After WikiLeaks released a trove of U.S. embassy cables to the press in 2010, Joe Lieberman, who was then the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, imposed a weird and completely unjustified financial embargo on the organization by pressuring Amazon, PayPal, and all the major credit card companies to drop WikiLeaks from their sites so they could no longer get donations through these convenient channels. I went to the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and said, “Hey, we’re a nonprofit. Let’s create a path through us to help out Julian Assange, because he’s doing the stuff that we’ve always wanted to do.”
At that point, EFF was twenty-five years old. More than half the employees were lawyers, and they all felt there was a significant chance that we’d be hauled into court for aiding and abetting Julian Assange. The chief counsel’s response to me was, “I’d much rather be defending you than having somebody defend me.”
She then said, “Why don’t you do it personally?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “You’re fearless. You take the hit and we’ll defend you. We’ll be with you all the way.” I said, “I think people may have a lot of respect for me, but if I’m going to set up a merchant banking account and ask people to start plunking hundreds of thousands of dollars into it on my word that it’s going through to WikiLeaks—that seems like a bit of a long shot.”
I rolled the idea around in my head for a while. Then I thought, if I had some other people join me who were equally gutsy, then it would probably become a lot easier. The first person I called was Daniel Ellsberg. Dan loved the idea and was delighted to join me in cofounding a new foundation that would help get money to WikiLeaks. We then added Trevor Timm, Rainey Reitman, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Xeni Jardin, and John Cusack to our board of directors.
Originally, we intended the Freedom of the Press Foundation to be a first-of-its-kind crowd funding mechanism. We copied an astonishingly clever donation method so no one could tell how much money was actually going to WikiLeaks. The person giving the money knew, but it would be extremely hard to trace it because there were three other news organizations who were also beneficiaries.
Not long after we had done this, I was in London with my girlfriend, and we both spent the better part of an afternoon and early evening with Julian Assange in the Frontline Club. It’s the kind of place where tweedy intellectuals with leather elbow patches and meerschaum pipes once would have congregated. Although I had never met Julian before, he had apparently known about me since he had been in knee pants, and gave me what I would call a fair modicum of respect. At the time, he was also pitching me to bring in the EFF to help support WikiLeaks by giving him a lot of money (which I, of course, was already inclined to do), and this was definitely another factor in the way he treated me.
Nonetheless, throughout the course of our conversation, Julian kept his gaze fixed directly on my girlfriend. He kept looking at her in the way someone does when he means to form a relationship of some sort. I didn’t really mind and, to her great credit, my girlfriend was totally amused by this. Fortunately for both Julian and myself, he was one of those people who fell into a category where I never really asked myself how much I actually respected him personally.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation then began funneling money to WikiLeaks on a fairly regular basis. This went on for months, and my best guess would be that we transferred around $100,000 to him in the first year.
Unlike the way I felt about Julian, it was really swell to find myself working with Ed Snowden, because in my entire life, I have never met a human being whom I have come to respect more when I’m in his digital presence.
I kept in contact with Ed through the Internet, and every sentence we exchanged felt really deep. In 2014, I hosted an event called “A Conversation Across Cyberspace” at the Personal Democracy Forum in an auditorium at NYU. Ed appeared on a huge screen from Moscow before a large and appreciative crowd.
I cherished every moment I spent with Ed because I was so impressed by the clarity of his mind. Listening to Ed Snowden talk about why he had decided to reveal the unbelievable level of completely unwarranted secret surveillance that the U.S. government had been carrying out on its own citizens was like listening to pure spring water running through a mountain brook.
While it is fair to characterize Ed as the Daniel Ellsberg of his generation, my feelings about him don’t really have much to do with that. It’s more about his incredibly deep understanding of principle, as well as how truly difficult it was for him to do what he did. I think Ed has done more to protect the individual civil liberties of those in America than any other single person. I know Dan Ellsberg would tell you the exact same thing.
Part of what had fired Ed up in the first place was that there were a lot of people within the intelligence agencies who were increasingly comfortable with how stupid and incompetent the nature of America’s intelligence gathering system really was.
As usual, it was all just about economics, in the sense that collecting and keeping every last bit of information that found its way into this huge system was a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to refine and filter it. The real question was whether the information was relevant, but determining that would also have been incredibly expensive.
Although there were many people who felt Ed was a dreadful traitor, I thought he was the least traitorous person I had ever met. One of the people who completely disagreed with me about this was General Wesley Clark. After having served as the Supreme Allied Commander for NATO in Europe and retiring from the military as a four-star general, he had won the Oklahoma state Democratic primary for president in 2004 only to then withdraw from the race and endorse John Kerry.
When I met Wesley Clark for the first time at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2013, he was sixty-eight years old and having one of the most Technicolor midlife crises I had ever seen. He was there after having left his wife of thirty-six or so years, and had begun keeping company with a really sexy thirty-year-old Mongolian woman who was a veteran Burner, and so they were there together.
At one point, I asked Wesley Clark about Ed Snowden and he said, “I think Ed Snowden has been the greatest traitor in American history since Benedict Arnold.” And I said, “General, we can argue all night about whether or not Ed is a traitor, but the fact is that Benedict Arnold himself was absolutely loyal to his king, whom he had never renounced.” That shut Clark right up. My point was that by doing what he had done, Ed Snowden had, in fact, been truly loyal to his country.
At the Freedom of the Press Foundation, we have a sizable staff, and among the things we’ve developed is an open-source software platform called SecureDrop, which makes it possible for any standard journalistic outlet to bring leaks in over the transom and then publish them with an absolute assurance of anonymity. I consider this one of the most important things I have ever done in my life. We are now setting up a whole new layer of civilian communications with the kind of encryption that will make it essentially invisible.
To date, about $1.5 million to $2 million has come into the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The funding is ongoing, and I think this will loom ever larger in public consciousness as we proceed ever deeper into the era of rampant Trumpism.
SecureDrop itself was originally designed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen, who called it DeadDrop. The platform was launched as StrongBox by the staff of the New Yorker in 2013. We then took it over and have since helped to install it at the Associated Press, the Guardian, the New York Times, the New Yorker, USA Today, ProPublica, the Washington Post, and about twenty-four other organizations.
What makes all this even more meaningful to me is that in 1996, I spoke to a middle school class at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois. Aaron Swartz was one of the kids in the class, and I still have a very strong memory of him. Even then, Aaron was already the person he would turn out to be.
The two of us didn’t interact directly very much that day, but Aaron was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame at the same time I was in 2013. His father was there to accept the induction for him, and I said, “Did Aaron ever talk about that encounter he and I had?” And his father said, “His life was different after that.” When I spoke to his class that day, Aaron was ten years old.
In 2011, Aaron was arrested on charges of breaking and entering after he connected a computer to the MIT network and downloaded academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was facing thirty-five years in jail and a fine of $1 million.
After Aaron declined a plea bargain that would have put him in a federal prison for six months, his lawyer submitted a counteroffer that the prosecution rejected. Two days later, Aaron hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was twenty-six years old.