Bill Scannell: Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6585_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412282145_-_inside_field_station_berlin_teufelsberg_-_bill_scannell.html

Of all the NSA's Cold War listening posts, their intelligence facility on top of Berlin's Teufelsberg was their most secretive.

Bill Scannell

Bill: We know,

and we know they know.

And they know, we know they know.

And in turn, we know they know we know they know.

Except until quite recently

us - we, we mortals didn't know they knew.

They knew!

Until Mr. Edward Snowden let us know he knew.

*laughter*

Wether we call it evesdropping or spying

or signals intelligence -

the very nature of electronic monitoring

has radically evolved over the past few decades.

And we are still trying to wrap our monkey brains

around what it all means.

Let's begin at the beginning.

We're here to talk about Field Station Berlin.

And anyone who's been to Berlin

has looked up at the skyline

and somewhere between the Funkturm and the Fernsehturm,

has seen a vaguely phallic shaped wide-ish structure

silhouetted against Berlin's sleight gray sky.

It's abandoned now.

The only things that live there now

are ghosts and untold secrets.

It was my home for two years in the 1980s

and as I stand before you today

I still don't quite understand how and why I ended up there.

But I can tell you

that if I hadn't started there,

I certainly wouldn't have ended up here.

So bear with me

and let's zen-navigate our way back in time

and enter that strange building.

*laughter*

*applause*

Officially it was a radar station

but Berlin has known better

they called it the "große Ohr" -

"Big Ear".

I'm a lucky man.

I now have the coolest job in the world.

I get to travel around the planet

as one of the few security experts in public relations,

putting up buyers, fixing people's problems

and launching and developing their companies.

I'm a PR cypherpunk.

There's really no career path for what I do

but if I had to start somewhere,

it had to be my completely accidental

unplanned career as an intelligence officer

working for the National Security Agency.

And not just as any random analyst

but as a US army signals intelligence analyst

at Field Station Berlin,

at the height of the cold war.

I had never even planned on joining the army -

but Ronald Reagan had done an excellent job

in destroying economic opportunity for all but the very rich

and, thus -

*applause*

nice round for Ronny!

And for those of us straight out of college,

there was nothing to do out there.

I was once rejected for a job as a waiter

because I didn't have a graduate degree.

So, my life choices came down to moving back home

with my parental units,

comitting suicide

- oh, it's this way, right? -

or joining the army.

Really.

*applause*

And so that's how I found myself

in a US army uniform, studying russian

at the defense language institute in Monterey, California.

It's important to remember that the National Security Agency

was and is primarily a military agency.

You should look at it as a fifth branch of the US military.

Its head has always been a two or three star general

and while its budget has always been several orders of magnitudes greater than that of

the CIA,

it's always spend its money on equipment rather than people.

Running a global intelligence network

required a lot of cheap labour,

and we soldiers, airmen and seamen

were the worker bees that collected and processed the pollen

before sending it back to the mother hive

at Fort Meed, Maryland.

Thank god I don't have to look at that picture.

So after learning the language du jour, you would be shipped off

to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas,

where the only things to do besides learning the dark gods of cryptanalysis

was the occasional Armadillo race

and the regular consumption of margaritas and nachos.

Lots of tequila.

So enough about me,

let me tell you a little more about me -

because I found myself after all of this

landing at Tegel airport on a Pan Am jet

in what was then West Berlin.

You could tell from the flying in from Frankfurt

that this was no ordinary place to be living.

For once you hit the inter-german border the plane dropped drastically to about 3,000 feet

and the flight attendants knew exactly when to scoop up the glassware

which was almost to the minute of when your ears exploded from the rapid drop in airpressure.

The air-transit agreements with the soviets dated from the late 40s

so... that's how they flew.

Now without exhuming all the whitened bones of the cold war

but just so we know what we're talking about -

I was working on the second floor of that phallic shaped,

top secret intelligence facility,

located on a mountain of World War II rubble

which was the highest point in Berlin,

which was in the middle of a forrest

in the city of two million people

surrounded by a concrete wall with guard towers and machine gun nests at regular intervals

which was in turn surrounded by 23 soviet motorised riffle brigades and tank regiments

and not to mention a very large, very well armed East German military -

the NVA.

There were three roads in, three air corridors out

and the duty train ran once a day.

I was fresh out of college, had just graduated from an intelligence school

within the army I never wanted to join

and I knew how to say:

"Don't shoot, I know secrets"

in several languages

*laughter*

So, welcome to Field Station Berlin!

*applause*

It's difficult to explain just how hard it is to even talk about working at such a place.

In its day, Teufelsberg - the devil's hill -

was one of the most secretive intelligence facilities in the entire world.

And the Feds really put the fear of god into you about the penalties,

the severe penalties, that would result if you ever told stories out of school.

This makes it difficult for me even now

a quarter of a century later,

to talk about my experiences.

You know what --

the cold war is long over, and I know a lot of you were born

after the soviet Union collapsed.

But I feel on pretty safe ground talking about this for one good reason:

and his name is Jim Hall.

Meet Jim!

Jim got to Field Station Berlin just a few months before I did.

He too was an analyst.

And Jim was a pretty friendly guy

he used to come up and pay me a visit

and talked to the other analysts about what we were up to.

And I would go down and I would hang out with him at section in Field Station Berlin

where he was busy tracking soviet Spetsnaz units,

you know, the special forces.

And Jim was always good for a drink and a laugh.

And a couple of years after I left

he was busted for espionage and treason.

It turns out that Jim was found with a duffle bag full of cash

in the trunk of a very nice Mercedes

because Jim had been selling secrets to the Russians for a very long time.

He went to jail for 30 years or so

and anything I could possibly tell you,

he sold to the soviets a long time ago.

*laughter*

Because we knew, they knew that we knew they know that we knew

and if you're wondering why this is the first time anyone

has ever given a serious talk about the inner workings of Teufelsberg

-- this talk should give you a pretty good idea why.

Let me take you into the compound.

We called it the hill, and I worked on the hill

for a little over two years.

At any one time, there'd be about 200 people working up there

24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

I celebrated new years there in 1984.

A bunch of us went up to the fifth floor and looked out on the city

awash in the firworks at midnight.

You could even see the borders between East and West Berlin -

and not just because of the wall and the illuminated death strip,

but because the firework celebrations stopped, where the wall began.

In the beginning, as I understand it,

Field Station Berlin was just a collections point,

where signals were intercepted and recorded

and then the tapes were send back to Fort Meed for processing.

And sometimes the backlog would get severe and it would take months

before the tapes would be listened to.

An old story on the hill says that

what brought about real change to Field Station Berlin

was the fact that we had advanced warning about the building of the Berlin wall

but because the tape containing this intelligence was listened to almost 6 months later,

it was ultimately too late.

Construction had already begun.

So from the 60s on, there was an early warning element to our operations.

By the time I got there, we not only had operators rolling up on frequencies to record them

but actively listening in and making notations.

These reporting were then sent off to the processing shop

where the scanners would transcribe their contents.

The transcripts would then be sent over to the analysts,

who would then write up a report and send it off to Fort Meed.

And I was one of those analysts.

The hill was a joint forces base.

There were elements from the US army,

the American Airforce, the British army and the RAF.

There was only one way to get onto the hill.

The gate was guarded by german local nationals,

- we call them LN guards -

and backing them up was a company of military policemen.

You typically came to work on a duty shuttle,

which was a bus that ran from the field station barracks in Lichtenfelde

and if you lived off-base, or you missed the shuttle,

you could just take the U-Bahn to Theodor-Heuss-Platz and then walk.

If you timed it just right, the duty shuttle would stop for you

or someone with a car would pick you up.

The bus would drive you through the gate and stop right at the front steps

and you'd walk up, show your electronic blue badge to the MP

and then pass it over the electronic reader

and proceed down the main corridor.

To the immediate right, you would see a metal door, that led to the area

that the Brits use.

The English were our poor cousins --

when we disposed of our old equipment

they would go outside and scavenge our thrown out racks.

Their intercept gear was almost all of the rack,

where as ours was almost all bespoke.

And I don't want to go into too deep a dive

into the technology we had.

If you have any questions, you can find me at the bar afterwards.

But suffice to say, that Teufelsberg was beyond state of the art.

And I know there's some old guy out there in the audience, who worked for IBM in the

50s

that remembers using Skype when Adenauer was Bundeskanzler.

But up on Teufelsberg, back in the 80s, we were using instant messaging,

and we'd already started transitioning in the early 80s from mag tape to hard drives.

So enough now about toys.

Continuing our journey through the inside of Field Station Berlin,

past the Brits area, going down the corridor on the left

was the paper-shredding and pulping area, known as "Jaws".

I you annoyed the wrong people

you would find yourself working at Jaws for a shift.

It was a loud, wet and disgusting job that involved pulping and bailing

the many untold reams of paper, generated by Field Station Berlin.

Weirdly, the pulping paper bails were supposedly sent to a disposal site in East Germany.

So the security guys were regularly unbailing and rebailing,

just to make sure everything was properly destroyed.

At any rate, you would continue down the corridor

where you would find a set of elevators

which would take you to the area were you worked.

And I worked on the second floor, which was where the analysis section was.

The European Communist section, which looked after the East Germans and the Poles was also

there

as well as were the Airforce, Air defense and operations interceptors worked

And another area on the same floor behind a rather flimsy door with a crypto lock

was "Le Fox", which was our data center,

and that's where all the racks and intercept recorders were kept

and maintained in very, very large racks.

I did a little bit of time back in Le Fox,

where my job was to explain to the technical guys

what the operators on the floor ment,

a job kind of the reverse to what I do today

which is to explain to mundanes, what technologists are really up to.

Moving on, behind the analyst section was where the watch officer sat

responsible for the oversight of all operations of that shift.

Behind him where 10 to 15 teletype printers,

constantly pumping out intelligence reports from around the world.

We would of course only get things that related to us

and central and eastern europe

but also hourly reports about what was happening all over the world.

There'd be somebody assigned to separate and collate these reports into daily read files.

And one of the great things working as an analyst

was that you got to read "the read file"!

Now, what the intelligence community considers super secret or very valuable

is a very strange thing.

If you bought a copy of today's paper and looked up to see what the weather in Moscow

was today

that would be unclassified.

Now if you brought that paper, that same paper in Field Station Berlin is part of a report.

It remains unclassified, but gains a classification

because you know you were using it to bolster your information about the weather in Moscow.

But -- if you pointed a dish at a group of soviet forces,

Germany's weather information line and radar-heard

the weather was going to be cloudy and 19 at the red square tomorrow,

then all of a sudden this becomes highly classified code-word information

because we don't just know from reading the newspaper

you know, the Kremlin knows, that it's going to be 19 and cloudy in Moscow.

*laughter*

You live in this ethereal world, where you know things

and then, you really know things.

And you feel like you have an insight.

And I believe one does have a true insight into what's going on in the world

or more importantly -- what the most important people on earth

are basing their decisions on.

Because this is considered definitive information for working the analysis desk for the NSA.

I knew what they knew, that I knew that they knew.

My favourite section of all was located diagonally across from the analyst section,

just over from treadmill, which was the russian processing area.

It was an unassuming area full of shelves and cabinets filled with

books and binders and video tapes.

It was a library.

Now I never been able to walk past a bookstore, library without exploring

and a library in an NSA field station, well,

that's just to good to pass up.

When things were quiet, I'd burry my head in the library

and read the real history of historical events.

Yes!

Because there really are classified accounts of historical events.

Two things I remember well, were watching the talk by the man

who was then CIA station chief in Teheran

when the embassy was taken over in 1979.

The CIA station chief was one of the 51 hostages

held by the Iranians for over a year.

The talk he gave was in the form of an interview

before and audience of spies.

And the one part I never forget was his answer to the question:

"What did the Iranians get?"

He said, after a very long pause:

"They got everything."

Turns out, that no-one initiated destruct procedures

and so all of the classified material you'd expect to be inside a CIA station --

And so what wasn't given to the soviets ended up in an Iranian museum

about American imperialism.

*laughter*

So we knew, they knew, we knew.

Another historical event I learned about

was the incident at the USS Liberty

which was an NSA ship in the mediteranean, staffed by US Navy sailors

that was repeatedly bombed and strafed by the Israelis in 1973.

Scores of americans were killed.

The Israelis claimed, that it was a case of mistaken identity

but the real history was clear in its verdict.

The Israelis knew exactly whom they were killing,

they just didn't want the Americans to know what they were up to

in the Sinai, before they invaded Egypt.

We Field Station analysts when we weren't busy reading the read file,

browsing through the intelligence library

playing pranks on people or talking in the air up in the fifth floor

spent our time writing reports

and every report was addressed to one man, and one man only:

DIRNSA -- director NSA.

Everything was "To DIRNSA".

We called him "Big Daddy",

as in: "Hey Scannell, did you get that third shock thing QCed and off to Big Daddy?"

or "Yeah, it's important, but it's not worth waking up Big Daddy."

Big Daddy knew everything.

He was the hive queen to whom we brought the Intel nectar.

Now NSA listening posts are neither pretty nor comfortable inside.

Everything is pretty much gray or white.

Field Station Berlin's interior looked a lot like mission control

at Cape Canaveral, real glamorous, right?

But instead of people sitting in movie theater-style rows in front of monitors,

Field Station Berlin was set up with base of workers,

in front of monitors and racks of demultiplexers and receivers

around the edge of the room or in parts of the middle of the room.

Think harshly lid arcades, like from the movie The War Games

but with all the screens in black and white.

All the metal was battle ship gray

from the racks to the covers of the receivers

to our main computer Le Fox screen,

which was originally built as a fire direction control system

for recomission battle ships.

Every room was built on raised flooring

that provided tempest proofing as well as ample space for cable.

It was cold, purposely so, because of the electronics.

We'd cut the fingers off of our wool gloves

so we could keep typing while at the same time keeping our hands warm.

Within the context of the cold war,

working in a building full of spies on top of the highest point in an island city,

surrounded by a quarter million troops of your adversaries

does not make you feel terribly safe.

In fact, a gallows humor sets in,

sort of as a still version of the kind of humour everybody else in West Berlin developed

in response to wall fever.

But while the working environment could occasionally be harsh and stressful,

it didn't mean it was all work and no play.

And what happens in a tightly contained environment full of smart twentysomethings

is the same that happens everywhere else --

people play jokes.

One of the things that would be done would be carbon papering somebody's headphones.

Now when typewriters were still common

you'd make a copy by taking a piece of carbon paper

and sticking it between two sheets of paper.

What we'd do is we'd take a piece of carbon paper

and rub it on the inside of somebody's headphones

and this would leave an extremly large, very big black mark

around each of their ears,

that would be very difficult to remove.

Because that's what you get when you take your head phones off!

If you're foolish enough to take off your tunic and work in your T-shirt

it was not unknown for someone to soak their shirt in water and fold it perfectly

and put it in the freezer

and by the end of shift it'd been a perfectly frozen rectangle.

Never happened to me!

Some of the jokes were job-specific,

for example in signals direction finding,

each line of direction is called a "lob"

so you take three bearings from three different positions

and where the three lobs intersect, is the location of your target.

Lobs.

New people would be send back to engineering for a box of them.

They'd be directed to pick up a scary badly weighted box

full of broken glass, and nuts and bolts

so even the slightest movement would make them think

that they broke something.

"You broke the lobs!"

And every new intercept office eventually found themselves

unintentionally taking copy from West Berlin Taxi drivers.

"Einundzwanzig, Vierundreißig. Empfangen, Kommen!"

"Achtundsiebzig bestätigt!"

They'd eventually get overwhelmed with all the traffic

and more than one would eventually come to believe that we were under attack,

once they realised, the signals were coming from inside West Berlin.

There was also a very heavy element of fetishizing our enemy, our targets

to brighten up the otherwise white and gray surroundings

the walls of workspaces would be typically decorated with

soviet flags, east german propaganda posters and other bits of communist regalia

We'd intentionally speak like communist politicans, you know

"Frieden, liebe Bevölkerung der Deutschen Deomkratischen Republik!"

We'd watch DDR Fernsehen.

And I knew a couple of people who even dressed in their private lives

in clothes they bought in stores in East Berlin.

*laughter*

They get inside your head!

There was an unofficial rule, that if the german scanners,

the people that wrote up the tape transcripts for the german section,

when they were called in to work an extra shift because of heightened activity,

they would show up wearing Free German Youth uniform shirts.

The local german guards at Field Station Berlin

love posting the new guys at the front gate

when a dozen or so FDJlers would successfully enter the facility.

*applause*

The european communist action was also home to the station's

best collection of propaganda posters.

They raised money for their parties by running a café

out of an old wooden foot locker.

Café Eurcom would sell us overpriced Capri Sun, potato chips

and candy bars in order to fund their off-duty debauches.

Our Airforce counterparts also had their fun.

They ran something called "the ghoul pool"

whenever the soviets trained in the air.

Now, soviet pilots were infamous for their recklessness

in the air during training exercises.

So our spies ran an in-house gambling book.

You placed bets for the ghoul pool

and to win you had to name the type of aircraft

involved in a crash, and where it happens.

I remember someone winning quite a bit of money

when they successfully called the mid-air colission

of two hindbee helicopters over the Jüterbog permanent restricted area.

*laughter*

Sometimes, we german speaking intel types would be called out

to assist in training the infantry units from the Berlin brigade.

There was an urban warfare training center in Zehlendorf,

called dillboy city, complete with S-Bahn and buildings and everything.

We'd pretend to be punks.

Well, some of us had to pretend less than others.

*laughter*

To give the soldiers a good and proper hard time,

so they wouldn't react badly in an actual crisis.

One evening, we were send into dillboy city, to pretend to be

anarchistic german house occupiers, "Wohnungsbesetzer",

you know, "Hausbesetzer".

And the american soldiers would evict us.

But these soldiers did not know, that we were also soldiers.

Now this made for a lot of fun in the beginning,

when we were to drop balloons full of urine on them,

and throw pieces of wood at their heads.

*laughter*

But it became a lot less fun, when the german riot police showed up.

*laughter*

They were secondary force-called in, because the american soldiers failed to evict us.

*laughter*

I'm still not sure, if the german cops didn't know it was an exercise

but they came in and beat the crap out of us.

*laughter*

I personally received three stitches over my eyebrow from that.

Let me tell you a little bit about the people I work with.

*laughter*

At a time, when the US military had very few women,

over 30% of Field Station Berlin was female, when I was stationed there.

It was considered at that time, that women had better natural faculties

for foreign language learning.

But at the same time, women were equally scattered throughout the chain of command.

Field Station Berlin may have been progressive on the sex front

but racially, it was very, very white.

There were only five black people.

Five! - in an intelligence unit of around 750.

Other groups were overrepresented.

A surprisingly large number of Teufelsberg workers

were either mormon or seventh day adventists.

It's true!

I'd later been told, that this was because of the ease

they were granted security clearance.

Because all the mormons and seventh day adventists neither drinked,

nor smoked, nor ...

indulge in physical pleasures.

This would all be fun and well, if this were only about the personal morality,

but is it good for a nation when group that hold moral position out of line

with the mainstream populists,

start making decisions about war and peace

and what is right and wrong?

I'm not sure.

Many of the people who worked at Field Station Berlin

were smart misfits.

We got out of college, couldn't find a job

and were crazy or stupid enough, to join the army.

There were at least two PhDs in my unit, and a number with graduate degrees.

And just going through NSAs cryptanalysis course

really does do something to your brain.

Just as lawyers have their brain rewired in law-school,

the crypto course absolutely remaps sections of your brain

and gives you the strange but very real ability

to predict the future in very, very limited ways.

Which is a useful skill, whatever you do in your life.

We Sigint worker bees were almost all better educated than our officers,

and this was something that all accepted for the most part

and it made for a pretty good working environment.

But - there's always one, that just doesn't wanna work within the system.

In my case, there was a new captain by the name of Mooney,

who was the watch commander of my shift.

He insisted on calling me into the watch office,

when I could have been doing something more useful,

just to discuss with him "the big picture".

Mooney was a bit of a conspiracy nut in training.

He was pretty sure, there was something really big going on out there

but we just hadn't spotted it.

Hence, "the big picture discussions".

And one very, very slow night, after being called in,

about "the big picture" one too many times

I went back to my section and found a small news article

in the army daily newspaper.

- "stars and stripe", you probably know it -

that mentioned, that several military bases in West Germany

had gone on heightened alert for unspecified terrorist threats.

So I took this unimportant snippet of news,

and paired it with some routine radio training for the East German border guards

for their new guys in the guard towers.

And so I wrote this up, as a very short report

merely reporting the facts, and giving it the appropriate level

of very high classification

*slight laughter*

and turned it over to Captain Mooney.

He was extatic!

It was clearly "the big picture" he was looking for.

So right at shift change, just as I was leaving

on a sunday, Captain Mooney put Field Station Berlin on red alert.

Battle stations!

This meant, that everyone that came on duty

could neither leave nor be relieved.

Soldiers coming to work, wearing clothes for a normal shift,

found themselves in the middle of winter

standing, stationed in the cold with M16s

they didn't know to shoot on the roof,

with the building on lockdown!

No food or drink!

All the auto-distract gear was put into hair-trigger --

it was mayhem!

And the last words that man ever said to me, were:

"Scannell, you gonna get a medal for this!"

*laughter*

*applause*

And I told him that the credit was all his

and I preferred to just have my name left off the report.

He told me he'd never forget this day

and unfortunately a lot of people never quite forgave me for that one

including all my commanding officers.

We humans have the useful ability to look back in times of trouble

and remember the funny, the amusing, the good times

but the world at Field Station Berlin could quickly turn deadly serious.

One sunday I came on watch

and total chaos was going on in the analyst shop.

Multiple alerts have been sent out from our station around the world

about a pending soviet attack.

Tactical nuclear weapons were on the move

and chemical units were gearing up for battle.

We were all gonna die!

This was it, it was the big one!

And all because Ronald Reagan, in preparation for his weekly radio address

decided to test the mic, not realising it was live, with the words:

"I've signed legislation, that will outlaw Russia forever."

"We begin bombing in five minutes."

*laughter*

I don't think to this day anyone realises

how close we came to total nuclear destruction

because of that ignorant man's actions!

Fortunately, we knew, they knew

and so we let them know, so they knew.

And so in the course of the 8 hour shift,

soviet military activity gradually returned to normal

and we all lived to spie another day.

Looking back, I think I may very well have been working

during the golden age of Sigint.

A relatively short period in history

when there were hard and fast rules

over what was legitimately a target

and what was none of our business.

Collection was highly targeted.

There was no wholesale vacuuming of data.

Not only because the world was still very much analog

but because it was illegal under US law.

In the 1970s, the NSA committed a number of crimes against the state

that were exposed by a US senate intelligence committee,

led by Frank Church.

The Church committee set down hard and fast rules

about what the NSA could and could not do.

The most important of which being

they absolutely, positively could not spie on Americans.

This was codified in an intelligence directive known as USSID 18.

When I worked on the hill

and you had the grave misfortune to intercept a US person,

all hell broke loose.

Tapes were wiped,

brains were degaussed,

papers were shredded,

you were expected - and you did! -

to delete whatever it was that you don't remember that you just deleted.

You no longer knew, you knew!

I realized that NSA not spying on Americans gives little comfort

to her friends and allies.

But it's an important thing, because it demonstrates

that there was, once upon a time,

a culture of rules and behaviour

that codified an almost fundamentalist level of privacy

and respect for the people that you were sworn to defend.

You did not spy on your own!

The power and might of the Sigint community was so great and so powerful,

that even in the 1980s it was self-evident, that these powerful weapons

should never ever be pointed at one's own people.

That's not to say that some spying isn't good.

Knowing what your adversary is up to

and how your adversary is thinking

prevents war and minimizes poor judgment.

Field Station Berlin's ability to intercept and analyse information quickly

meant that the West could be more deliberate in the foreign policy.

One such example was the day

a high level east german functionary based in Moscow

called his mistress in East Berlin,

telling her that he was so sorry "Schatzi",

but he wouldn't be coming home this weekend

because Konstantin Chernenko died

and he'd need to stick around in Moscow until the funeral

- whenever that would be.

Now, if there's ever been an example of lose lips sinking ships

the soviets did not announce the death

of the general secretary of the communist party

for several weeks.

Chernenko's death set off a massive power struggle

inside the soviet central committee.

A fight that generally resulted

- that eventually resulted in the appointment of

Michail Gorbatschow as general secretary.

But for three weeks we knew, they knew,

-- and they didn't know that!

We were then able to keep calm

and not overreact, while the soviets solved their own internal squabbles.

Now that's targeting -

being selective,

smart spying.

Yet the wholesale vacuuming up of everything

-- that serves only to confuse.

We used to joke, that if we wanted to destroy the KGB

all we had to do was empty all the contents

of all of our intelligence facilities

onto the front steps of their headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square.

They'd choke on the information.

They'd then know everything

which would mean, they'd know nothing.

And we'd know that!

*applause*

An intelligence community that treats everyone,

whether friend or foe, as a suspect

is not a tool of war prevention,

but a means of control.

*applause*

To collect everything on everyone

is a totalitarian act.

*applause*

So here I stand,

a lucky man,

I got a front row balcony seat

inside one of the strangest, most curious theaters of the cold war.

Field Station Berlin did a lot of good.

It had a very targeted mission

and the work would turn out, helped cooler heads prevail

at a time when the world was at three minutes to nuclear midnight.

And today, Field Station Berlin stands empty.

A derelict.

The "Big Ear" hears nothing but the wind.

Its intelligence purposes passed, but there it stands -

an old, wide, phallic shaped, between the Funkturm and the Fernsehturm

against the sleight gray Berlin sky.

It may now be a derilict,

but isn't it also a monument?

A monument to the good things that knowledge can provide?

Hey, we didn't blow ourselves up!

The cold war never turned hot.

And if we didn't know, what we knew, we knew

because of signal intelligence,

it could have heated up pretty fast.

Field Station Berlin stands as a monument and a memorial

to the power of knowledge and learning

over brute strength.

But it's also a warning -

a big, wide, phallic symbol reminding us

that if we used these intelligence weapons on our own people,

we're all literally screwed!

*applause*

Let's save Teufelsberg!

Let's preserve Field Station Berlin!

At least the outside,

as both a monument and a warning.

German is such a descriptively specific language,

the word is "Mahnmal" - a warning monument.

"Teufelsberg steht als Symbol für die Macht des Wissens, um einen Krieg zu verhindern.

Aber in einem modernen Kontext kann es eine andere Bedeutung haben.

Heute gibt es keine große Radarschüssel, die Sie im Visier hat -

Keinen Klick oder Radarziel -

es passiert nicht mehr von der Spitze eines Hügels.

Es ist in einem Rechenzentrum ihrer Telefongesellschaft begraben, versteckt.

Oder in einer Netzwerk-Cloud.

Oder Malware auf ihrem Computer.

Oder da!

But we're still humans --

we still are trying to wrap our monkey brains around what it all means.

We still need the pictograph,

so I ask you to preserve Field Station Berlin!

We need to know, that they know, we know.

Thank you!

*applause*

Herald: So, thanks for your great talk, Bill!

We do have enough time for a Q&A session,

so you may line up at the microphones.

If you leave before, please do it as quietly as possible,

and not like you do know.

Please be quiet, so we have a Q&A.

Bill: We can just embark, we don't need to do a Q&A,

we can just meet at the bar!

Herald: As you wish!

Bill: Of course, no please -- happy to answer any question.

Herald: Ok, as it gets more quiet, we may start the Q&A.

As such...

*audience talking*

Microphone: I have a question, no not a question --

A statement. I don't really trust you!

*applause*

Bill: If I put on my tie, would that help?

Herald: Ok, microphone 2, please.

Microphone 2: Yeah, hello. It's really strange,

because you remind me of the old, Stasi officers

from my family and all around, and the old, same stories of

"Oh, we are so great guys, and we know everything"

about "they, they know, but they don't know".

And I don't know why is James Hall or Mr. Carneigh

your reason you spoke here and not Mr. Edward Snowden.

It's really strange, that you not spoke

and your friends of the NSA spoke about things

that matter, and not histories and funny stories of all your military career.

It's such strange, that a useless thing like an intelligence agency

is defended by "Yeah, let's make good things" and everything else

it's -- I don't know, it's digusting.

Bill: Were you at the same speech, I was?

Herald: Ok, microphone 1.

Microphone 1: Ok, hello. First I wonder, whether it might be the wrong place

for this talk, but later I realized that this talk really gave me

an insight into how things work out within Signal Intelligence,

and how people think and how they reflect on their work and

the problem was, I didn't got the impression, that you reflect much

about what you've done,

because you told us in the last part of this talk

that the world has been nearly into the hot --

the hot moment of the cold war,

and before you told us, that you faked some kind of document for...

to have some kind of impact on your paranoid officer or...

- I don't know. So,

have you an idea what responsibility was within your job

when you're telling us all your jokes?

You know what I mean, this responsibility in faking a document,

when you know that there's a cold war going on

and there's a chain of commands taking action,

maybe you can't control, later?

Bill: Certainly, you know, 30 years on, you can think about that, sure.

I think that you bring up an interesting point, which is

that you have a group of people, that can select documents

and create pretty much, whatever they want.

I mean, we saw that with the build-up to the Iraque war,

that it didn't matter what the intelligence showed,

because the then american vice president went

and sent some of his cronies over, to cherry pick documents

and create a series of facts, that weren't facts at all.

Sure!

*slight applause*

Microphone 3: Hi. Even before Snowden,

the NSA was already spying on friendly governments.

Have you guys ever discussed amongst your group,

what this actually means for democracy

or was this just daily business?

Bill: If this was 30 years ago, I don't think, ...

well I know, that we weren't at all interested in spying on our friends,

because that's a waste of time.

One of the great problems right now is

that if you take in everything, you know nothing.

So, it's a colossal waste of time to be listening to

you know, chancellor Merkel's telephone.

Or yours, or mine!

Microphone 3: My point is maybe more specific.

I mean, I understand you guys were all in your twenties.

Bill: Sure.

Microphone 3: But did you have in that area, when you worked there,

did you have political discussions

or did you just do your job and don't think longer and deeper

about what you're actually doing, as the NSA?

Bill: I think, like a lot of things in life

that there's sort of this mental break between

who you are and what you do.

And I --

most of us --

I'd say, we're politically to the center of the left

and didn't really think about

"This is some global thing, that we're doing".

If anything, we looked out at this

well, doing this is a lot better, than people shooting at one another.

And it was obviously a very, very different world at that time.

I mean, it's strange to think now,

that people were absolutely terrified about this

monolithic communist thing, coming into...

you know, eat their grand mother's baked goods.

But there was a great fear.

Nuclear war was a great fear,

so being in a position where you're gathering information

-- and in good faith, I think to your point, the other thing is

that things hadn't been politicized,

that there really was a serious, pretty hard and fast rules

and people weren't thinking about politicizing the work that they did.

Microphone 3: So you thought, you were doing a good thing, basically?

Bill: Sure, I think so. Sure, absolutely!

Microphone 3: Ok.

Microphone 4: Thank you for your talk,

I have a problem with your claim that Teufelsberg

is a symbol for the good sides of surveillance,

because this is --

the surveillance you describe, is made for a world

where you can differentiate between your friend and your enemy

and it's a bit difficult to listen to your talk,

because from the american perspective today,

everybody who's not american is an enemy.

*applause*

Bill: Well, actually, anyone who's also american, is an enemy!

And that's also the problem.

Microphone 3: And of course american citizens themselves!

So your emphasis becomes spying our own people

but we're all being spied on by the american government.

I wanted to say: I find it quite --

I was happy to hear your talk, because...

it's quite scary to see that twenty...

- I'm twentysomething myself -

that twentysomething year olds are in charge of such powerful weapons

and they are today, as well.

So thank you for this insight.

Bill: Well, sure.

Two things. One, I think the important part about not spying on your own people

and that they were in fact very hard and fast guidelines back then

is relevant to today, because we need to figure out a way -

we, being all of us --

need to figure out a way, that we can not point these things at us.

And at the same time, accept that...

you need to be looking for bad guys at some level,

but treating everyone as a criminal is...

is absurd.

If there's a crime scene, you put a piece of tape around it

and you look it.

What's happening now is that NSA is treating the entire planet

as a crime scene, and wrapping the whole planet in

you know, "police line, do not cross"-tape

which makes absolutely no sense.

Microphone 2: So I also find the talk very interesting

and my question goes along the lines of this last question.

Even during this answer you kept talking about "us" -

we have to live to decide this thing

and it's ok to listen to "them"

and I will ask: who is "us" and who is "them"?

Bill: That's a fine question.

*applause*

Bill: And if you drink - come and have a drink with me.

And if you don't, then you can watch me drink.

Because I think that's a very interesting question.

I spent time in various places around the world

and this side of "them and us" and "us and them" gets very complicated.

But I think that we can all agree that

there are some elements that don't like other elements.

And that keeping a general look on what those elements are up to

and being able to take appropriate measures

is a lot better than wholesale wanting destruction.

*audience heckle*

Bill: It's horrible!

I'm not here to defend this!

Did you listen to my speech?

*more heckling*

Herald: Ok, we have only three minutes left for more questions.

So we continue with microphone 5.

Microphone 5: I have a question about your security clearance.

You told us that you didn't tell everything because

you're not supposed to.

What would happen, if you --

if you tell us all. Would they arrest you tonight,

or kill you tonight, or --

what happens to someone telling the stuff?

Bill: Well, telling thirty year old stuff,

I have no idea. I mean, I feel on perfectly safe ground

talking about everything I've talked about tonight.

Microphone 5: I mean, the things you didn't tell.

So the security level, you were working on...

Bill: You mean, about the aliens?

Can't talk about that.

Microphone 5: No, I mean there are people working in jobs like you did, today.

If they would go out and tell us, what would happen?

Would they survive?

Bill: I believe, one guy is currently living

somewhere outside of Moscow with his girlfriend.

Herald: Ok. Then we've got a question from the Internet?

Signal Angel: Do you really belive that you ever prevented anything?

What justifications do you have for that, or can you give any examples?

Bill: I think that the example of finding out that...

the leader of our adversary had died,

and there was an internal power struggle going on,

that they didn't want us to know

certainly helped all of the western countries

keep a cool head. Because -

at that time, when a politician said something, then

the others start reacting to it.

I mean, you saw with Reagan saying something

completely evil into a microphone he didn't realize was live,

caused a massive overreaction.

But because we saw the massive overreaction

we were able to at least engange in discussions.

If we didn't know, that they knew that we knew,

then we wouldn't be able to have that kind of a conversation.

If you don't know what's going on behind the scenes,

it's difficult to take a measured response

or to remain cool headed, when things get heated up.

So I think that - sure,

Intelligence in general, does a lot of good in keeping the peace.

Sure.

Herald: Ok, we've got only time for one more question,

so if you don't get your question asked, meet Bill later at the bar.

Microphone 6, please!

Microphone 6: Hi, I think no single individual in the room and the hall

-- it's a bit confusing, but I'm trying to conversate.

About the toys -- did you use VAC systems from digital ...

*incomprehensible*

god, the idea is confusing!

Yeah.

Bill: I was an analyst, I wasn't involved in running the technology.

I couldn't tell you what flavour of a lot of things were.

Microphone 6: Ok.

Bill: I mean, it's true, so...

Herald: Ok, thank you Bill. Please give him another warm round of applause.

*applause*