In English with simultaneous translation into German.
Every single online search leaves virtual traces and footprints of us. While buying things or merely reading a page, metadata are collected and analysed using algorithms. Even the time elapsing while looking at a web page allows drawing conclusions about the user. Shopping platforms are thus able to make predictions about our future wishes and desires, and connect us to the unending chain of consumption through targeted product advertisement. Yet also intelligence services are spying out the digital sphere. Ever since June 2013 in the wake of NASA systems administrator Edward Snowden’s first release of data, we’ve known for a fact what we could’ve only been suspecting until then – that data and intelligence about and from our lives are being collected, stored and processed in a centralistic way across national borders. The legitimation: apparent protection against terrorist threats and attacks. Yet Snowden argues: "What we are about to construct is the most gigantic apparatus of oppression of all time.”
Edward Snowden, a young man, says he has known the internet in the early days when there was no surveillance. He is actually in an exposed position to testify the rapid changes in technology and society within the last decade, and to foresee how democracy and the sovereignty of the people are being increasingly undermined. It is the private sphere that is the prerequisite for shaping informed political opinions, forming a political stance and enabling participation. And the latter will be the first casualty of digital surveillance. Edward Snowden will discuss these matters with theatre director Angela Richter and lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, who is legally supporting Snowden in Germany, at the Volksbühne via video link. Richter went to see Snowden in Moscow several times. Kaleck is also the founder and secretary general of the Berlin-based human rights organization ECCHR (European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights), an independent, non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to protecting civil and human rights worldwide.
Snowden does not only talk with them about what it means to be a whistleblower and be able to conquer the fear of persecution, but also about how restrictions of intellectual freedom will ultimately bring about long-term changes for the political life of western cultures. Moderation: Jakob Augstein
The discussion at Volksbühne was initiated and prepared in personal meetings with Edward Snowden in Moscow by Angela Richter and Wolfgang Kaleck.
Tickets at 12.- €; concessions 8.- €.
From Moscow with Love. Edward Snowden über die Kriminalgeschichte der Demokratie (live aus dem Exil). (O.V.) from Volksbühne Berlin on Vimeo.
