Charmian Gooch: Meet global corruption's hidden players

When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. He was a slightly unusual guy. And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official.  

There's Teodorín Obiang. So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. I've been up to its front gates. I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece — oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too.

  Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. And there's Dan Etete. Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion — that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. But does it just happen over there? Well, at 22, I was very lucky. My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "Blood Diamond," the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, some of that sprang from our work.

  Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. And it was a slightly crazy place. So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. But it wasn't about blood diamonds. Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "weak governance." I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. 

So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. He did business with global banks. A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. He used shell companies. He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. And then there's Dan Etete. Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government — now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan.  

This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. Now let's take the banks first. Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family.  

And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too.  

You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. Corruption in that sector, no surprise. There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? Well, because there's a lot at stake. In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away.

  Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. And here's the thing. After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. I mean, these are state assets. They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. It's just how some business is done. It's too complex and difficult to change. So in effect, what? 

We just accept it. But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. So this is change happening. This is progress. But we're not there yet, by far. Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. Thank you. (Applause)

Peter Eigen: How to expose the corrupt

I am going to speak about corruption, but I would like to juxtapose two different things. One is the large global economy, the large globalized economy, and the other one is the small, and very limited, capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern, to shape, this economy. Because there is this asymmetry, which creates, basically, failing governance. Failing governance in many areas: in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment, in the area of exploitation of women and children, in the area of climate change, in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy, which is operating in a worldwide arena. And I think corruption, and the fight against corruption, and the impact of corruption, is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance.
 

 Let me talk about my own experience. I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa. At that time, I noticed that corruption, that grand corruption, that systematic corruption, was undermining everything we were trying to do. And therefore, I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank, our own projects, our own programs against corruption, but in general, I thought, "We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption." And as soon as I started this work, I received a memorandum from the World Bank, from the legal department first, in which they said, "You are not allowed to do this. You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries. This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank, so I want you to stop your doings."

In the meantime, I was chairing donor meetings, for instance, in which the various donors, and many of them like to be in Nairobi — it is true, it is one of the unsafest cities of the world, but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable. And in these donor meetings, I noticed that many of the worst projects — which were put forward by our clients, by the governments, by promoters, many of them representing suppliers from the North — that the worst projects were realized first. Let me give you an example: a huge power project, 300 million dollars, to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable, and one of the most beautiful, areas of western Kenya. And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits: It had no clients, nobody would buy the electricity there, nobody was interested in irrigation projects. To the contrary, we knew that this project would destroy the environment: It would destroy riparian forests, which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups, the Samburu and the Turkana in this area. So everybody knew this is a, not a useless project, this is an absolute damaging, a terrible project — not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars, and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools, like hospitals and so on. And yet, we all rejected this project, none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it, and it was the first project to be implemented.
 

 The good projects, which we as a donor community would take under our wings, they took years, you know, you had too many studies, and very often they didn't succeed. But these bad projects, which were absolutely damaging — for the economy for many generations, for the environment, for thousands of families who had to be resettled — they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks, of supplier agencies, of insurance agencies — like in Germany, Hermes, and so on — and they came back very, very quickly, driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North. Now, these suppliers were our big companies. They were the actors of this global market, which I mentioned in the beginning. They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large-scale corruption. We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here, or 100,000 dollars there, or one million dollars there. No, we are talking about 10 million, 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts, on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein, of the president's ministers, the high officials in the para-statal sectors.

This was the reality which I saw, and not only one project like that: I saw, I would say, over the years I worked in Africa, I saw hundreds of projects like this. And so, I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries, which is the main reason for the misery, for the poverty, for the conflicts, for the violence, for the desperation in many of these countries. That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line, that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world, twice that number, more than two billion people without sanitation and so on, and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children, still, child mortality of more than 10 million people every year, children dying before they are five years old: The cause of this is, to a large extent, grand corruption.
 

 Now, why did the World Bank not let me do this work? I found out afterwards, after I left, under a big fight, the World Bank. The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay, including Germany. In Germany, foreign bribery was allowed. It was even tax-deductible. No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed. Not all of them, but most of them. And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance, because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin, at the Villa Borsig, we were told, "You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing, because we will lose our contracts. We will lose to the French, we will lose to the Swedes, we'll lose to the Japanese." And therefore, there was a indeed a prisoner's dilemma, which made it very difficult for an individual company, an individual exporting country to say, "We are not going to continue this deadly, disastrous habit of large companies to bribe."

 

So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, "We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad." They needed help, and the large companies themselves have this dilemma. Many of them didn't want to bribe. Many of the German companies, for instance, believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price, so they are very competitive. They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are, but they were not allowed to show their strengths, because the world was eaten up by grand corruption.

And this is why I'm telling you this: Civil society rose to the occasion. We had this small NGO, Transparency International. They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner's dilemma, and we developed concepts of collective action, basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table, explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing, and to make a long story short, we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters.

 

In 1997, a convention, under the auspices of the OECD, which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery. (Applause) Well, thank you. I mean, it's interesting, in doing this, we had to sit together with the companies. We had here in Berlin, at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee, we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry, and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery. In the first session — we had three sessions over the course of two years. And President von Weizsäcker, by the way, chaired one of the sessions, the first one, to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs, who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations. And in the first session, they all said, "This is not bribery, what we are doing." This is customary there. This is what these other cultures demand. They even applaud it. In fact, [unclear] still says this today. And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing. But in the second session, they admitted already that they would never do this, what they are doing in these other countries, here in Germany, or in the U.K., and so on. Cabinet ministers would admit this. And in the final session, at the Aspen Institute, we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government, at the time, requesting that they participate in the OECD convention.

And this is, in my opinion, an example of soft power, because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us. We had a longer-term time perspective. We had a broader, geographically much wider, constituency we were trying to defend. And that's why the law has changed. That's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that's why MIN is in the trouble they are in. In some other countries, the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced. And, again, civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment.

  In London, for instance, where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case, which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute, 100 million British pounds, every year for ten years, to one particular official of one particular friendly country, who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment. This case, they are not prosecuting in the UK. Why? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain. Civil society is pushing, civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem, also in the U.K., and also in Japan, which is not properly enforcing, and so on.

  In Germany, we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention, which is a subsequent convention. We are, Germany, is not ratifying. Why? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies. In Germany, we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant, but you are allowed to bribe a deputy. This is, under German law, allowed, and the members of our parliament don't want to change this, and this is why they can't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery — one of they very, very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world, but not able to ratify the convention, which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world.

  I see my time is ticking. Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened. I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption, one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance. By now, the United Nations is totally on our side. The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus; under Wolfensohn, they became, I would say, the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world. Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on. And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem, in the development of 

  Of course, if civil society organizations want to play that role, they have to grow into this responsibility. Not all civil society organizations are good. The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO. So, we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself. They have to have a much more transparent financial governance. They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations. We also need much more competence of civil society leaders. This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society.

  But what I'm saying from my very practical experience: If civil society does it right and joins the other actors — in particular, governments, governments and their international institutions, but also large international actors, in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility — then in this magical triangle between civil society, government and private sector, there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world.

  Thank you.

  (Applause)

Ian Bremmer: How the US should use its superpower status (Video/Transcript)

When you come to TEDx, you always think about technology, the world changing, becoming more innovative. You think about the driverless. Everyone's talking about driverless cars these days, and I love the concept of a driverless car, but when I go in one, you know, I want it really slow, I want access to the steering wheel and the brake, just in case. I don't know about you, but I am not ready for a driverless bus. I am not ready for a driverless airplane.

How about a driverless world? And I ask you that because we are increasingly in one.

It's not supposed to be that way. We're number one, the United States is large and in charge. Americanization and globalization for the last several generations have basically been the same thing. Right? Whether it's the World Trade Organization or it's the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Accord on currency, these were American institutions, our values, our friends, our allies, our money, our standards. That was the way the world worked.

So it's sort of interesting, if you want to look at how the US looks, here it is. This is our view of how the world is run. President Obama has got the red carpet, he goes down Air Force One, and it feels pretty good, it feels pretty comfortable. Well, I don't know how many of you saw the China trip last week and the G20. Oh my God. Right? This is how we landed for the most important meeting of the world's leaders in China. The National Security Advisor was actually spewing expletives on the tarmac -- no red carpet, kind of left out the bottom of the plane along with all the media and everybody else.

Later on in the G20, well, there's Obama.

(Laughter)

Hi, George. Hi, Norman. They look like they're about to get into a cage match, right? And they did. It was 90 minutes long, and they talked about Syria. That's what Putin wanted to talk about. He's increasingly calling the shots. He's the one willing to do stuff there. There's not a lot of mutual like or trust, but it's not as if the Americans are telling him what to do.

How about when the whole 20 are getting together? Surely, when the leaders are all onstage, then the Americans are pulling their weight. Uh-oh.

(Laughter)

Xi Jinping seems fine. Angela Merkel has -- she always does -- that look, she always does that. But Putin is telling Turkish president Erdogan what to do, and Obama is like, what's going on over there?

You see. And the problem is it's not a G20, the problem is it's a G-Zero world that we live in, a world order where there is no single country or alliance that can meet the challenges of global leadership. The G20 doesn't work, the G7, all of our friends, that's history. So globalization is continuing. Goods and services and people and capital are moving across borders faster and faster than ever before, but Americanization is not.

So if I've convinced you of that, I want to do two things with the rest of this talk. I want to talk about the implications of that for the whole world. I'll go around it. And then I want to talk about what we think right here in the United States and in New York.

So why? What are the implications. Why are we here? Well, we're here because the United States, we spent two trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were failed. We don't want to do that anymore. We have large numbers of middle and working classes that feel like they've not benefited from promises of globalization, so they don't want to see it particularly. And we have an energy revolution where we don't need OPEC or the Middle East the way we used to. We produce all that right here in the United States. So the Americans don't want to be the global sheriff for security or the architect of global trade. The Americans don't want to even be the cheerleader of global values.

Well, then you look to Europe, and the most important alliance in the world has been the transatlantic relationship. But it is now weaker than it has been at any point since World War II, all of the crises, the Brexit conversations, the hedging going on between the French and the Russians, or the Germans and the Turks, or the Brits and the Chinese.

China does want to do more leadership. They do, but only in the economic sphere, and they want their own values, standards, currency, in competition with that of the US. The Russians want to do more leadership. You see that in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, in the Middle East, but not with the Americans. They want their own preferences and order. That's why we are where we are.

So what happens going forward? Let's start easy, with the Middle East.

(Laughter)

You know, I left a little out, but you get the general idea. Look, there are three reasons why the Middle East has had stability such as it is. Right? One is because there was a willingness to provide some level of military security by the US and allies. Number two, it was easy to take a lot of cheap money out of the ground because oil was expensive. And number three was no matter how bad the leaders were, the populations were relatively quiescent. They didn't have the ability, and many didn't have the will to really rise up against.

Well, I can tell you, in a G-Zero world, all three of those things are increasingly not true, and so failed states, terrorism, refugees and the rest. Does the entire Middle East fall apart? No, the Kurds will do better, and Iraq, Israel, Iran over time. But generally speaking, it's not a good look.

OK, how about this guy? He's playing a poor hand very well. There's no question he's hitting above his weight. But long term -- I didn't mean that. But long term, long term, if you think that the Russians were antagonized by the US and Europe expanding NATO right up to their borders when we said they weren't going to, and the EU encroaching them, just wait until the Chinese put hundreds of billions of dollars in every country around Russia they thought they had influence in. The Chinese are going to dominate it. The Russians are picking up the crumbs. In a G-Zero world, this is going to be a very tense 10 years for Mr. Putin.

It's not all bad. Right? Asia actually looks a lot better. There are real leaders across Asia, they have a lot of political stability. They're there for a while. Mr. Modi in India, Mr. Abe, who is probably about to get a third term written in in the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, of course Xi Jinping who is consolidating enormous power, the most powerful leader in China since Mao. Those are the three most important economies in Asia. Now look, there are problems in Asia. We see the sparring over the South China Sea. We see that Kim Jong Un, just in the last couple of days, tested yet another nuclear weapon. But the leaders in Asia do not feel the need to wave the flag, to go xenophobic, to actually allow escalation of the geopolitical and cross-border tensions. They want to focus on long-term economic stability and growth. And that's what they're actually doing.

Let's turn to Europe. Europe does look a little scared in this environment. So much of what is happening in the Middle East is washing up quite literally onto European shores. You see Brexit and you see the concerns of populism across all of the European states.

Let me tell you that over the long term, in a G-Zero world, European expansion will be seen to have gone too far. Europe went right up to Russia, went right down to the Middle East, and if the world were truly becoming more flat and more Americanized, that would be less of a problem, but in a G-Zero world, those countries nearest Russia and nearest the Middle East actually have different economic capabilities, different social stability and different political preferences and systems than core Europe. So Europe was able to truly expand under the G7, but under the G-Zero, Europe will get smaller. Core Europe around Germany and France and others will still work, be functional, stable, wealthy, integrated. But the periphery, countries like Greece and Turkey and others, will not look that good at all.

Latin America, a lot of populism, made the economies not go so well. They had been more opposed to the United States for decades. Increasingly, they're coming back. We see that in Argentina. We see it with the openness in Cuba. We will see it in Venezuela when Maduro falls. We will see it in Brazil after the impeachment and when we finally see a new legitimate president elected there. The only place you see that is moving in another direction is the unpopularity of Mexican president Peña Nieto. There you could actually see a slip away from the United States over the coming years. The US election matters a lot on that one, too.

(Laughter)

Africa, right? A lot of people have said it's going to be Africa's decade, finally. In a G-Zero world, it is absolutely an amazing time for a few African countries, those governed well with a lot of urbanization, a lot of smart people, women really getting into the workforce, entrepreneurship taking off. But for most of the countries in Africa, it's going to be a lot more dicey: extreme climate conditions, radicalism both from Islam and also Christianity, very poor governance, borders you can't defend, lots of forced migration. Those countries can fall off the map. So you're really going to see an extreme segregation going on between the winners and the losers across Africa.

Finally, back to the United States. What do I think about us? Because there are a lot of upset people, not here at TEDx, I know, but in the United States, my God, after 15 months of campaigning, we should be upset. I understand that. But a lot of people are upset because they say, "Washington's broken, we don't trust the establishment, we hate the media." Heck, even globalists like me are taking it on the chin.

Look, I do think we have to recognize, my fellow campers, that when you are being chased by the bear, in the global context, you need not outrun the bear, you need to only outrun your fellow campers.

(Laughter)

Now, I just told you about our fellow campers. Right? And from that perspective, we look OK. A lot of people in that context say, "Let's go dollar. Let's go New York real estate. Let's send our kids to American universities." You know, our neighbors are awesome: Canada, Mexico and two big bodies of water. You know how much Turkey would love to have neighbors like that? Those are awesome neighbors.

Terrorism is a problem in the United States. God knows we know it here in New York. But it's a much bigger problem in Europe than the US. It's a much bigger problem in the Middle East than it is in Europe. These are factors of large magnitude. We just accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees, and we're complaining bitterly about it. You know why? Because they can't swim here. Right? I mean, the Turks would love to have only 10,000 Syrian refugees. The Jordanians, the Germans, the Brits. Right? That's not the situation. That's the reality of the United States.

Now, that sounds pretty good. Here's the challenge. In a G-Zero world, the way you lead is by example. If we know we don't want to be the global cop anymore, if we know we're not going to be the architect of global trade, we're not going to be the cheerleader of global values, we're not going to do it the way we used to, the 21st century is changing, we need to lead by example -- be so compelling that all these other people are going to still say, it's not just they're faster campers. Even when the bear is not chasing us, this is a good place to be. We want to emulate them.

The election process this year is not proving a good option for leading by example. Hillary Clinton says it's going to be like the '90s. We can still be that cheerleader on values. We can still be the architect of global trade. We can still be the global sheriff. And Donald Trump wants to bring us back to the '30s. He's saying, "Our way or the highway. You don't like it, lump it." Right? Neither are recognizing a fundamental truth of the G-Zero, which is that even though the US is not in decline, it is getting objectively harder for the Americans to impose their will, even have great influence, on the global order.

Are we prepared to truly lead by example? What would we have to do to fix this after November, after the next president comes in? Well, either we have to have another crisis that forces us to respond. A depression would do that. Another global financial crisis could do this. God forbid, another 9/11 could do that. Or, absent crisis, we need to see that the hollowing out, the inequality, the challenges that are growing and growing in the United States, are themselves urgent enough to force our leaders to change, and that we have those voices. Through our cell phones, individually, we have those voices to compel them to change.

There is, of course, a third choice, perhaps the most likely one, which is that we do neither of those things, and in four years time you invite me back, and I will give this speech yet again.

Thank you very, very much.

(Applause)

Trevor Timm: How free is our freedom of the press?

Source:TED

So this is James Risen. You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. If that sounds crazy, go read it. It's an incredible story.

  But you know who didn't like that chapter? The US government. For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a US government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists.

  You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him: he refused and said he'd rather go to jail. So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison.

  That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether. It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. They got his email records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower.

 Sadly, this is only one case of many. President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers, and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. Since 9/11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone.

  But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. Communications software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book, and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls. For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz, and is now developed at the non-profit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. From there, you can upload a document or send information much like you would on any other contact form. It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place.

SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals, or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water, or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who expose crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution.

Thank you.