Some news organizations, including The Intercept, have devoted substantial resources to reporting on the newsworthy aspects of the archive of emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that was published last week by WikiLeaks. Numerous documents from that archive have shed considerable light on the thought processes and previously secret behavior of top Clinton campaign aides and often the candidate herself. While the significance of particular stories has been debated, there is no denying that many of those disclosures offer a valuable glimpse into campaign operatives who currently exercise great political power and who, as of January of next year, are likely to be among the most powerful officials on the planet. Despite her agreement with those propositions, the author and activist Naomi Klein believes there are serious threats to personal privacy and other critical political values posed by hacks of this sort, particularly when accompanied by the indiscriminate publication of someone’s personal emails.

The fact that the individual whose emails were hacked wields significant power may mitigate some of those concerns, but, she believes, it does not remotely obviate them. She also believes that while a public service has been performed by the reporting on some of these emails, media organizations (including The Intercept) have not sufficiently emphasized the dangers to personal privacy posed by the hacking of someone’s email inbox. Earlier this week, Klein and I discussed her views and concerns about these issues. The discussion has been lightly edited into a 30-minute podcast, which you can listen to on the player above. A transcript is also provided. Klein, invariably, is extremely thoughtful and insightful, and so I believe the discussion is well worth listening to. This transcript has been edited for space and clarity. GLENN GREENWALD: Hi, this is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, and I am very excited that my guest today is one of the world’s most influential and accomplished journalists, activists, and thinkers, who also happens to be my good friend, Naomi Klein. Hi, Naomi. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. NAOMI KLEIN: Hey Glenn, it’s great to be with you. GG: So the principal impetus for this conversation is that over the last two or three weeks, there has emerged this spirited debate prompted by the publication of many thousands of emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Nobody knows for certain who actually hacked them. The U.S. government says the Russian government was involved — although they presented no evidence for that — but there are a lot of people who believe Russia was at least implicated in some way. Whoever did it gave it to WikiLeaks, which instead of curating any of it or trying to figure out what would be in the public interest and what wouldn’t, simply took it all and dumped it on the internet. And from what I’ve seen, at least, the debate that has ensued — as news organizations went through this archive and began to report on material they thought was newsworthy and in the public interest — was this dichotomized debate. So on the one hand, you have these actors who caused all of John Podesta’s emails — without discrimination about their impact or content or whether they had anything to do with public interest — to be published on the internet, which was the hackers combined with WikiLeaks. And then you have this separate debate once that happens. Once these materials are made available, for better or for worse, what is the duty of journalists? Should they ignore it on the grounds that it’s illicitly obtained or might incentivize future similar bad acts? Should they weigh the fact that there’s been a massive privacy invasion against the journalistic value that can undoubtedly come from some of the specific materials? And obviously, we at The Intercept have been centrally involved in that debate, because we did make a decision to do so much reporting on the documents that we believe shed light on the person highly likely to be the next president of the United States. So those are the contours of the debate — there’s certainly a lot of disagreement within them — but I guess I’m curious about whether you think that’s the right way to think about this debate, whether that’s the right way to carry it out, whether there have been things that have gotten distorted or not gotten enough attention. What are your overall thoughts on this? NK: I really appreciate the chance to talk about it with you. I think a lot of that is exactly how we should be thinking about it, but there are some things that need a little bit more emphasis. I would add that it’s not just that they didn’t curate it and dumped it all. They are dumping it, but they are doling out the dumps to maximize damage. So they’re not just saying, “Hey, information wants to be free, here is everything we have. Journalists, have a field day, go through it.” They’re very clearly looking for maximum media attention and you can tell that just by looking at the WikiLeaks Twitter feed and at how they are timing it right before the debates. Now everybody uses leaks as a political weapon, including the Clinton campaign, which we already knew but we have lots more evidence of, thanks to these emails. They’re constantly talking about leaking information to their own benefit. The other thing I would say is I think there’s a particular responsibility for you as a journalist — and others at The Intercept — because you’re the ones who brought us the Snowden files, and I am one of many people who are tremendously grateful for that line in the sand about our rights to electronic privacy. You are one of three or four people in the world who have done the most to defend that principle for our electronic communications — because we live our lives online, we can’t distinguish that from our right to privacy, period. These leaks are not, in my opinion, in the same category as the Pentagon Papers or previous WikiLeaks releases like the trade documents they continue to leak, which I am tremendously grateful for, because those are government documents that we have a right to, that are central to democracy. There are many things in that category.

These leaks are not, in my opinion, in the same category as the Pentagon Papers or previous WikiLeaks releases like the trade documents they continue to leak, which I am tremendously grateful for.

But personal emails — and there’s all kinds of personal stuff in these emails — this sort of indiscriminate dump is precisely what Snowden was trying to protect us from. That’s why I wanted I wanted to talk with you about it, because I think we need to continuously reassert that principle. As journalists — now that it’s out there — we do have to go through it and talk about the parts that are politically important and newsworthy. But at the same time, we have a tremendous responsibility to say that people do have that right to privacy. I heard you defend [the leak] to some degree on the grounds that these are very powerful people. Certainly Podesta is a very powerful person, and he will be more powerful after Hillary Clinton is elected, if she’s elected, and it looks like she will be. But I’m concerned about the subjectivity of who gets defined as sufficiently powerful to lose their privacy because I am absolutely sure there are plenty of people in the world who believe that you and I are sufficiently powerful to lose our privacy, and I come to this as a journalist and author who has used leaked and declassified documents to do my work. I could never have written “The Shock Doctrine” or “This Changes Everything” without that. But I’m also part of the climate justice movement, and this is a movement that has come under incredible amounts of surveillance by oil industry-funded front groups of various kinds. There are people in the movement now who are being tracked as if they were political candidates, everywhere they go. So how are we defining powerful? Because once we say this is OK, and I’m not saying you’ve said it — you’ve made that distinction — but I think we need to say it louder. And particularly you, as the guy who brought us the Snowden files, need to say it louder. GG: There’s an amazing irony here in some sense because I’ve been defending the news value of the WikiLeaks archives over the past several months, not just the Podesta but also the DNC archive. And I’ve defended WikiLeaks in the past, long prior to the Snowden archive. There are a couple of really fascinating nuances that I think set the stage for the kinds of distinctions that you’re urging be drawn. When I first started defending WikiLeaks back in 2010, one of my primary arguments was that WikiLeaks, contrary to the way they were being depicted by the U.S. intelligence community and their friends, was not some reckless rogue agent running around sociopathically dumping information on the internet without concern about who might be endangered. And in fact, if you look at how the biggest WikiLeaks releases were handled early on — the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, as well as the State Department cables — not only did they redact huge numbers of documents on the grounds that doing so was necessary to protect the welfare of innocent people, they actually requested that the State Department meet with them to help them figure out what kind of information should be withheld on the grounds that it could endanger innocent people. So they were very much an ardent and enthusiastic proponent of that model — that when you get tons of information that belongs in the public eye, you have the corresponding responsibility to protect not only people’s physical security but also their privacy. I used to defend them on that all the time. Somewhere along the way, WikiLeaks and Julian decided, and they’ve said this explicitly, that they changed their mind on that question — they no longer believe in redactions or withholding documents of any kind. During our reporting on the Snowden material, we did not just take the archive and dump it on the internet, as a lot of people called for. We spent years very carefully curating it and keeping parts of it secret that might endanger individual privacy, harm people’s reputations unjustifiably, or otherwise put them in harm’s way. And WikiLeaks publicly and viciously attacked us for years. They continue to, actually, over the fact that we were the so-called gatekeepers of information. It was always my view — and continues to be — that it would have been incredibly hypocritical for us to say that these documents need to see the light of day because people’s privacy is being compromised, and then in the same breath, release documents that would destroy people’s privacy because they’re too lazy or don’t think it’s justifiable to go through and redact. So there’s debate, even among people who believe in radical transparency, over the proper way to handle information like this. I think WikiLeaks more or less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are ethically — never mind journalistically — just ethically, as a human being, justifiable. I think that debate has been vibrant and healthy, and I do think you’re probably right that it needs to be even more so now that we have so many more examples, like the leak of climate scientists, of Sony executives, and other leaks that are inevitably coming.

I think WikiLeaks more or less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are ethically — never mind journalistically — just ethically, as a human being, justifiable.

We do need to figure out a way to say both at the same time: Powerful institutions and powerful actors need the kind of transparency these leaks can provide, but at the same time, even people who are in powerful positions and wield influence continue to retain the right to privacy, and there should never be any publishing of personal matters or things that aren’t directly in the public interest. Is that what you mean when you say this needs to be more prominent? Is that the distinction that you think is crucial? NK: I think we have a very strong interest in continuously reasserting the right to electronic privacy, particularly when we’re talking about people who are not elected officials. It’s just so subjective what criteria we’re using to define powerful, because that word is flexible. And I’m not saying that emails are out of bounds — I think about emails that came out about legitimizing torture during the Bush administration. But those were particular, relevant emails, rather than: “You’ve just lost all your electronic privacy. We’re dumping the whole thing, or rather, we’re dumping it in stages to maximize damage.” We need to defend that because certainly in the climate movement, we are up against forces that will always have massively more resources than the movement does. We can encrypt our emails, and we should encrypt our emails, but the principle still has to be defended because we lose if this gets blurry. GG: But let me ask you this. We started out by saying that with this particular leak, because of WikiLeaks’ philosophy, the hacker went in and grabbed everything, which sometimes hackers will do even if they’re well-intentioned — because you don’t have time to grab only the relevant material, you hope that the people to whom you then give the material are going to do that. That was Snowden’s theory: I’m going to take as much as I can but make sure I’m only giving it to journalists who promise to safeguard the material and let the public see the stuff they should see, not what they shouldn’t. Let’s say you had a good faith hacker who said, “I’m going to take all of John Podesta’s emails and I’m just going to download them. And instead of giving them to WikiLeaks, I’m going to give them to this organization and tell this organization, ‘What I want you to do is go through them and get rid of the ones where John Podesta is talking about the emotional difficulties staff members are having, or personal conversations he’s having with family members or friends, and pick the ones that really shed light on what the Clinton campaign is doing that affects public policy and discourse.’” Would you have qualms about that process? NK: No. I think they set themselves up for the bank speeches coming out because they refused to release them. They should have released them, and what’s interesting is that some of the most relevant, newsworthy information is not in email traffic — it’s in documents like that. Or, for instance, an attachment that’s a transcript of Hillary Clinton’s conversations behind closed doors with labor leaders in which she says that climate activists should “get a life” rather than coming to her events. That’s not an email. To me, that doesn’t fall into the same category. I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it were curated. It’s also the way in which it’s being released, to clearly maximize damage, and the recklessness about the implications of that when it comes to electing Trump. You’ve written about how dangerous it is for media organizations to take such a highly political approach to this election because they don’t want Trump to get elected, so they’re engaging in what you described as “journalistic fraud.” I agree with you. But we have to acknowledge how political WikiLeaks and Julian are being here. GG: It’s interesting. All we can do is speculate because it involves what’s going on in somebody else’s head, in this particular case, a person who’s even in the best of times quite complicated, who’s been trapped in a single room for five years, who literally has not seen the outdoors in many years, and who doesn’t have much of a future to see one shortly — so it’s hard to assess what’s going on in the mind of a person like that. Still, as somebody who does know Julian, and that includes you and me as well to varying degrees, are you persuaded by this idea that Julian’s goal here is this conventionally partisan objective, that he has simply sided with the Republican candidate over the Democratic candidate and is doing what he can to help Trump? Or do you think it’s more about Julian harboring a substantive philosophical animosity toward U.S. empire and U.S. hegemony as a force for evil in the world, and looking for any opportunity to undermine and burn it? To the extent that Hillary Clinton represents that, that she’s a target of his anger, on top of his view of her as desiring his imprisonment and therefore there’s this personal anger too — that goal isn’t the way Paul Begala wants the Democrat to win and the Republican to lose. I don’t think Julian has these simple partisan motives. I think it’s more about wanting to see things burn, out of a combination of political philosophy and personal resentment. I’m curious what you think about that. NK: I don’t know. I don’t know him well. I’ve met him and I’m not sure I can answer that. I have to be perfectly honest with you, Glenn, I’m actually nervous about it, because there is clearly a vendetta element going on, which is understandable, because Hillary Clinton’s State Department is massively responsible for his lack of freedom. So I can understand that, but at the same time, Assange is not the only person who has lost their freedom for standing up for their beliefs.

I’m not comfortable with anybody wielding this much power.