Last week in Berlin the 2015 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence was presented to the former Technical Director of the NSA, whistleblower and tireless privacy advocate, William Binney.
A 36-year intelligence agency veteran, Bill Binney resigned from the NSA in 2001 and became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring programme he had helped develop were being used to spy on Americans. He explained that he “could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution”.
Bill remains tireless, pledging to spend the remainder of his years speaking out across the world and working to reform the gross governmental illegality and stupidity of intercepting trillions and trillions of communications of innocent people’s phone calls, emails and other forms of data. Bill states “it’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to spy on the whole world.”
The Sam Adams Associates decided to hold the ceremony in Berlin as it is currently a global hub for privacy-minded individuals — journalists, film-makers, technologists, whistleblowers and campaigners.
History has made Germany much more sensitive to the need for basic rights, such as privacy, than many other soi disant western democracies, and the disclosures of Edward Snowden, including the collusion of German intelligence agencies with the NSA as well as the bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, have caused outrage across the country.
Plus, only last year Bill Binney was invited to give evidence to the German Bundestag’s NSA Inquiry Commission.
Whistleblowers, former intelligence officers, military officers, diplomats and lawyers flew in from around the world to honour Bill Binney. The Sam Adams Associates attending the event were Ray McGovern (CIA), Todd Pierce (US military lawyer), Coleen Rowley (FBI), Elizabeth Murray (US national intelligence council), Craig Murray (UK ambassador), Katherine Gun (GCHQ), Tom Drake (NSA), Jesselyn Radack (US DoJ), David MacMichael (CIA), and myself (MI5).
We were also pleased that Edward Snowden was able to join us via live link to give a powerful speech honouring Bill Binney.
So, here is the film of a wonderfully touching ceremony, and congratulations to Bill Binney for the courage he has already demonstrated and continues to display:
Sam Adams Award Berlin 2015 from Annie Machon on Vimeo.
And here we have the text of the award citation to Bill Binney:
The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence
Presents its INTEGRITY AWARD for 2015 to:
William Binney
Know all ye by these presents that William Binney is hereby honored with the traditional Sam Adams Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder, in symbolic recognition of Mr. Binney’s courage in shining light into dark places.
Bill Binney represents the patriotic side of a duel between two unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful and ruthless state and Bill, an official who would not break his solemn oath to defend its Constitution. Like Tom Drake and Ed Snowden, he was determined to preserve his integrity, his privacy, and his personal honor.
On both sides of the Atlantic we hear the mantra: “After 9/11/2001 EVERYTHING CHANGED;” just like “everything changed” after the burning of the Reichstag on 2/27/1933. That event led many Germans into what the writer Sebastian Haffner called “sheepish submissiveness” — with disastrous consequences.
As a young German lawyer in Berlin at the time, Haffner wrote in his diary one day after the Reichstag fire that Germans had suffered a nervous breakdown. “No one saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”
What was missing, wrote Haffner, was “a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to be drawn on in the hour or trial.”
We are grateful that these traits were NOT missing in Bill Binney. Nor were they missing in Edward Snowden, whose patriotic risk-taking opened the way for Bill and his colleagues to expose the collect-it-all fanatics and the damage they do to privacy everywhere.
What Ed Snowden called “turnkey tyranny” can still be prevented. But this can only happen, if patriots like Bill Binney can jolt enough people out of “sheepish submissiveness.” Goethe understood this 200 years ago when he warned, “No one is more a slave than he who thinks himself free, but is not.”
“Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein*.
Presented this 22nd day of January 2015 in Berlin by admirers of the example set by the late CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
And finally, here are some extra interviews from the night with Bill Binney, Tom Drake, Jesselyn Radack, and Coleen Rowley:
With thanks to Berlin Moscow on Unter den Linden and the Dreger Group for hosting the event, to professional photographer Johanna Hullar for all her great pictures of the ceremony.