You Decide: Was Purdue Right to Destroy Video of This Lecture by Barton Gellman on the NSA and Edward Snowden?
Recently, Purdue University intentionally deleted Bart Gellman’s keynote lecture entitled “Investigative Reporting in the Age of Snowden,” which he delivered at Purdue’s Dawn or Doom symposium on September 24, 2015.
The reason? Seven publicly available—albeit still classified—slides from the Snowden archive, which Bart briefly displayed on screen during his remarks. (In early tweets, Bart said there were three.)
Read the full story here—involving classified university contracts, a mole in the audience, a Defense Department intervention, and a close brush with a death sentence for a slide projector.
After Bart published his account, with some signal-boosting from a certain social-media-savvy former government contractor, Purdue acknowledged that it had overreacted. One organizer of the event (who had nothing to do with the subsequent censorship) weighed in on the controversy earlier this week.
In the spirit of openness and free inquiry, we have done our best to reconstruct the deleted lecture. We can’t show you the original video, which Purdue apparently wiped and “sanitized” beyond recovery. But two solid citizens in the audience sent us samizdat audio recordings. One came encrypted and anonymous, a fitting epilogue to Bart’s final slides. We have enhanced and synchronized the sound to the slides as Bart presented them.
Note: The video begins with general conference remarks by Purdue President and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. At 5:48, Bart is introduced by Purdue’s VP for Information Technology, Gerry McCartney. The lecture begins at 9:30. The first classified slide is at about 34:48.
Where each slide has previously been published:
Slide #38, begins ~34:48, previously published by the The Washington Post, June 6, 2013
Slide #40, begins ~38:04, previously published by the The Washington Post, October 13, 2014
Slide #43, begins ~40:09, previously published by the The Washington Post, June 6, 2013
Slide #44, begins ~40:23, previously published by the The Washington Post, October 30, 2013
Slide #46, begins ~42:06, previously published by Der Spiegel, December 28, 2014
Slide #48, begins ~43:52, previously published by The Intercept, July 1, 2015
Barton Gellman is a critically honored author, journalist, and blogger. His professional distinctions include two Pulitzer Prizes (individual and team), the George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting.
You Decide: Was Purdue Right to Destroy Video of This Lecture by Barton Gellman on the NSA and Edward Snowden?
Recently, Purdue University intentionally deleted Bart Gellman’s keynote lecture entitled “Investigative Reporting in the Age of Snowden,” which he delivered at Purdue’s Dawn or Doom symposium on September 24, 2015.
The reason? Seven publicly available—albeit still classified—slides from the Snowden archive, which Bart briefly displayed on screen during his remarks. (In early tweets, Bart said there were three.)
Read the full story here—involving classified university contracts, a mole in the audience, a Defense Department intervention, and a close brush with a death sentence for a slide projector.
After Bart published his account, with some signal-boosting from a certain social-media-savvy former government contractor, Purdue acknowledged that it had overreacted. One organizer of the event (who had nothing to do with the subsequent censorship) weighed in on the controversy earlier this week.
In the spirit of openness and free inquiry, we have done our best to reconstruct the deleted lecture. We can’t show you the original video, which Purdue apparently wiped and “sanitized” beyond recovery. But two solid citizens in the audience sent us samizdat audio recordings. One came encrypted and anonymous, a fitting epilogue to Bart’s final slides. We have enhanced and synchronized the sound to the slides as Bart presented them.
Note: The video begins with general conference remarks by Purdue President and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. At 5:48, Bart is introduced by Purdue’s VP for Information Technology, Gerry McCartney. The lecture begins at 9:30. The first classified slide is at about 34:48.
Where each slide has previously been published:
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Tags: edward snowden, nsa, national security, barton gellman, reporting