The last day of the Jaipur literature Festival may have not quite drawn in the numbers but the sessions proved that this edition went out with a bang. Jigyasu Joshi wraps up
Apart from being a foreign correspondent, luke Harding is also the author of several books, including Mafia State which recounts his experiences with FSB surveillance in Russia, Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy and most recently, The Snowden Files. Excerpts from the interview:
First, what do you think about SnowdenIJ Is he a hero or a villainIJ
Well, for me, Snowden is a hero but I think public opinion divides sharply depending on who you ask and what country you are in. Until four or five years ago, when Snowden came along, we didn’t know the full extent of spying by the Americans and their British friends. Now we know that that they do this on an enormous scale. They hoover up your emails, your text messages, your web searches, they can bug your iPhone, and even turn on the camera on your laptop by remote and see what you are doing in your bedroom. These are unprecedented powers of surveillance, and I think, and Snowden thought, that these kinds of powers should only be used with democratic consent. He was the guy who ripped away the curtain and revealed the nature of these things. I think he’s a hero, but he is also a hero who has paid a pretty big price for what he has done.
Have you actually met SnowdenIJ
I wrote the book with my colleague, Ewen MacAskill, who met Snowden in Moscow (he visited the school two years ago). I couldn’t meet him directly as I was kicked out of Russia. I was one of a team of journalists who looked at all the tens of thousands of documents that Snowden had revealed. We went through them in london, interpreted them and published a whole series of stories on them.
In your session you talked about freedom of information. Don’t you think that the freedom of information and spying are two different things and what Snowden did was not freedom of informationIJ
Well, there is a great story; there he was, a junior systems analyst, working for the NSA, with phenomenal computer skills, based in Hawaii. He was unhappy about what he saw, skipped off to Hong Kong with a hard disk full of top secret information, and all these journalists came to meet him. In terms of freedom of information, it’s quite interesting, because Snowden was careful about what he did. He didn’t want to destroy legitimate American intelligence operations. He thought there was a role for spying but, he felt that spying should be against bad guys: Al Qaida, Russian or Chinese leadership, rather than what it has become, which is mass surveillance of everybody, whether you are a teenager in Geneva, a granny in Norway or a militant in Pakistan. It is indiscriminate. So, he is for freedom of information, but within limits.
You wrote once that the text of the book while you were writing it on your laptop automatically started to erase. Tell us more about that.
Well this book was a complete adventure for me. One fine day I was typing and suddenly the cursor started blinking and text started deleting. I tried to save parts of it but it kept on happening. It was after one of friends wrote about it in a newspaper when it stopped. I don’t know who did it and why. I still have no clue.
How do you look at freedom of information and press freedomIJ
These are the two most important things that we are fighting for at this point of time. leaders like Putin and Trump try and suppress the truth by suppressing the freedom of information and more importantly freedom of press. But we should not succumb to such things and fight for it aggressively. People like Trump say that “media is fake” but without caring about it, we should work for putting forth the truth.
Finally, you have chosen journalism as a profession. What words of wisdom would you like to give to the aspiring journalists out thereIJ
I would like them to keep in mind two things. One, don’t expect to get rich and two it is a great profession and we want more and more people to come in, we want the tellers of different stories now more than ever.