* * * * * Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility. CART captioning and this realtime file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * *

>> AIDAN FLAX-CLARK: Hi, everybody. Thank you for being with us tonight. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark. I get to introduce tonight's conversation Barton Gellman about his new book, "Dark Mirror" and he will be speaking about the book with Emily Bell.

Bart's book in part Chronicles his control along with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in receiving the information that was leaked by Edward Snowden, but it also documents the continuing erosion of our rights to privacy, as well as the continuing enlargement of what the government deems acceptable of our civil liberties.

The book is available for sale from the library shop, which you can get to from nypl.org/shop. All of the proceeds go to benefit the New York Public Library. You can go to nypl.org/shop and purchase Bart's new book.

First of all, tonight's event is being simulcast on Zoom and Youtube. If you're watching it on Zoom, the event is being recorded there, but only the event, not you, speaking of your privacy rights. What you see on the screen is being recorded, nothing else.

Bart would love to answer your questions and he is ready to answer any difficult questions you have, so anything you would like to ask, type it in the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom app and we will make sure he sees them and he will answer as many as he is able. OK, so let's bring on Emily Bell and Bart Gellman and get to it. Again, thank you for being with us tonight. Here is one.

>> EMILY BELL: Hi, good evening.

>> AIDAN FLAX-CLARK: All right, take it away.

>> EMILY BELL: Thank you very much indeed, Aidan. I'm Emily Bell. I'm the director of the center for digital journalism, journalism school. Welcome. >> BARTON GELLMAN: Thank you. Pleasure to be here and thank you Aidan for that.

>> EMILY BELL: Yes, Bart, I was just thinking, June 11, 2020, can you remember what you were doing exactly seven years ago? [LAUGHTER]

>> BARTON GELLMAN: June 11, yeah, I was frantically working my way through a much too large pile of classified material that I got from a source I had known as Virax. I now night was Edward Snowden and by then, I had written the first story or two what would become a year- long series of stories about the NSA. I was quite overwhelmed, I would say.

>> EMILY BELL: I was just remembering that Snowden himself, who none of us knew self disclosed on June 9, so just two days into that. I have to say as somebody who has taught this in the journalism school and I knew of the characters involved from the guardian side, what a huge story it was, what a huge impact it happen

This book that you're bringing out now and I'm going to ask you in a minutes, why wait so long, "Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance," it does two things that nobody else has done so well until the many, many thousands of works that have been written about this, one of which is the way you lay out the journalistic process and the other is the way that you really elusive complex matters and make them real for people. So you were sorting through classified document, none of the issues a the time felt like, perhaps that people were going to engage with how important they were. Were you worried at any point as a journalist after you worked for months and months on the disclosures, were you worried about people were not going to get it at the point?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: I worried about that all of the time. I did not worry about a political point of view. As a mainstream reporter there are values in my story, there are -- there's news that I think is important and I want people to notice it, but I wasn't trying to elicit horror or anger. I didn't feel equal telling this story in a way that made sense in old fashioned analogue terms and that is a big reason why I wrote the book. I was dissatisfied with the daily newspaper stories and I felt like I needed a narrative and characters and the voice that you take in a book to get the story across.

>> EMILY BELL: You certainly managed that and it was a story that I feel I know very well but new things on every single page and it is beautifully told. Take us right back. This probably something you do in your sleep, it has been a why for people who haven't been engaged in the facts, but how did you first encounter this story and when did you know there was something truly, sort of important and verifiable here? >> BARTON GELLMAN: In January of 2013, we now know, reconstructing events, Edward Snowden who had been frustrated by his inability to reach Glenn Greenwald. Glenn didn't answer his e-mails and didn't know how to use the encryption that Snowden required to communicate. Snowden turned to the filmmaker Laura Poitras. I previously advised Laura on how to encrypt her own personal materials so they wouldn't be taken freely by inspectors at the border, which were happening. Laura wrote to me in January in an encrypted message and said I'm going to be passing through town, can we have a coffee there is something I need to talk to you about.

In subsequent e-mails, she did not want me to bring my cell phone with me and would like the place to be quiet, very discreet. She was contacted by someone who claimed to be a member of the intelligence community and said he had a story about surveillance that was so broad and so deep it was a threat to the republic. My first unspoken reaction was, oh, not that again. You get a lot of false tips as a reporter and there is something about the spooky world of national security and intelligence that draws out disturbed people who imagine plots and I had been given sophisticated false documents in the past, so I was very suspicious to begin with.

>> EMILY BELL: That is a wonderful part the way you're describing the meeting with Laura who is a great journalist, but you went to this and this is not enough, we have to go to another one. I think it is so interesting that the sort of cliche of the investigate journalist is meeting a shadowy figure on the bridge and passing notes. It is interesting that you and Laura are both really versed in the issue of surveillance, so she has been on the rough end of it as a reporter. How do -- were you constantly thinking at the time as a national security reporter that you were being watched or followed or did you think this was a slightly, too paranoid level of security?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: I did not think that Laura was paranoid or that she would lightly ask for special precautions. I assumed she had reason to be cautious and she did. She was -- she was using anonymous proxies and encrypted channels to talk to her source and she wanted to consult very privately about it and it made good sense.

For most of 10 years by then, I had been gradually more convinced I had to cover my digital tracks in my work, because it was all well and good to say as a newspaper reporter, as I was at the time, I'm going to protect the confidentiality of my sources, but if we're leaving our names and addresses in our digital exhaust, if we're leaving traces all over the Internet that doesn't do much good, so I had become proficient in the basic tools of privacy and security on the web.

>> EMILY BELL: I think it is fair to say that you were one of only a small number of journalists who regularly practiced that at the time and after the story broke, everyone had a PGP key and everyone started to understand.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: You're right.

>> EMILY BELL: Right, so it really did, I think personally from the field of journalism, Snowden changed a huge amount almost immediately in terms of practice. You introduced by Laura and I'm intrigued how often these characters from classical references to identify themselves. You have no idea exactly who Edward Snowden was for quite some time, is that right?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Right, I had an extensive correspondence with him, some of it was by e-mail, asynchronous and some was live, live chat over encrypted channels. We exchanged, I don't know, it had to be tens of thousands of words of back and forth in which he was trying to work out in his own mind whether he could trust me enough to give me the story. I was trying to figure out whether he was authentic, whether the story was real. He talked about a document. We never talked a lot of documents. You can imagine my surprise. I cross examined him closely about the Providence of the document, what it would say, who authored it, what their qualifications were to speak to what was happening inside of the NSA, whether the document was, not only authentic, but accurate. They are two different things.

I like to point out there was an authentic headline in the newspaper that Truman was defeated and I wanted to know if it is a real document and if the document was correct and what would the government say when they found out I had the document and so on. It went endless iterations before I saw the thing.

>> EMILY BELL: Tell us about when you state thing, so it arrived, tens of thousands of words and I'm going to go back to talk a bit about getting to know a source, but to keep us on track for the chronology, describe the momentum when you opened your encrypted mail and you saw the document.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: When I talked to Laura about this mysterious source of her, it has turned to May. It is the third week of May, I want to say and the document arrives. We decrypt it. It is a 41 page slide deck, a PowerPoint presentation about a program called Prism. Laura and I read through this, standing over the same little crappy laptop screen because we were using a burner laptop. We read through it and it had 41 slides, but it had 7,000 words of speaker notes and this was written by insiders for insiders. Nothing was explained. All kinds of acronyms were used in passing and never decoded. There were code names for the programs that were referred to, also without explanation. There was a lot of highly technical network jargon, in other words, it was not a document that you can read it once and say, aha, I understand what is going on here.

>> EMILY BELL: It is also the case that for people who are not quite so familiar with your work, maybe unlike, you know, unlike Laura and Glenn Greenwald who guarded at the time who had a deep interest in the stories, you have a deep expertise, if you like, in the national security apparatus. If anyone was going to receive this who really understood the acronyms or who was speaking and why, it was going to be you and yet, even to you it was obscure, opaque. I wonder whether to what extent were you surprised. I think sometimes when journalists are an expert, they speculate. You have a narrative speculation about, I wonder what would it look like if they were, but it sounds from what you're saying and your description in the book this was genuinely something you had not expected to see.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Well, I try really hard as my career advances to not be surprised when I don't know something because it happens all of the time. [LAUGHTER] The worst is when I imagine that I do know it all that, that is the worst surprises. Look, this thing was unique. It was a code word classified document. It was classified "above top secret" and it was contemporary. It was dated a matter of days, weeks before I read it and it described a sensitive, ongoing U.S. intelligence gathering program. It was not shocking to me that I did not understand the shoptalk of technical people who do highly technical things and have internal names for systems of enormous complexity and sophistication. I understood surveillance policy, surveillance law, I knew the history of the unlawful warrant list, domestic surveillance undertaken by the Bush/Chaney administration 10 years before, but I did not imagine I knew all there was to know about how the NSA worked. That has been a black box for a long time.

>> EMILY BELL: You were saying you received the first document, which was a 41 page PowerPoint presentation. Someone said when it was published, you knew it was authentic because only a security agency could produce such an ugly set of slides. It had authenticity about it. Something truly remarkable happened after the first document, you received more.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: I received more, right, so the next day, the day after the first document appeared and I'm still trying to grapple with that. I understand half of it and I'm trying to work out how do I come to understand the rest of it? I can't do whale normally do, which is showing it around widely and asking experts to explain it to me, because the people who know are not willing to talk to me and if they are allowed to talk to me I would put them at risk by blundering around and calling them. I would have to visit people at home, study background reading and so on. Now, while I'm still just trying to get my arms around the first document, the next one arrives and more particularly the encryption key arrives for a very large digital encrypted files for all we knew was garbage. They might have been something valuable or important, or it might have been noise. The encryption keys arrive. It is like one inside of another and we open the last one and it is folder after folder after folder, sub folder of classified documents and I started clicking through it at random and I was truly overwhelmed.

I felt, A, that something big just happened and I was fortunate to be at this journalistic moment and there was also kinds of risk now that I realized right away, I was going to have to start contending with. I knew from reading the first document that there were things in this archive that I did not think should be published and in fact, Snowden did not think should be published. I had to protect those and make sure nobody would steal those from me. I would need big-time legal advice. I would need journalistic help. I was a freelancer. I was a fellow, but it is not a journalistic enterprise and I badly needed to find my way to back to the sort of news media that I grew up in.

>> EMILY BELL: And I think that is when I talk about laying out the journalistic process of this, for those who knew, it is a fascinating challenge when somebody, you know, drops a thumb drive or sends you an encrypted key and there are 50,000 documents on the back end of it. You start to think you need a big institution behind you.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: It never happens. The thing is you wake up one day and you get a phone call out of the blue or a box of documents arrives out of the blue. You were not expecting it and it has a stupendous scoop in it that does not happen. It is a movie cliché. That is not how scoops come, we can talk about that, but this was generous.

>> EMILY BELL: It certainly ignited conspiracy theory; it is too good to be true or too bad to be true. It is too clean and sort out and it does not happen like this in real life and talking of the movie, you ended up going back -- you were out of the matrix the way "The Washington Post" who viewers will be familiar with him from hits such as "spotlight," but Marty was the editor. It is interesting in the book, just as a reporter with a huge scoop, you would think any editor would throw themselves at it a and say yes, come on in, but there are lots of reasons why it was a risk taking it to a newspaper. What are the kinds of things you have to negotiate with The Post.?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Marty baron was the editor and he was the editor for less than a year. Spent 21 years at "The Washington Post" and I wanted to go back and invite him to help me with this story, help me to sponsor this story. I had a whole long list of crazy sounding conditions. I wasn't an employee. I wasn't under his authority. I was asking for his sponsorship, but I was already deeply aware of how sensitive this material was, so I said we can't communicate about this story in the normal way that they were going to have to be a couple of editors and reporters at least at the newspaper who would learn how to communicate over encrypted channels. I was not going to hand over this document. I spoke to him just about one document on our first meeting that I would be happy to show it to him, but I was not going to transfer it to the paper's possession, any part that I thought should not be published. If we were going to work with material like this, the people who worked on it would have to have computers that were physically doctored to remove their networking hardware, so they could not accidently touch the Internet or be touched by hackers. We would are to keep the material in a locked room, in a safe there was a list of security precautions and there were hard legal questions that had to be answered about risk. There was a certainty that there would be a criminal charge and my source would be found and charged with espionage with this leak and it was probable that I would be summoned to a grand jury to testify and to provide documentation. I was not going to do that voluntarily and so I wanted The Post to commit to representing me at trial and all the way through final levels of appeal, which The Post did undertake.

There was a smaller probability; smaller possibility that I or The Post itself could be charged for publishing. That charge has never been brought against a journalist before and it was unclear whether I would be constitutional to do so, but the lawyers did not want to rule it out in a case of this sensitivity, so I had a lot to talk about with Marty. The last thing was I wanted him to hold a backup copy of the materials I had. I made an extra encrypted copy of this whole archive and I was very much worried about losing it. I was worried about an F.B.I. raid or someone stealing it. I was afraid of losing my own copy and there is obvious places to hide something that valuable and I wanted The Post to hold it because I thought it would be easier to stage a raid on a freelance guy in his apartment than it would be to break down the doors of a newsroom.

I said to Marty, I would like you to hold this. He is not going to have the encryption key, he is not going to be able to open it and I want you to hold it. "The Washington Post’s” lawyers said I can't advise you to do that and Marty took two seconds to decide I'm going to do it and he did. It was an enormous relief to me. It felt like "The Washington Post" was still the great paper I grew up with and I was being welcomed home.

>> EMILY BELL: I think that is remarkable kind of moment, because from the outside, I think there is sometimes a public perception that these things, if you have a great story, it happens easily in newsroom and that is never the case there is always stumbling and that is why you need great editors.

Going back to -- let's talk again about Snowden's source. Up to this point, you don't know anything about him. You guess he might be an older person or you haven't -- he has to reveal himself to you as a source over that period of months. There is an interesting die Willem ma, you have to know the source well enough to trust them, but you can't be an accomplice that is an important distinction. How did your relationship evolve over that time and how did you balance that tricky, I think relationship with a source of enough knowledge, but normal complicity?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: It is so interesting that you use the word accomplice because that is the word that was used to describe me by the director of national intelligence in congressional testimony at the beginning of 2014. He referred to the three journalists, Glenn, Laura, and me as Snowden's accomplices, which has a meaning in law. It alarmed me, I have to say to hear him say that because it was vetted congressional testimony. It was not something he had come up with out of the blue. He had prepared those remark in advance and had them cleared around the U.S. agency, so the U.S. government was calling me an accomplice and it is something that took care not to be.

If you think I'm thinking about breaking into the NSA stealing documents, can you help me, I'm having a math problem solving or I don't know the password, first of all, no I would not be capable of helping him. The important thing is it wouldn't help him. I couldn't be partied to breaking in there is a clear legal distinction there. It is not trafficking stolen goods or unlawful for a journalist to publish something that a source has taken unlawfully, but the journalist can't participate in the theft. Snowden didn't ask me to do that. He did, however, ask me very indirectly to assist him with his plans for getting asylum from a foreign country. He asked me to do something that would have no other purpose, no purpose for readers, no other purpose than to help introduce himself as authentic to foreign government officials and I declined to do that.

>> EMILY BELL: And again just tell us how -- when did you know he was a 29-year-old security analyst with few qualifications -- few academic qualification, kind of an extraordinary person in other ways? What was the process of discovery like?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Well, it was constrained. Snowden, well, let's say this way, Virax revealed his identity on the day that the large cache of documents arrived. The large set of documents was accompanied by a manifesto in which he explained his purposes and his beliefs. I quo this manifesto at some length in the book and at the bottom it said, you know, Edward Joseph Snowden, here is my Social Security number, here is my credentials. It did not have his date of birth, which was interesting and Laura and I did not feel free at that stage.

Now, we have all of these secrets and we're planning to write story, particularly one story together, Laura and me, but we haven't published yet and we don't want the government to know we have this stuff yet. We need to sort it out for a while, first and I was afraid if I started Googling, Edward Snowden or starting looking him up by social security number in a database, just find out his age and other pertinent things about him, that I could be giving away the game. If the government already suspected I was working on something like this or caught wind of a leak of this kind, someone could be watching and I did not want to out him as my source either, so I felt like I didn't know what was fair game. Didn't know what could be seen and not seen, so I didn't do any research on the guy for a while. I asked him a lot of questions myself, but I did not feel free to do that.

>> EMILY BELL: That's extraordinary again, it all seems -- because we're so familiar with him as him as an icon and I was -- something I didn't know was a lot of the iconic images of Snowden were taken by you from meeting with him. I didn't realize that photography was another talent, but we feel we know him very well. He has been generous with his insights and profile as a source. So thinking back to really you being in a tunnel of, sort of real code of silence in terms of not wanting to give the game away, put him in danger, etc. So when you actually found out who he was, that was really kind of the documents publication, disclosure happened in a short space of time after a long period of back and forth and establishing credentials. Did it change how you felt about Snowden when you found out he was 29? It feels, I spoke to the journalist who was sent out to establish it and you said he is the same age as my son. He is a young man. How did you feel when you discovered the details about him?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: There were so many jaw-dropping things happening at once that I can't remember whether this further astonished me, but I was surprised to learn he was so young. I had come to imagine who I was talking to. I never heard his voice or seen his image, but when you exchange tens of thousands of words with someone in live chats, you can see his thoughts forming in real time. You can see it. It only took him 15 seconds to write the reply and it is quite eloquent. He seemed to know a lot of things. He had a way of expressing himself that Laura and I assumed he was middle age and fairly senior person in the intelligence establishment, so yeah, I was quite surprised he was young.

>> EMILY BELL: So just in the few minutes that we have before we open it for questions and do hard questions, I want to talk about the other aspect of the book that is sort of the unpacking of exactly what it means to live in surveillance state? How America was operating as a surveillance state, how it alienated you from many of your sources in the national security apparatus? Something that occurred to me as I was reading it, how much has changed or it feels like a great deal has changed in the past seven years? Has it really? I mean there are things you mentioned popular culture was shifted by Snowden, what really changed once the disclosures were made and was it a result of the story or different of external pressures? >> BARTON GELLMAN: I think there are a lot of overlapping forces that bring about change starting with Snowden, but it has all of these effects, the disclosures he made shifted public opinion and that shifted political winds. Congress passed legislation that reformed some of the collection practices in particular; Congress passed a law that forbade NSA to collect records of the telephone calls we were making, one of the shocking things. The big picture, shocking part of the story, after 9/11, the boundaries completely shifted. The permissible lines changed entirely, so there are things that Americans grown used to thinking there are things that the government could not do, like spy on them and they shifted in secret, so the best informed citizen or public interest group or lobbyist, in many cases members of Congress even the best informed were unable to know what had happened.

The shock was these things changed in secret and political pressures were brought to bear and Congress did put some restraint on the NSA after that. The same citizens were also consumers, and they created demand for privacy and security in their digital lives, so companies who had no particular privacy model there was nobody in the business of selling private security systems. It was not in demand and people did not have consciousness of it. They took it for granted, but when the stories broke and one in particular that I wrote, I think made a big difference here.

The story said that the NSA was going overseas and breaking into the private fiber optic cable links that connected data centers of Google and yahoo and Microsoft overseas, so they have a gigantic global infrastructure. A data center will fill many, many city blocks. It has its own power plant and sort of an "Indiana Jones" style warehouse full of servers and they are connected by thousands of miles of cable. They are not the Internet. They are privately owned by Google. The NSA was breaking into those and the Internet companies went nuts. They were extremely surprised and distressed to learn that they were vulnerable in this ways. Because they were pressed by their customer or their consumers who wanted security and privacy, in particular overseas where almost all of their growth was going to be, European countries for example were demanding privacy.

Google spent tens of millions of dollars to thwart the intelligence gathering authorities of its own government and Microsoft and yahoo, which resisted encrypting and now if you get online, it is easy to forget when you browsed around the web, you were not seeing a padlock icon in your browser bar for almost any site. Most of the Internet, you know, all of the new sites, all of the commerce sites, all of the social networks this stuff was all unencrypted. It was traveling naked data and now there is an encrypted link between you and your computer and the server serving you and that makes it harder for the NSA to make collection in bulk of high volumes in communication. They can still break into any link it want, but it can surveil anyone, but it can't surveil everyone like it used to.

>> EMILY BELL: It was a revelation to me, it was the first time that I was convinced, maybe I trust you too much, but I was convinced that Google and yahoo didn't know it was happening, because in the stories at the time there was a feeling of they are saying we're shocked, and we had no idea. You lay out how to showing how this was happening to somebody who worked for Google, genuinely shocked.

It also made me think about privacy and right to privacy and I want to know what you think about how people think about the state versus corporations, because one of the outcomes of Snowden was corporations tighten their security and yet, post to 2016, particularly Cambridge analytica and the heat is on the big tech companies. Are we sort of looking in the wrong place or has the threat to our privacy tipped in a way?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Yeah, well, I have been known to trip into the wrong rabbit hole from time to time. I think you don't need to choose between concern about privacy when it comes to government surveillance and concern about privacy when it comes to the commercial market for data, when it comes to the original sin of the Internet as a term I did not coin. The idea that you trade all of the data about yourself for some service, that you're not the customer of most of these companies, you're the product being sold for advertisers that is a big problem it is not the problem I was tackling in this book.

>> EMILY BELL: Right, I want to talk as well about something that you get to the end of the book, which is many of the things that Snowden's disclosures were aimed at stopping slide into authoritarianism, judicial reach by the state, it kind of happened anyways, but in ways we could not have predicted in 2013 and we have seen all over the world there has been a real change in political temperature.

Post Trump, one of the points you make in the book, all of this apparatus was assembled by the state on the grounds that everybody believes the state would behave ultimately in the best interests of its citizens. In Trump, we have a case that suggests that might not be so, what does the NSA and the intelligence agencies that have been so denigrated once loved by the President, now feel about the power that they have or the power they potentially invested in perhaps an unstable actor?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: I wouldn't have predicted this. I found it fascinating that when I went around in the Trump era to talk to some of the senior national security officials who had been so angry at me because I wrote the Snowden stories that their thinking had shifted a bit with passage of time. James Clapper who was the director of national intelligence and called me an accomplice, which meant I should be brought up on charges. >> EMILY BELL: Criminal.

>> BARTON GELLMAN: By the way, still defends that language to this day, agreed to come meet me at a C. I.A. diner in north Virginia, which turned out to be a three-hour breakfast and I reproduced the whole conversation and the scene in the book. There are things that he defends always the way he did and he is no fan of Snowden. Snowden made one central point that Clapper found himself almost involuntary beginning to get soft on and Snowden's phrase was turnkey tyranny. He said it was so powerful and risky to build it. You might trust one person but you don't trust the next. Clapper did not trust John. He thought he was a threat to legal and political norms and he was not sure he wanted a guy like that to have his hands on the apparatus.

>> EMILY BELL: So I'm going to go to Q&A, though I want to insert some of my own questions in here as well. So there is a question here, before you received the decryption keys for the second document, what did you think was in the large file? Did Snowden explain what he intended to provide to you before you received it?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Snowden was very good at dissimulation and deflection and he would talk about what he wanted to talk about. We would start to ask questions about the file called architecture materials and it was a gigantic gigabyte of no known file type. If I looked at it with an editor, it was characters. I have no idea what was in it and he gave no preparation that there would be a large cache of documents coming at once.

>> EMILY BELL: Another question from that, the most troubling revelations from your perspective in the documents, you said there was jaw-dropping moment after jaw dropping moment, if you have to pick out things, I know in the book you say there are stories that were important that you did not get to at the time and if you look back and think, what were the troubling things in the cache, what would they be?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: As time went on, I worked the hardest to delve into stories about the impact of NSA operations overseas on domestic U.S. privacy, that the whole conceptional architecture of the NSA, which when you're spying overseas, you're spying on foreigners that was no longer true. The Internet destroyed that, because the Internet does not respect sovereign borders in anyway. An e-mail from the East Side to the New York will pass through Ireland because Google has a large data operation there and it uses globalized load bouncing and backups and Internet content gets broken into tiny little packets and takes their way around the Internet and so on. Basically, if you dip into some big high volume pipe of data, you're going to find Americans in it. The NSA handles that if you collect any Americans that way that is incidental to our purpose, which means we did not do it on purpose. It does not mean accidental. It does not mean inadvertently. It does not mean unwelcome. Huge volumes of Americans are getting scooped up by targeting foreigners overseas and the rules about how that data is treated is complex and in my own view as a citizen inadequate to protect privacy.

>> EMILY BELL: A great question here that is a hard question. The question reads, I wonder if "The Washington Post" would agree now to such a story as companies with Amazon has ties with the intelligence agency and the U.S. government. I would phrase that as would you go to The Post now with those begin there is a change of ownership?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: Look, when Bezos bought "The Washington Post," I was simultaneously happy for the paper that it would have financial backing, but worried. Rich people don't buy toys without wanting to play with them and I worried he would play with it too much. I am not an employee of the "Washington Post." I have no direct stake in this. I have no constraint on what I'm able to say about this. Everything I know from talking to sort of working levels at the "Washington Post" in the newsroom and talking to the top brass tells me he has not interfered in anyway. If I checked it out and got a report like that, yes, I would go to The Post with this story. I have no doubt in my mind that Bezos would publish these stories. When he was part way through publishing the stories. In fact, he hosted a small dinner for the people who were the key people doing the coverage on these stories to celebrate the work, so yes, he would.

>> EMILY BELL: So another hard question, you're doing very well with the audience members. What are Mr. Gellman's points of Julian Assange waiting for trial in England. I think sort of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden often, because if you -- the architecture of whistleblowing, leaking, et cetera, this is a question that is often linked. How do you see that question?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: There are so many levels to it. Assange and Snowden are very different even though they come from, to some extent the same world. Snowden does not approve of everything that Assange did or everything that WikiLeaks did. In fact, the handle he chose was a little bit of a tweak at Assange. Assange in his youth has a hacker adapted meant liar. Snowden's meant the opposite. He did not want the documents that he stole to made publicly entirely on the web, so he would have given it to WikiLeaks. Assange wanted them at WikiLeaks and he wanted to perform the filtering and the editorial roles that journalists traditionally perform that is the opposite of what Assange wanted when it came to data. Nevertheless, I'm extremely troubled by one aspect, at least of the case the United States against Julian Assange. In three of the charges, three of the counts of the indictment against him, the crime consist of publication. It literally that is the words of the charge that he violated the espionage act by publishing for all of the world to see the following document. That claim has never been brought against anyone. It is not to say I want to take a part in whether or not Julian Assange is a journalist. Journalists don't have special First Amendment rights. Everyone has them. But what Assange has been charged with here has never been charged against anyone ever and if he is convicted and the conviction is upheld of espionage for publication then "The Washington Post," Buzzfeed and everyone else who writes about national security will be equally at risk.

>> EMILY BELL: This is a broad, very broad question, what made you decide to become a journalist?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: The, sort of the smart ass answer because I was a bad junior varsity gymnast in high school and I quit the team and went to work for the paper. There is a long story, but the short one is it became editor of the high school paper. The principal did not like something we were printing and she seized the copies and burned them and I brought a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court and so I was fairly well committed early on to giving a crap about this sort of thing, so one thing lead to another and now it is the college paper and the summer internships and it seemed natural to keep going.

>> EMILY BELL: So clearly the perfect student. I can only imagine the principal's reaction to that. I can imagine, so we have a few more questions, I think there is time. Again, you and I both have a number of children, more like young adults these days, but how can parents of young children introduce the idea of privacy to their naive children?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: So the thing is, I think in age-appropriate ways, it is not as hard as you would think to do that, because children learn relatively early on that some things are private and some things aren't. They have their own secrets or let's say you get into the age of teenagers. A lot of people think teenagers will post anything on Instagram or we used to say it about Facebook. They just give it all away. They say things in public that we would never say. High school and college students have lots of secrets and they want control over who knows what. They true try to use the privacy controls in the apps, but they are not good at it, because they are designed to be hard to use, actually they are designed to be impossible to use. They will be speaking in code, they will be quoting song lyrics, so their parents and principal won't know what they are talking about, but their friends do. They want control, whether their parents know, whether their teachers know, they have a sense of privacy, the important thing is to teach them how without knowing it their privacy can be violated. I taught my own kids to limit the information they provide and the stuff they download and ask them to use more software protecting, use duck, duck go instead of Google, because it is a search engine that does not spy on you.

>> EMILY BELL: I found the worse when they are 13 and 14, you know Snapchats, snaps don't disappear is very powerful in the discussion about where do they go. I have never seen a 14-year-old's boy face pale quite so quickly as they are sitting on their servers somewhere. I have tile for a couple more questions. These are questions, which is you may not want to disclose this, do you still have access to the documents? Does you The Post still have access to the documents and do you think there are more stories in there that should be reported or is the rest legitimately secret?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: There are limits to how much I want to answer that question, but I still could have access to the documents, but they are in cold storage, which means they are even more deeply protected than before and they are not set up in a way that I can get at them quickly. The Post no longer has access to them. We're no longer actively working on stories. I'm not saying everything left in there is a deep, dark secret. A lot is bureaucratic and technical and would be pointless and possibly damaging to reveal. I was interested in stories that raised hard public policy questions, should they be allowed to do this, what are the boundaries between government and their own citizens? Do we understand the implications of that program and so on, but just, you know, 10,000 pages of network maps or budget documents there is a lot in there that is boring and there are a lot of things that should not be published, because they will give away ongoing operations against adversaries that would be an intelligence target, if you believe there is a purpose for intelligence. These would qualify and I'm not going to publish something that blows an operation like that.

>> EMILY BELL: We just have one more minute to go before we wrap up. I want to ask you about Edward Snowden himself. Are you still in touch with Edward? Have you seen him recently?

>> BARTON GELLMAN: I haven't visited him in Moscow for several years now. I went to see him twice and I did video chat with him when we talked about less sensitivity subjects. he gradually loosened up so he was willing to do video. I told the story in the book, I show the story in the book scene by scene, when he agreed to come with me virtually and meet the cast of the TV series "Homeland" and talk about real-world spy things with him. I had these interactions with him, not long ago, but we're not in touch all of the time.

>> EMILY BELL: He got Claire Danes to delay her flight. We're up for time, I would say thank you very much, Bart, you have been terrific and insightful on this. If you're interested in these issues, buy the book. It is a really, really great read, "Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance" and I hope everyone stays safe and everyone stays cool and don't forget to encrypt your communications and have, I hope a safe and happy summer. Thanks very much, indeed for the team at the New York Public Library for hosting this. >> BARTON GELLMAN: Thank you, Emily. I'm glad you did it and thank you from me to the library. This has been a great event. Thanks.