On Oct. 7, Edward Snowden spoke to Georgetown students in Lohrfink Auditorium while sitting 4500 miles away in an undisclosed location in Russia. The discussion was moderated by Kevin Bankston, director of the Open Technology Institute.
Bankston used the recent Yahoo scandal, where Yahoo admitted to constructing a program to scan user emails and share them with the government, to kick off the discussion. Through metaphors and colloquial explanations to keep technological outsiders engaged, Snowden critiqued U.S. political structures and governmental relationships.
“We have an issue that goes beyond technology,” Snowden said. “We should not be expected as non-experts, as citizens, to be expecting our public officials to be lying in a very careful way.”
He made it clear, however, that this wasn’t a criticism of the officials themselves. He maintained that in most cases they are doing their best at their jobs. .
“These aren’t moustache twirling villains sitting at their desk trying to figure out how to destroy democracy,” Snowden said.
From there, Bankston moved on to pop-culture: Hollywood’s portrayal of Snowden’s life in Snowden, which came out on Sept. 16. Lecture Fund Executive Board chair D.J. Angelini (MSB ‘17) cited the movie specifically as a reason to bring Snowden to campus.
“We thought with the release of his movie this fall coupled with the upcoming election, it was just the right time to have him address students,” Angelini said.
On that topic, Snowden had one decisive response.
“If my story is screwed up, I don’t care about that so much because I don’t care about my reputation,” Snowden said. “If you want a documentary, go watch Citizenfour. If you want absolute fact, watch Citizenfour.”
Citizenfour, a documentary about Snowden’s release of documents to the media and their subsequent release to the world, came out on Oct. 24, 2014, and was the first complete picture of Snowden’s motives and how international media would interpret the leaks. It brought a face to a national security crisis, someone to be blamed or thanked. The Lecture Fund was able to bring that same face to campus.
For Mizraim Belman (SFS ‘20), this was an opportunity that gave new insight into someone who had previously been only a figment of news stories.
“It [gave] me a new perspective on why I view him as someone admirable,” Belman said. “I felt it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and it would allow me to get his perspective on his current situation.”
Last year, technical difficulties delayed a student conversation with Snowden and limited communication to audio, but this year a team of audiovisual professionals ensured that Georgetown would be prepared to support the stream.
“The first challenge was to make sure that we had the systems in place to deliver quality audiovisual services so we could avoid any of the technological difficulties we experienced last semester,” Angelini said.
For Angelini, that was a relief not only in solving tech problems, but because the Lecture Fund had been aiming for this goal for about a year.
“We knew about 15 minutes after the first event that Georgetown would benefit from hearing him again,” Angelini said. “He’s such a compelling speaker and his area of focus is such a relevant topic.”
Snowden, however, seems to wish everyone would leave the “compelling speaker” part out and focus on the topic. As the last moderated question, Bankston asked Snowden what it was like to be depicted as a character both by the news media and now by a major film. Bankston asked what it was like to be so essentially tied to a story.
“Despite clinging to this desperate principle of ‘look guys, talk about anything but me,’ they kept talking about me anyway,” Snowden said, “The difference was, my side didn’t get to have the same voice.”
With Snowden’s face looming twenty feet tall over an audience of young adults he summed up his fame.
“The media doesn’t tell stories without faces,” Snowden said. “The human face is how they make a narrative.”
