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Christopher Lane/AP for The New Yorker
NEW YORK - Edward Snowden knew when there was no going back.
That moment came clear to Snowden when Laura Poitras, the filmmaker for “Citizenfour,” the long-awaited Snowden documentary, turned on the camera to chronicle Glenn Greenwald’s cross-examination of the former National Security Agency contractor as they sat together in a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013.
“We both immediately stiffened and froze up,” Snowden told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. “We looked at each other, and it was very clear there was no going back. The only way we could go from this point is forward.”
Snowden, responsible for one of the most significant intelligence leaks in U.S. history, was speaking in a video interview with Mayer in front of a sold-out crowd in midtown Manhattan and thousands more watching online on Saturday during The New Yorker Festival.
Despite being effectively on the run from U.S. authorities, these talks have now become commonplace for Snowden almost 17 months removed from the publication of the first leaks. As well as being one of the most wanted men in America, he’s also become one of the most wanted interviews on the festival circuit this year.
In fact, the Snowden interview, along with a video talk with Ai Weiwei, the artist and activist openly critical of the Chinese government, helped solidify the rise of activism on the culture and festival scene and the role it has played in 2014.
When speaking through the video feed, Snowden, who has made his virtual talks into sold-out events at festivals and cultural settings such as South By Southwest (SXSW) and TED in the last year, looked even more comfortable in his role as the virtual voice of privacy and surveillance. Wearing all black, he acknowledged he hasn’t thought about his place in history, but looked to the past to help stabilize his own unstable and uncertain future
“I’ve told the government again and again in negotiations, you know, that if they’re prepared to offer an open trial, a fair trial in the same way that Dan Ellsberg got, and I’m allowed to make my case to the jury, I would love to do so,” said Snowden, referring to the former U.S. military analyst responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers and his 1973 trial. “But to this point, they’ve declined.”
Though chunks of the talk centered on well-covered parts of his story such as process for making the intelligence leak possible and what his life has been like since then, Snowden turned his attention to “dangerous services,” such as Dropbox, Facebook and Google.
“Get rid of Dropbox,” he told Mayer, suggesting that users look into competitors like SpiderOak that “protect the content of what you’re sharing.” “It doesn’t support encryption, it doesn’t protect your private files.”
Snowden called for a reform of government policies on privacy and surveillance.
“When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right,’” said Snowden, passionately. “You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve [gotten] to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights.”
And while Snowden offered some praise for Facebook and Google for improving security, he still urged people not to use them. (As TechCrunch pointed out, there was a Google logo above Snowden’s face as he was explaining his skepticism for people using Google.)
Before Snowden’s first virtual talk at SXSW in March, his legal team decided that it was time to reintroduce himself to the public, beginning a wave of public-speaking engagements both online and in person.
“This is the way exile can be mitigated,” Ben Wizner, Snowden’s legal adviser and director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told Forbes during SXSW. “He may not be able to be here in person but his voice can be here.”
But Snowden wasn’t the only high-profile activist to take the big screen. Speaking with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, Ai, one of the most influential avant-garde artists in Beijing’s history, offered an apology for having to pre-record the talk for the popular session.
“I feel sorry we cannot be in the same moment with the audience,” Ai said. “I’m being watched…My phone is tapped, computer is searched. They know exactly what I’m doing.”
Described by Osnos as someone whose art and activism “became increasingly indistinguishable,” Ai, who remains under heavy surveillance for his criticism of the Chinese government and is prohibited from traveling to other countries, walked through the large, open white room that serves as the headquarters of his ideas. Recently, Ai’s work made its way back to the U.S. this month with his “@Large” exhibit at Alcatraz in San Francisco, which, according to an Alcatraz spokesman, “raises questions about freedom of expression and human rights that resonate far beyond this particular place.” The seven-installation exhibit features a colored dragon to represent personal freedom and Lego-block portraits of more than 170 figures jailed for their beliefs.
“Lego is the perfect tool for [Vincent] Van Gogh or Rembrandt [van Rijn],” said Ai, with a big grin. “They’re not living in this time, and had to use brushes.”
Any conversation around Ai and his work will inevitably return to the “Citizens’ Investigation” of the 8.0 earthquake that rocked Sichuan province in May 2008, killing 70,000 people. The investigation focused on compiling data of all the thousands of children who died. When he attempted to testify for a fellow investigator involved in the “Citizens’ Investigation,” Ai was beaten by police, causing him to have cerebral hemorrhage and emergency brain surgery. Later, he would release an exhibit in Munich, featuring 5,000 children’s backpacks that spelled out, “She lived happily on this earth for seven years.”
“They’re intentionally trying to forget,” Ai told Osnos about Chinese culture. “They’re intellectually shy, or avoid discussions. They use tragedy or difficulty as some kind of excuse to avoid any moment for philosophical discussion or aesthetic discussion.”
Ai, a student of China’s social history, joked to Osnos about the Chinese government’s outlook on him, describing it as “very tolerant, great patience, very considerate.”
“All they want is me not talking like this with you,” he told Osnos. He added later: “The whole society is like sand, and you cannot build on sand. This is really a crisis [for]…the foundation of what they’re trying to build or maintain stability. With today’s technology, you can Google whatever, and you can get any kind of ideas from anybody. What [China’s] doing is going backwards. That will damage them.”
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