voting against

the motion.

AD: So are you then prepared , Mr. Greenwald, to withdraw your accusation of pretext, because

you say motive doesn’t matter, and you ca n’t have pretext without a bad motive.

GG: My basis for saying that terrorism is pretext, and I doubt you want me to read it again,

although I’d like to, is the federal court judge, President Obama’s own panel…

AD: They never said that.

GG: …I quoted, I q uoted…

AD: They never said that. Show me the word ‘pretext’.

GG: I quoted them when they said that the program… ‘

AD: Show me the word ‘pretext’.

GG: You can keep screaming that and it doesn’t change the point that everybody who…

AD: What’s the point?

GG: … who has looked at the issue has said that these programs have played virtually no role in

stopping terrorism and…

AD: That’s completely…

GG: …it’s not the role of…

AD: It’s completely different point.

GG: …and it doesn’t work…

AD: That’s a completely diffe rent point. You’re saying what they have said is that they were

well -intentioned, it wasn’t a pretext, but there’s no evidence that it worked. If you can’t

understand the difference between those two statements then you really are what you have

described y ourself as not being, previously.

GG: The threat has been greatly exaggerated, greatly exaggerated. That is what three Democratic

senators with access to the classified information, which you don’t have...

AD: The results were exaggerated, not the motive.

RG: Hot debate , that’s for sure. And before we go to closing statements I want to provide Alexis

Ohanian an opportunity to reflect on Snowden’s statement, on what came out of that statement

that you think is a key point for yourself .

AO: Well this has gotten spicy. I, like I said, I’m the nerd here. I still want to point out that, my

first opening remarks about the fact that what we are doing with mass surveillance actually

undermines the strength and secur ity of our nations, as well as oversteps the bounds and the

rights of privacy that we all have. Like, this is still a fundamental truth about what is being done

from a technological level and then ultimately, on top of that, remember, Canadians, Americans,

right? Our governments work for us. They are ultimately responsible and beholden to us. We

employ them, we sometimes hire them, sometimes we fire them, but they work for us. And the

way this entire thing has been handled over the last 20, to give you a pe rception of how much

this technology has advanced, right, technology does not grow linearly, it grows exponentially.

What I mean by that is if you think about how much technology has boomed in the last 20 years,

versus the 20 years before it, it is inordin ate. We can do things in the last 20 years that we could

not have even imagined in the 20 years previously. And a lot of those things are great. But some

of them are not. And one of the things that has run amok because of this technological boom,

because o f how much of a role the internet plays in our lives is this surveillance state. And the ‘

principles we used to keep our nations, our free nations, safe, in the 20 th century don’t work in

the 21 st. They are causing abuses that we can do something about and I hope that’s why you will

vote with us against this motion.

RG: Moving the debate along, it’s now time for closing statements. We’re going to give each of

our debaters three minutes, they are going to speak in the reverse order of the opening so Glenn,

that means that you are up first.

GG: So, I feel like I anticipated moderately well one of the problems that this debate was going

to entail, which is the ability of each side to make claims about what the thing is that you’re

supposed to vote on which is the surveillance state. Is it this nice, well -motivated, work in

progress where we just try to eavesdrop on the terrorists, but oh so accidentally and just very

occasionally bump into your gmail account by accident? Or, is it what the NSA actually

describe d it as being when they didn’t know that you were listening, when they were talking only

amongst themselves, when they were planning on what their institutional aspiration actually

would be? Collect it all, snip it all, process it all, know it all, exploit it all. Those are not my

words, those are the words of the NSA working in a top secret environment because that is what

you actually should be voting on because that is what they are actually doing. And not Professor

Dershowitz’s aspirations for what one day he hopes it someday might be. The way we get to that

point is by rejecting what it now is as excessive and menacing and dangerous.

The second point that I feel is vital to make is one that Alexis just touched on which is this now

mockery over the idea that what kept us safe from the Soviet Union is simply woefully

inadequate, namely, not getting proof that someone is wearing an al Qaeda hat but going to a

court and having evidence be presented that someone is a legitimate surveilla nce target before

allowing the NSA to invade their system. If you go back and look at what was said by Ronald

Reagan and world leaders in the ‘70s and ‘80s it was the Soviet Union is the greatest threat ever

to mankind and now suddenly it becomes, oh those were nice, reasonable people who we could

manage, it’s really these terrorists in a cave who we have to fundamentally dismantle our system

of liberties in order to protect ourselves from. And General Hayden keeps asking for facts and I

think I’ve presente d facts, a lot in this debate, but let me just leave you with a few more.

In 2009 the global news service, McClatchy, characterized the threat of terrorism this way, quote

undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestin al illnesses

than from terrorism. Harper’s, in March 2011, offered this statistic: the number of American

civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year, 8. The minimum number who died

after being struck by lightning, 29. Terrorism is a real t hreat, it is not anything to make light of,

but there are also all sorts of threats that we guard against and keep ourselves safe from not by

dismantling our fundamental liberties like the right to privacy or the limitations on the

government ability to kn ow what we are saying, but by balancing them and by affirming the

values that we are trying to protect in the first place. Thank you. ‘

RG: Professor Dershowitz, your closing statement.

AD: I think we need less surveillance than what we have now, but more than what we would get

from the other side, that would require a warrant to specify with particularity the suspicion level

against anybody on whom we would surveil at all. We need a reasonable, middle -ground on

which we can use some surveillance based on l ess than probable cause in order to target people

who are trying to do harm against us.

Now, terrorism is real and it’s different than viruses; it’s different than being struck by lightning.

It’s an essential attack on the very core of our country and our people. I actually believe, and the

reason I’m on this side of the debate, is that one of the greatest threats that civil liberties face in

this country would be another terrorist attack like 9 -11. Even if fewer people are killed in a

traffic accident, if we had another attack like 9 -11, the devastating impact it would have on our

civil liberties would be incalculable. If you don’t believe me, just think back to Canada in 1970.

Some of you may be old enough to remember this, when two terrorist kidnappings resulted in the

invocation of the War Measures Act, which deprived Canadians all across the country of some of

their basic civil liberties. I know, because I along with Irwin Cotler, served as consultants to the

Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and t o the Liberal Attorney -General John Turner in those

days, to try and figure out a way of reducing the impact on civil liberties without diminishing the

prevention of terrorism, which was a real threat in those days.

It’s the interest of every person who c ares about liberty to take reasonable steps to prevent

another mass casualty attack. A surveillance system directed against terrorism and those

facilitating terrorism, which will have false positives, which will result in the intrusion on some

privacy of s ome people who are innocent, is essential both to the defence of our citizens and to

the protection of our liberties. I urge you to vote for this proposition and to allow our

governments, all of our governments, the five eyes , to work together to allow us to have the

intelligence necessary to prevent a recurrence of 9 -11. Will it prevent it? Nobody knows for sure.

Will it increase the likelihood of preventing it? I think we can be fairly assured that that is the

case. We need to improve our system of survei llance; we need not scrap it because reasonable

state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.

Do not vote to tie our hands, to deprive us of essential tools in the real war against real terrorism.

Vote yes on this proposition if you want to see a proper balance struck between the legitimate

need for surveillance and the equally legitimate need for privacy.

RG: Alexis, your three minutes.

AO: Well, Mr. Dershowitz, it sounds like we might be winning you over, at lea st with the idea of

some less surveillance. Now look, technology has enabled so much. It’s made my career

possible, it’s made so many others and with that technology, as I’ve said before, we’ve enabled a

surveillance state that is out of control. Alright? And I started this from the very beginning and I

said, look, fundamentally this is a problem because one, it affects our economic strength and ‘

economic strength is a core part of our national security. It affects the underpinnings of the very

technology th at makes the internet work, the things we’re doing, along, have huge impact on data

protection and it gives comfort to the leaders of countries that want to use the internet to spy on

their own citizens, to surveil them. This is important because upon hear ing all of those things it

still doesn’t cover the fundamental point here which is that what we are doing in the name of

security actually makes us less secure, makes us more vulnerable. Remember the example I gave

of the key, alright? That is the layperso n version of what we are doing. We are finding flaws in

the system and we are holding onto that key for ourselves, leaving every one of our homes

vulnerable.

And yes, I am from a generation that cannot imagine a world without the internet but I have a

fee ling most of you feel like the internet has become pretty indispensable. And yes, it is the place

where we go not only to start companies but to have discussions, sometimes combative ones, to

make new friends, to have relationships, to find that there are other people all over the world, all

over the worldwide web that have ideas we can benefit from and then remix and share and all of

those things are possible because we have a flat internet. Sorry, Tom Friedman, the world is not

flat but the worldwide web is and our nation s have done so much to lead the way in innovations

because every one of us as citizens had the belief that our private most thoughts were safe and

were secure.

And so what I’m saying is this: state surveillance is not acceptable in this i nternet age because

for all that we have had, all of this innovation, it can all be undone. We’re doing far more of it on

far more innocent people than we have ever done before and like I said in the past,

technologically, it was impossible and the laws ke pt us doing direct surveillance. Today, the laws

have been weakened and the technology makes it cheap and easy to gobble up all of that data

about every single one of us. And this is an unprecedented situation where surveillance

disproportionately affects innocent people and there is a technological answer but it is not what

is being done. And so I will leave you with this: I know there are good people at the NSA trying

to keep us safe; I know they have our best interests at heart. I know the surveillance s tate is full

of people who were maybe preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to

think about whether they should. Thank you.

RG: Final closing statement goes to you, General Hayden.

MH: Thank you. Well, I started out as pernicio us, picked up untruthful and untrustworthy along

the way, but apparently as a former U.S. intelligence official I’m a good storyteller, so here goes.

Talk about scare tactics. We need to run the tape sometime and count how many times Alan and

I said terror ism and how many times Glenn and Alexis said surveillance state. What do they

really mean by surveillance state? One point seven billion U.S. emails a day collected? No. That

is just not true. The surveillance state is out of control, they’re monitoring, just now Alex, every

single one of us. We’re gathering up the information on far more innocent people. I need to

know the what. It’s hard for me to counter that. What is it you think we’re doing? I love the ‘

Snowden quote. It covers your text messages, your web history, your searches, every search

you’ve ever made! Guess what? That’s Google. That’s not NSA.

Boston bombing: Tsarnaev kids visited jihadist websites and after the attack, the American

security establishment gets slapped around by its political l eadership . People are saying, how

come you didn’t know they went to jihadist websites? Because we are not allowed to monitor

internet activity of Americans or of lawful permanent residents and it’s a matter of policy that we

are not allowed to monitor your internet activity either, along with the Canadians and the

Australians and the New Zealanders . What Glenn and Alex are describing simply isn’t going on.

With regards to the Soviet Union and its being threatening, I didn’t say they were reasonable or

safe, I just said their communications were on a dedicated isolated network where ours never co -

existed. And that created a different dilemma.

With regard to oversight, Glenn mentions Judge Leon, who said that the program was ‘probably’

unconstitutional. That makes Glenn’s side one for 37 in court decisions on the constitutionality

of this matter, and oh, by the way, Judge Leon stayed his own decision. And with regard to the

three Democrats who articulated opposition to this program for both questions of civil liberties

and of effectiveness, those three were on a 15 -person committee in the Senate and those three

were out -voted consistently 12 to three.

NSA’s mantra, collect it all, doesn’t mean collect it all. They’d drown in it all if they did that.

They’d dro wn. They can’t use it all. What it means is that they want the ability to cover any

communications by any method at any time, communications of those who would do you harm.

Trust me, if what Glenn says is true were true, and if what Alexis fears is true we re true, I’d vote

for them too. Thank you.

RG: Well ladies and gentlemen, a superb debate on a complicated, important topic and we

couldn’t have done it without these four gentlemen, so a big round of applause. Bravo. And a big

thank you to our hosts toni ght who, year after year, have supported this debate, tirelessly, the

Aurea Foundation, Peter and Melanie Munk, thank you for this debate series.

Now, for a crucial part of tonight’s proceedings, which one of these two teams has been able to

sway opinion in this hall? Let’s review where the vote stood at the beginning of tonight, before

we listened to the last hour and 40 minutes of debate and conversation. So can I have the

numbers for the initial audience vote: 32% agreed with the motion, 47% disagreed a nd 21%

undecided; we then asked the percentage of you that would change your vote depending on what

you heard and we have a debate very much in play with 87% saying they’re open to changing

their vote.

Now for those of you who are watching online this deb ate is not over, we have a post -debate

analysis starting up right now on MunkDebates.com – you can share your opinions on what has

happened over the last 40 minutes with a top Reuters technology journalist, Ontario’s Privacy

Commissioner and Ron Diebert, C anada’s great cyber -expert at the Munk School of Global ‘

Affairs. For those of you in Roy Thomson Hall, you lucky 2500, you’re going to get another

paper ballot, and we’re going to force you this time, no hiding out on the sidelines, you’re going

to have to choose yes or no on the resolution. We will announce the second ballot results in the

south lobby shortly before 9 p.m., you can also purchase books by some of our debaters from this

and past debates and for those of you who want to watch the full Snowden tape, which he

provided exclusively for tonight’s debate, it’s up on our website

www.munkdebates.com/snowden .

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a marvellous debate, let’s see how it turned out.