Joe Rogan is a writer, speaker, podcaster, and podcaster. In this episode, we talk about how he got started in his career, how he became a media personality, and why he thinks we should all be worried about what s going on in the world around us. We also talk about his new book, Permanent Record, and how he thinks about the future of technology and government in the post-9/11 era. And of course, there's a lot more! Joe Rogan's book Permanent Record is out now, and it's available for purchase on Amazon for $19.99. You can also buy a copy of Permanent Record for $99.99 here. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can get a free eReader app from Amazon so you can read my book on any laptop, desktop, smartphone, or tablet device. It's free for a limited time, but you have to have a valid eReader device to use it. I'm giving away a Kindle Fire, a Surface Book 2, or a Surface Pro 3, and a Surface tablet, and I'll give you a $10 credit when you sign up for my free trial when you buy a book recommendation. Just use the promo code at checkout to receive $10 and receive a free copy of my book. Thank you for supporting the show! at linktr.ee/joerogansrjr/josephcrane and thank you for sponsoring the show. Thanks so much for sponsoring this episode! - we really appreciate it - it was a lot of fun, and we're looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much of your support and support the show and your support. - thank you, Joe Rogans and we'll see you back in 2020. Timestamps: 4:30 - 5:00 - What do you like it? 6:15 - What's your favorite kind of coffee? 7:00 8:20 - How do you feel about this episode? 9:40 - What would you like to hear me out in 2020? 10:30 11: What s your favorite part of the show? 12: What are you looking for me? 13:00s - what do you think of this podcast? 15:30s - my favorite part? 16:40s - how do you want to hear more?
00:00:56.000So I came on because I had just written a book called Permanent Record, which is the story of my life because that's what publishers make you do when you're writing your first book.
00:01:09.000But it's more than that because I didn't just want to talk about me.
00:01:12.000It's actually about the changing of technology and the changing of government in this sort of post 9-11 era.
00:01:18.000Which in our generation just sort of happened to be growing up during.
00:01:23.000And I was at the CIA and the NSA and all this stuff.
00:01:26.000But the day that the book came out, the government hit me with a lawsuit.
00:01:30.000And they hit the publisher of the books with a lawsuit.
00:01:35.000Because they don't want to see books like this get written.
00:01:37.000They especially don't want to see books like this get read.
00:01:41.000And so the big thing was, you know, we didn't know where this was going.
00:01:45.000We didn't know what was going to happen.
00:01:46.000And my publisher, of course, wanted me very badly to let people know this book existed in case the government leaned harder and harder and harder.
00:01:56.000The government is still pursuing that case quite strongly.
00:02:01.000They're more focused on the financial censorship side of it, basically taking the money that I made from it, kind of as a warning to the others, and getting a legal judgment against the publishers saying, you know, you can't pay this guy, that kind of thing.
00:02:16.000More so than taking the book off the shelves, but that's not because they're okay with the book being on the shelves.
00:02:22.000It's because, thankfully, we've got the First Amendment, and so they can't.
00:02:25.000And that's a very rare and good thing.
00:02:32.000They were like, well, what about Joe Rogan?
00:02:35.000I had heard about you at this point, but the only thing that I had really seen, that I really understood, had familiarity with, was you talking to Bernie Sanders, which, by the way, I very much appreciated hearing that, because a lot of people don't give the guy time to talk.
00:02:52.000Yeah, to hear him in those sound bites, you don't really get an understanding of who he actually is.
00:03:10.000But broadly, the media, the sort of more corporatized media, as we might say, is exactly what you just described, right?
00:03:18.000They want you to be able to answer in like 8, 15 seconds or less.
00:03:23.000And when we're talking about big massive shifts in society, when we're talking about power, when we're talking about technology and how it controls and influences us in the future, you can't have a meaningful conversation within those constraints.
00:03:38.000And so instead, these guys all want to say, repeat these long discredited sort of criticisms.
00:03:43.000And, you know, I'm sure you'll ask the same thing.
00:04:41.000And, like, I have to say, your logo...
00:04:45.000It's the worst thing in the world for people who are, like, trying to be, like, politically serious and, you know, they're worried about the National Security Advisor condemning it.
00:04:52.000Because, like, this bald guy with this maniacal grin and, like, the third eye on his forehead, and I'm like, oh, man, that show, you know?
00:05:07.000But that first impression, like, I... This almost didn't happen, but everybody who has talked to you, you know, everybody who watches your show, I think they get a very different impression than how you paint it.
00:05:20.000And for me, it's a wonderful thing because nobody understands that better than I do, right?
00:05:24.000Like, the government ran a smear campaign against me endlessly for six months when I came forward in June of 2013. I know we got way off topic here.
00:05:40.000Okay, so for those people, first off, who have no idea who the hell I am, I'm the guy who was behind the revelations of global mass surveillance in 2013. I worked for the CIA, I worked for the NSA as a contractor at the NSA,
00:05:56.000a staff officer at the CIA. I was undercover working at embassies.
00:06:01.000And I talk about the difference between this in a book and contractor and government official and how it's all sort of lost its meaning.
00:06:11.000And I saw basically the government was violating the law and what I believe to be the Constitution of the United States and more broadly human rights for everyone in the United States and around the world.
00:06:20.000There were domestic surveillance programs, there were mass surveillance programs that worked internationally.
00:06:26.000Basically everything that they could monitor They were monitoring.
00:06:30.000And this is actually, like, people go, well, isn't that obvious?
00:06:33.000Isn't that what they're supposed to do?
00:06:34.000And this is weird, but the answer actually is no.
00:06:38.000Under the framework of our Constitution, the government is only supposed to be monitoring people that it has an individualized, particularized suspicion of wrongdoing for, right?
00:06:48.000We think about this in the investigative means, right?
00:06:51.000Like all those TV shows where they're like, go and get a warrant.
00:06:55.000The reason they have to do that, like we fought a revolution over this, uh, you know, a couple hundred years back, um, is the idea that when we had, you know, kings, when we had governments of absolute power, uh, they could simply go in your home and go,
00:07:19.000Or you didn't find evidence, well, no harm, no foul.
00:07:21.000You're just doing what government does.
00:07:23.000Um, We were trying to build a better system where, yes, the government has extraordinary capabilities, but it only uses them where they're necessary, right?
00:07:36.000Where they're proportionate to the threat that is presented by this person.
00:07:40.000You know, like, we shouldn't be afraid of the person who's got, like, a baggie of weed in their dresser or something like that.
00:07:47.000That is not a threat to national security.
00:07:49.000That is not a threat to public safety.
00:07:52.000But what happened in the wake of 9-11 was a whole bunch of government officials got together behind closed doors.
00:07:58.000And this was actually led, interestingly enough, by the Vice President of the United States, Cheney.
00:08:03.000Everybody remembers that name or hopefully can look that name up, Dick Cheney.
00:08:09.000And his personal attorney, sort of the Giuliani of Dick Cheney, a guy named David Addington.
00:08:18.000And this lawyer, David Addington, wrote a secret legal interpretation that no one else was allowed to see.
00:08:26.000It was kept in the Vice President's safe at the White House.
00:08:30.000They weren't giving this, even when they told people, and it was just a couple people in Congress, Nancy Pelosi was one of them and a couple of these other folks.
00:08:39.000When they talked to the heads of the agency, the NSA and the CIA and the FBI and all this stuff, they told them the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel and the President's attorneys, all of these guys had decided this would be legal to do.
00:09:04.000And this became a mass surveillance program called Stellar Wind, which they said was supposed to monitor the phone calls and internet communications, emails, and things like that of everybody in the United States and around the world who they could get access to for links to Al-Qaeda.
00:09:20.000Because if you remember, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, they were singing...
00:09:28.000We thought there could be sleeper cells of al-Qaeda that were just, you know, peppered all throughout the country and they were going to spring up at any moment.
00:09:34.000Of course, like weapons of mass destruction, it just didn't exist.
00:09:39.000But on that basis, they started doing this in secret and it was completely unconstitutional.
00:09:44.000It was completely illegal, even under the very loose requirements of the Patriot Act.
00:09:49.000But they did it for so long That they got comfortable with it.
00:09:54.000And they thought, you know, this is a really powerful capability.
00:09:57.000What if we started using this for stuff that was other than terrorism?
00:10:00.000Because it wasn't finding any terrorists, because there weren't any terrorists in this context that they were looking for them.
00:10:07.000And the ones who, where there were terrorists, the program wasn't affected because these were guys in Pakistan that weren't using terrorism.
00:10:15.000They were getting on a, you know, moped with their cousin, who was a courier, who was bringing a letter to his guy, you know, who runs the food stand or whatever.
00:10:25.000But, bit by bit over time, this grew and grew and grew.
00:10:28.000And there were scandals, and if you want to drill down on these later, I'll go into them.
00:10:31.000But what happened was, step by step by step, our constitutional rights were changed.
00:10:44.000And even the many members of Congress, right, 535 in the United States, they were prohibited from knowing this.
00:10:52.000And instead, they told only a few select people.
00:10:55.000In the original case, there were only eight members of Congress, called the Gang of Eight, who knew about this.
00:11:02.000Then there were the people on the intelligence committees, both in the Senate and the House, who were told about this.
00:11:08.000But they were only told partially about it.
00:11:10.000They weren't told the full scope of it.
00:11:12.000And now that they had been told about it because they had security clearances and things like that, they weren't allowed to tell anybody else, even if they objected to it.
00:11:23.000And another one, I believe Tom Udall was the name of them, who did object to this and who wanted something to happen, but because they couldn't tell anybody that was happening, they were sort of doing these weird lassie barks to the press, where they were like, we have grave concerns about the way these programs are being carried out.
00:11:38.000But nobody knew what they were talking about.
00:11:40.000And so journalists were like, you know, they've got concerns.
00:11:46.000They couldn't tell what was happening.
00:11:47.000And so what had happened was that we, the American people, It sort of lost our seat at the table of government.
00:11:55.000We were no longer partner to government.
00:11:57.000We had simply become subject to government.
00:11:58.000And I think everybody who's in the world today, who is aware of what's going on, whether it's under this administration, the last administration, the one before that, right?
00:12:09.000They have seen a constant kind of shift where we have, we the public, have less say and less influence over the policy of government With each passing year, there's kind of a new class that's being created,
00:12:25.000a government class and then the public, a civil class, that are held to different standards of behavior.
00:12:31.000And when we start talking about leaking and whistleblowing, this becomes even more clear.
00:12:35.000And so, what I did I wanted to clarify that kind of Lassie mark, right?
00:12:41.000I just wanted everybody to know what was going on.
00:12:44.000I didn't want to say the government can't do this.
00:12:47.000I didn't want to say this is how you guys have to live, because that's not for me to say.
00:12:52.000But I do believe that everybody in the United States, and more broadly people in the world who are having their rights violated by a government, Should have at least an understanding of how that is happening, what the authorities, sort of the policies and programs that are enabling that are so that they can protest them,
00:13:09.000so that they can cast a vote about them, so that they can say, you know what, you guys say this is okay, but I disagree.
00:13:19.000And so I gathered evidence of what I believe to be.
00:13:22.000Criminal or unconstitutional activity on the part of the government.
00:13:26.000And I gave this to journalists, right?
00:13:29.000Now, I gave this to journalists under a very strict condition here, which was that they publish no story in this archive of information simply because it was interesting, right?
00:13:39.000No clickbait, not anything just because they thought it would make news, it would get them awards.
00:13:44.000They would only publish stories that they were willing to make an institutional judgment and stand behind.
00:13:50.000And this was three different newspapers.
00:13:53.000That it was in the public interest to know.
00:13:57.000And so then beyond that, there was additional, because if you could see sort of what I was doing here, what had happened, what had led us into this pitfall, was that The system of checks and balances that's supposed to self-regulate our government had failed.
00:14:16.000The courts had abdicated their role in policing the executive in the Congress because terrorism was such a hot argument at the time.
00:14:25.000They were worried about being criticized and blamed if something went wrong and an attack did go through.
00:14:29.000And they didn't have access to the information that the programs were ineffective.
00:14:33.000So they were just taking the government's word for it and they didn't want to weigh it in.
00:14:37.000Congress Most of them didn't even know, right?
00:14:41.000And the ones who did know, it was the same thing.
00:14:43.000They were getting their pockets stuffed with money by the defense contractors that were getting rich for building these systems that were violating the rights of each of us.
00:14:52.000So they benefited by just saying nothing.
00:14:55.000And then the executive themselves, whether we're talking about Bush, right, whether we're talking about Obama, or whether we're talking about Trump now, all these guys were okay with a constantly growing surveillance state.
00:15:05.000Because they're the ones whose hands were on the lever at the time.
00:15:40.000So when you have somebody who wants to inform the public of something, and we'll get into the proper channels arguments later, But you can't go through the institution to get these corrected because the institution knows it's wrong and is doing it anyway,
00:16:11.000I worked with the journalists and then to create an adversarial step, right?
00:16:16.000Someone who would argue against what I believed and hopefully what the journalists believed once they consulted the documents and basically authenticated them.
00:16:27.000Can we get the government to play that role, right?
00:16:31.000And so before the journalists published any story, and this is a controversial thing.
00:16:36.000People still criticize me for this, actually.
00:16:38.000They say I was too accommodated in government.
00:17:16.000Because there's a lot of people out there who don't like me, who criticize me, who go, this was unsafe, this caused harm to people or whatever.
00:17:26.000I came forward, and these stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism, starting way back in June of 2013. We've had six years to show bodies.
00:17:40.000And you know, as well as I do, the government's happy to leak things when it's in their interest.
00:17:46.000Nobody has been hurt as a result of these disclosures because everyone who was involved in them was so careful.
00:17:52.000We wanted to maximize the public benefit while mitigating the potential risks.
00:17:58.000And I think we did a pretty good job of it.
00:18:00.000But just to get back to the main thing, The original thing that got us off on that trail, when I came forward in June of 2013, I gave one interview to the people who were in the room with the documents, Laura Poitras,
00:19:04.000So they can controversialize the source of a story rather than having to confront the story itself.
00:19:12.000And that's why I said I really kind of appreciate your take on the media and everything like that because When you don't tell your story, you know, other people will tell it for you.
00:19:28.000They'll say so many things about you and they'll have these misimpressions like I did because of something as stupid as the avatar that you were using on Twitter, right?
00:19:36.000Where I think it's a certain kind of show with a certain kind of guy and it's this crazy stuff.
00:19:41.000But when I actually listen to you, When I actually look at the facts, right, and when I hear you just speak, I go, actually, this is a thoughtful guy.
00:19:50.000Actually, this is somebody who does care, who does want to look at these things deeply, and appearances and our first impressions can be very misleading.
00:20:59.000All these little suburban communities in Maryland where basically the entire industry of the state is the federal government of all these different agencies and then all the subcontractors, all the defense industries that serve that government and really are kind of our war-making machine, our system of control for the country and the world broadly.
00:21:18.000All that stuff spreads in, you know, a couple hundred mile radius out of D.C. My mother worked for the district courts, or rather the federal courts, and it's kind of funny because she still works there,
00:21:34.000and those are the courts that are trying to throw me in jail for the rest of my life now.
00:21:38.000My father worked for the Coast Guard, retired after 30 years.
00:21:41.000My grandfather was an admiral, and then he worked for the FBI. As far back as it goes, my family, my whole line of family, even generations back, was working for the government.
00:21:56.000So it was pretty ordinary, pretty expected for me to go into the same kind of work.
00:22:01.000Now, I started, I wasn't super successful in school, because I I felt, and you know, this is the most arrogant thing in the world that anybody says, that I had more to learn from computers than I did from,
00:23:03.000I think a lot of people have felt that.
00:23:07.000But I ran into somebody at the community college who ran their own home-based business.
00:23:12.000Doing web design and they could see I was kind of technical and they went, hey, do you want to work for me?
00:23:17.000And I was like, well, that sounds great.
00:23:20.000And so I started doing web design really, really early on.
00:23:23.000This is like, gosh, I don't know, probably 1998 vintage during the big boom and then the collapse that followed.
00:23:34.000And the funny thing is she worked, she was married to an NSA analyst, a linguist, right?
00:23:42.000And so she lived on Fort Meade and she ran her business out of their home on Fort Meade.
00:23:49.000It's right up the street from the NSA. So before I'm even working there, I'm driving past this building all of the time and trying to figure out what the next step is going to be.
00:25:18.000But at the NSA, then director Michael Hayden, he was a general.
00:25:25.000He later became director of the CIA. Ordered the entire campus evacuated of thousands, tens of thousands of people, actually, and just said, go home, right?
00:25:41.000At the moment, the country needed them more than they ever had, right?
00:25:47.000And I get a call Well, I hear a call that's from my boss's wife, her husband, to her.
00:25:58.000He's calling from the NSA and saying, hey, you know, I think Ed should leave for the day because I'm the only employee of this business besides her because I think they're going to close the base down.
00:26:33.000Because this is a military base, right?
00:26:34.000It's right outside the NSA. And I enter just this absolute state of pandemonium as I go past Canine Road, which is the road that travels right in front of the NSA's headquarters.
00:26:46.000And it's just a parking lot as far as you can see.
00:26:49.000They have military police out under...
00:26:53.000The stoplights directing traffic because it's this massive evacuation.
00:26:57.000And I still have no idea what's happening.
00:27:11.000Why did these people have so much power and so much money and so much authority that if at the moments we need them the most, they're the first ones in the country that are leaving their buildings?
00:27:23.000And, you know, later on, they said, and this is covered in a book, I believe, I think it's James Bamford, who interviewed that director of NSA who gave that order.
00:27:40.000He was going, well, you know, he called his wife and he was asking where their kids were and everything like that.
00:27:46.000And then after that, he wanted to think about, well, where could these other planes that they knew were in the air that hadn't struck yet, where could they be headed?
00:27:56.000And this sort of shows how self-centric the intelligence community is.
00:28:44.000But it's a question of risk assessment.
00:28:48.000If you have planes in the air, If you believe there's an ongoing terrorist attack that's happening in the United States right now, and if you have built history's greatest surveillance agencies, right,
00:29:04.000the most powerful intelligence forces in the history of the species, You are going to take those off the board or at least the majority of their personnel off the board then in a chance that you have no sort of grounds for substantiating that they could be targeting you to begin with simply because they could?
00:29:24.000Well, somebody else We'll get hit with those.
00:29:28.000As you say, it's gonna be the Pentagon, right?
00:29:34.000And the more minutes you're in front of that desk, the higher the chances, even if it's a very small chance, even if it's somebody who doesn't work on terrorism, right?
00:29:42.000Maybe if it's somebody who normally works finance in North Korea, right?
00:29:47.000But they go, look, this is an emergency.
00:30:22.000And this is, I think, it says so much about the bureaucratic character of how government works, right?
00:30:31.000The people who rise to the top of these governments.
00:30:36.000It's about risk management for them, right?
00:30:39.000It's about never being criticized for something.
00:30:41.000And this is, if we want to get really controversial, and this is something that'll haunt me, because people will bring it up again and again and again.
00:30:50.000People ask about, you know, people still criticize me.
00:30:53.000In the book, you know, I talk about aliens and chemtrails and things like that, and the fact that there's no evidence for that.
00:31:15.000But the idea that we're hiding them, If we are hiding them, I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups.
00:31:47.000These things all happen for a reason, this, that, and the other.
00:31:52.000There are real conspiracies, but they're not typically, you know, they've got tens of thousands of people working on them unless you're talking about the existence of the intelligence community itself, which is basically constructed on the idea that you can get,
00:32:07.000I think there's 4 million or 1.4 million people in the United States who hold security clearances.
00:32:15.000And you can get all of these people to not talk, ever, to journalists, to this, that, or the other.
00:32:21.000But when you look back at the 9-11 report, and when you look back at the history of what actually happened, what we can prove, right?
00:32:29.000Not what we can speculate on, but what are at least the commonly agreed facts.
00:32:36.000It's very clear to me, as someone who worked in the intelligence community, not during this period, of course, I was too young, but very shortly thereafter, that these attacks could have been prevented.
00:32:49.000And in fact, the government says this, too.
00:32:52.000But the government goes, the reason that these attacks happened, the reason that they weren't prevented, is what they call stove piping, right?
00:33:03.000They needed to break down the walls and the restrictions that were chaining these poor patriots at the NSA and the CIA and the FBI from all working on the same team.
00:33:13.000And to some extent, they're correct on this, right?
00:33:16.000There were limits on the way agencies were supposed to play ball with each other, but I worked there, and I know how much of this is bullshit and how much of this is not.
00:33:27.000Those are procedural and policy limits, in some cases legal limits, on what can be shared without following a process, without doing this, that, or the other, without basically asking for permission, without getting a sign-off, or anything like that.
00:33:42.000If the FBI wanted to send absolutely everything they had to the CIA, they could have done so.
00:33:46.000If the CIA wanted to send everything they had to the FBI, they could have done so.
00:33:51.000They didn't, and people died as a result.
00:33:53.000Now, government goes, bureaucratic proceduralism was responsible, and it's because we had too many restrictions on the intelligence community.
00:34:01.000And this is what led to the world post 9-11, where all of our rights sort of evaporated, was they went, well, restrictions on what these agencies can do are costing lives.
00:34:10.000Therefore, naturally, we just have to unchain these guys and everything will be better, right?
00:34:15.000And if you remember that post-9-11 moment, you can understand how that actually could come off as persuasive.
00:34:21.000How that might be a kind of thing that you go, alright, well that makes sense.
00:34:25.000Because everybody was terrified, right?
00:34:29.000There were people quite quickly who got their heads back on their shoulders the right way.
00:34:33.000There were some of them who never lost their heads at all, and who protested the Iraq War at the same time Maidah himself was signing up to go fight it, volunteering for the army.
00:34:47.000But everything that has followed in the decades past came from the fact that in a moment of fear, We lost our heads, and we abandoned all the traditional constitutional restraints that we put on these agencies,
00:35:06.000and we abandoned all of the traditional political restraints and just social constraints, ideological systems of belief about the limitations that the secret police should have in a free and open society.
00:35:22.000And we went, look, you know, terrorists.
00:35:25.000We created shows like 24 and Jack Bauer where he's like threatening to knife people's eyeballs out if they won't tell him this, that, or the other.
00:35:34.000We entered this era of increasingly unlimited government as a result.
00:35:39.000And now, in hindsight, we go, oh, we shouldn't have been surprised.
00:35:43.000But at the time, everyone panicked, right?
00:35:54.000I don't think any historian is going to look at the Bush administration and go, this improved the position of the United States in the world.
00:36:03.000But if you go back, you know, wind back the tape to that pre-9-11 moment, wind back the tape to those silos and those walls that they said needed to come down because that was restraining government, instead of the rules that said, well, you can share these things, but there's got to be a basis, there's got to be a justification, you've got to go,
00:36:19.000why are we trading people's information like baseball cards and all of this stuff?
00:36:24.000It's super easy as an intelligence officer to justify sharing information about a suspected terrorist who you think is planning to kill people or is even just in a country they shouldn't be or a place they shouldn't be or doing something you don't think they should be with another agency because no one's going to question that.
00:37:08.000The attacks probably could have been prevented if information had been shared.
00:37:13.000So, why wasn't the information shared?
00:37:16.000Government says Information wasn't shared because of these restrictions, and it's half true, because every important lie has some kernel of truth to it.
00:37:28.000But the reality is, why were those barriers respected in the case of a major terrorist plot?
00:37:35.000Why wasn't the CIA sharing information with the FBI? Why wasn't the FBI sharing information with the NSA? Why wasn't the NSA sharing information with the CIA in the case of a major terrorist plot?
00:37:45.000And if you've worked in government, if you've worked in the intelligence community, if you've worked in any large institution, if you work at a company that sells batteries, you know that every office is fighting the other office for budget, for clout, for promotions.
00:38:01.000And this is the sad reality of what actually happened.
00:38:05.000Every one of those agencies wanted to be the guy who busted the plot.
00:38:10.000They wanted to be the one who got credit for it.
00:38:12.000And they didn't realize how serious it was until it was too late because they were competing with each other rather than cooperating.
00:38:21.000That's exactly what I was going to ask you.
00:38:23.000If that was the issue, the competition between these agencies, because they are very proud of the CIA accomplishing something or the FBI accomplishing something, and they want to be the one to take credit for that.
00:38:36.000Yeah, and I mean, I think it's important, like, in their defense, because nobody else here is going to provide a defense for them, is that that's actually darkly human.
00:38:49.000Again, this happens in every industry.
00:38:51.000This happens in every sort of big corporate thing, because you want to get promoted, and, you know, everybody's putting in their, like, achievements at the end of the year for what they did.
00:38:59.000And if you're the guy who does that, you're going straight to the top.
00:39:05.000So we have a weird delay here for folks that are listening.
00:39:08.000So their solution, instead of having someone be responsible for bridging the gap and providing that information to each individual agency, their solution was mass surveillance?
00:39:53.000There's always going to be terrorists.
00:39:55.000Whether they're at your church, whether they're across the ocean, there are people out there who are angry, they're disenfranchised, they're violent, and they just want to harm something.
00:40:08.000They want to change something, even in a negative way, because that's what they feel.
00:40:44.000And they said this to Dick Cheney, which is a historic mistake, because Dick Cheney knows how government works.
00:40:51.000He was the person in that White House who was best placed to know all the levers of government, all the interagency cooperation, where we were strong, where we were weak, what we could do, what we were not allowed to do.
00:41:05.000And what he did was he took that little dial on what we're not allowed to do, and he changed it all the way until it broke and snapped off, and then there was nothing that we couldn't do anymore.
00:41:16.000And you were there while this was happening?
00:41:43.000What we have, though, the reason that I bring this up is this is a teachable moment because there's so many people right now in the Trump administration Who go, look, this guy has too much power.
00:42:27.000And the dark thing is, this is actually why he was elected.
00:42:33.000In moments of fear, Where the world starts falling apart, and this happens in authoritarian country after country, this is why you have Vladimir Putin in Russia who's been there for 20 years, right?
00:42:49.000You know, he sort of skipped in the middle there because he had to dodge the fact that presidents can only serve so many consecutive terms, so he dropped down to prime minister and then came back as president.
00:43:01.000How do you get that kind of political longevity?
00:43:04.000And it's because, if you know anything about Russian history, which, you know, even I don't know that much about, the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were an extraordinarily dark time.
00:43:13.000If you look at Russian cinema, all they had were gangster movies, right?
00:43:17.000All they had were the disintegration of society, how things are dark and broken, no one trusts each other, pensions were no longer being paid, Social Security's not there anymore.
00:43:26.000Like, there's nothing to buy, there's nothing to do, there's no job, no one had a future.
00:43:31.000And so they went, if there's somebody who can lead us out of this, if there's somebody who will fix this, who will find us an enemy and defeat that enemy to restore prosperity, we'll put them in office.
00:43:41.000We see it happen in Turkey with Erdogan, right?
00:43:44.000We've seen it happen successively with bad governments, even in Western democracies.
00:43:50.000We see it happening, sadly, in places like Poland and Hungary.
00:43:55.000You can even argue it's happening in the United Kingdom, right?
00:43:59.000And now there are a lot of people arguing that's exactly what we're seeing with Donald Trump's White House in the United States.
00:44:06.000And this is the lesson that we didn't learn from 2001. When we become fearful, we become vulnerable to anyone who promises they will make things better, even if they have no ability to make things better,
00:44:22.000even if they will actively make things worse, even if they will make things better for themselves and their buddies by taking from you.
00:44:30.000But if they tell you that they'll make things better and you believe them in a moment of fear, that typically leads to unfortunate outcomes.
00:44:40.000So sorry, let me turn this back over to you because we got way off track there.
00:44:44.000I want to bring it back to the initial question.
00:44:46.000So you're working for the NSA. When do you realize there's a huge issue, and when do you feel this responsibility to let the American people know about this issue?
00:44:56.000Like, when do you contact these journalists, and what was the thought process regarding this?
00:45:03.000Once you realize that this was in violation of the Constitution, and that even with the laws of the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, Things had changed so radically that you knew this was wrong, and you had to do something about it, or you felt a responsibility to speak out.
00:45:19.000Okay, so since we gave so much historical preamble, let me just give the CliffsNotes version to get us up to that.
00:45:27.000So, after September 11th, I'm a little bit lost.
00:45:30.000I'm doing my technical stuff, but it doesn't really feel like it matters anymore.
00:45:33.000Like, I'm making more money, I'm becoming more accomplished.
00:45:58.000And he was a young guy who was not especially political, right?
00:46:04.000And I come from a military background, federal family, all that stuff, and so that means I'm very vulnerable to this kind of stuff.
00:46:11.000I see it on the news, and Bush and all his sort of cronies are going, look, it's Al-Qaeda, it's a terrorist organization, they have all these international connections, there's Iraq, you know, dictators, weapons of mass destruction, they're holding the world at ransom,
00:46:27.000you got Colin Powell at the UN dangling little vials of like fake anthrax, And so I felt an obligation to do my part, and so I volunteered to join the Army.
00:46:38.000You probably can't tell from looking at me, but I'm not going to be at the top of the MMA circuit anytime soon.
00:46:47.000I joined a special program that was called the 18 X-ray program, where they take you in off the street, and they actually give you a shot at becoming a Special Forces soldier.
00:46:55.000So you train harder in special platoons, you go further.
00:46:59.000And I ended up breaking my legs, basically.
00:47:01.000So they put me out under special discharge.
00:47:25.000I was in great shape in boot camp because I came up really quick because all I could do was gain, but it was just too much on my frame because I wasn't that active.
00:47:39.000And so when you keep running on a stress injury, right, and you're running under weight with like rucksacks and things like that, you're running in like boots.
00:47:47.000And then you're doing exercise and the army is like a whole chapter in the book.
00:47:52.000You got your battle buddy, right, because they never allow you to be alone.
00:47:55.000You always got to have somebody watching you.
00:49:38.000I get in my rack, and the next morning when I get out of the rack, which is the top bunk bed, right, I jump out and my legs, they just give out underneath me.
00:49:47.000And I try to get up and I just can't get up.
00:49:50.000And so I go to sick call and I end up going to the hospital and they end up x-raying me and they also x-ray my battle buddy because I got to go there with somebody else.
00:51:26.000You know, they sent me to Sick Call, or sorry, the Sick Bay, where you're in like the medical platoon and you do nothing for, I think, about a month.
00:51:39.000And then they let you out once the paperwork all finishes.
00:51:42.000But in hindsight, I realized that if you take an administrative discharge, it exempts the Army for liability for your injuries.
00:51:52.000So actually what I thought was a kindness was just, you know, now if I had future problems with my legs, they wouldn't have to cover it or health insurance or any of those things.
00:52:02.000But anyway, I get out of the Army, and here...
00:52:07.000I'm on crutches for a long time and just sort of trying to figure out, alright, well, what's next in life?
00:52:16.000Because I had gotten a basic security clearance just for going through signing up for the military process, I applied for a security guard position at the University of Maryland because it said you had to get a top-secret clearance,
00:52:31.000which was a higher clearance than I had at the time.
00:52:35.000And I went, well, that sounds good because I knew if I combine my IT skills, which were now suddenly much more relevant again to my future, with a top-secret security clearance because of the way it works, if you have a top-secret security clearance and tech skills, you get paid a ridiculous amount of money for doing very little work.
00:52:52.000So I was like, all right, well, you know, I can basically make twice what I would be making in the private sector working for government at this level, at this phase.
00:53:00.000Because what we talked about earlier with September 11th and how the intelligence community changed, they no longer cared that I hadn't graduated from college, right?
00:53:10.000And I had gotten a GED just by going in and taking a test.
00:53:13.000So for government purposes, it was the same as if I was a high school graduate.
00:53:19.000So now suddenly it was like these doors were open.
00:53:21.000Now this University of Maryland facility turned out to be an NSA facility.
00:53:29.000It was called CASEL, the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland College Park.
00:53:37.000And all I was was literally a security guy, walking around with a walkie-talkie, making sure nobody breaks in at night, managing the electronic alarm system and things like that.
00:53:49.000But once I had my foot in the door there, I could start climbing the ladder step by step.
00:53:56.000And I applied for, or I went to a job fair, actually, that was only for people who had security clearances.
00:54:06.000And I ended up going to the table for one of the technical companies.
00:54:08.000It was a little tiny subcontractor nobody's ever heard of.
00:54:13.000And they said, you know, we've got tons of positions for somebody like you.
00:54:26.000And suddenly, I've gone from working for the NSA through a university in a weird way, where it's like the NSA holds the clearance, but I'm formally an employee of the state of Maryland at the college.
00:55:18.000I can go down to the gym at like 2 o'clock in the morning at the CIA and it's like not see a soul on the other side of the building and then go all the way back.
00:55:28.000And this kind of thing was my end because they were like, look, it's the night shift.
00:56:12.000And it's just me and one other guy on the night shift.
00:56:15.000And if you're interested in the book, there's a lot of detail on this.
00:56:19.000But I get sort of scouted from this position because they realize I actually know a lot about technology.
00:56:24.000They were expecting me just to basically make sure the building doesn't burn down, all these systems don't go down overnight and then never come back up.
00:56:35.000But they go, well, are you willing to go overseas?
00:56:40.000And to a young man at that age, that's actually like, hey, that sounds kind of exciting.
00:56:43.000You know, who doesn't want to go work overseas for the CIA? And there's a lot of people listening to the podcast who are like, not me.
00:56:58.000They're like, what, are you going to go overthrow a government somewhere?
00:57:01.000But you have to understand that I'm still very much a true believer.
00:57:05.000The government is like the living, compressed embodiment of truth and goodness and light, you know, the shining city on the hill.
00:57:12.000So I want to do my part to spread that to the world.
00:57:16.000I didn't have skepticism is really what I'm trying to establish here.
00:57:22.000And so I sign up and I go through this special training school, like people hear in movies about The Farm, which is down at Camp Peary in Virginia.
00:57:30.000I'm sent to this actually much more secret facility called The Hill, which is in Warrington, Virginia.
00:57:41.000This has been covered a few times in open source media, but I think this is one of the few book-length discussions of what happens there in permanent record.
00:57:55.000But yeah, so I go through training and then I get assigned overseas and I end up in Geneva, Switzerland, undercover as a diplomat, right?
00:58:02.000I think my formal title for the embassy is like something super bland, like diplomatic attache.
00:58:10.000And what I am is I'm a forward deployed tech guy.
00:58:13.000They send you through this school to make you into kind of a MacGyver.
00:58:17.000Yes, you can handle all the computers, but you can also handle the connections for the Embassy's power systems, the actual electrical connections.
00:58:54.000Still enjoyed it, but this was where I first, working with intelligence, started to get doubts.
00:59:01.000And the story's been told many times, so I won't go over it in full detail here.
00:59:07.000But the CIA does primarily, and it's not the only thing they do, what's called human intelligence.
00:59:16.000Now, there are many different types of intelligence that the intelligence community is responsible for.
00:59:24.000The primary ones are human intelligence and signals intelligence.
00:59:28.000You want to think of signals intelligence as tapping lines, hacking computers, all of these sort of things that provide electronic information, anything that's a digital or analog signal.
00:59:41.000That can be intercepted and then turned into information.
00:59:44.000Human intelligence is, you know, all that fun stuff we've heard the CIA doing for decades and decades, which is where they try to turn people.
00:59:53.000Basically they say, look, we'll give you money if you sell out your country.
00:59:59.000It's not even your country a lot of times.
01:00:02.000These guys could be working for a telecommunications provider and they want to sell customer records or they work at a bank, which was the thing that I saw.
01:00:10.000We wanted records on the bank's customers, so we wanted a guy on the inside.
01:00:15.000But anyway, that's sort of how it works.
01:00:18.000And what I saw was they were way more aggressive for the lowest stakes than was reasonable or responsible.
01:00:27.000They were totally willing to destroy somebody's life just on the off chance they would get some information that wouldn't even be tremendously valuable.
01:00:37.000And so, you know, ethically that struck me It's a bit off, but I let it pass because what I've learned over my life, short though it's been, you know,
01:00:54.000is that skepticism is something that needs to build up over time.
01:00:58.000It's a skill, something that needs to be practiced, or you can think of it as something that you develop through exposure.
01:01:04.000Kind of like a radiation poisoning, but in a positive way.
01:01:08.000It's when you start to realize Inconsistencies, or hypocrisies, or lies.
01:01:19.000And you notice them, and you know, you give somebody the benefit of the doubt, or you trust them, or you think it's alright, but then over time, you see it's not an isolated instance, it's a pattern behavior.
01:01:30.000And over time, that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds and builds until it's something that you can no longer ignore.
01:01:38.000Now after the CIA, I went to the NSA in Japan, where I was working there in Tokyo.
01:01:46.000And then from there, a couple years later, I went to the CIA again.
01:01:52.000Now I was working as a private employee for Dell, but I was the senior technical official on Dell's sales account to the CIA. You know, people, these big companies, they have sales accounts to the CIA. And so this means I'm going in, and now it's crazy because I'm still a very young man,
01:02:08.000but I'm sitting across the table from chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions.
01:02:12.000I'm sitting across from their chief technology officer for the entire agency, or the chief information officer for the entire CIA. And these guys are going, look, here's our problems.
01:03:00.000But Amazon runs a secret cloud system for the government.
01:03:06.000I forget what they've rebranded it now.
01:03:09.000But this is just, there's this massive connection between industry and government in the classified space that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
01:03:18.000But at this point, I was already, I had misgivings because of what I'd seen in Japan about government, but I was just trying to I was trying to ignore the conflicts.
01:03:32.000I was trying to ignore the inconsistencies.
01:03:36.000And I think this is a state that a lot of people in these large institutions, not just in our country, but around the world, struggle with every day, right?
01:04:10.000And when I had gone to Hawaii, which was the final position in my career with the intelligence community, I was, because of an accident of history here,
01:04:26.000I wasn't supposed to be in this position at all.
01:04:28.000I was supposed to be at a group called the National Threat Operations Center, NDOC. But because of the way contracting works, and again this is covered in the book, I end up being reassigned to this little rinky-dink office that nobody's ever heard of in Hawaii called the Office of Information Sharing.
01:04:54.000And I'm replacing this old-timer who's about to retire.
01:05:00.000But he spent most of his days just reading novels and doing nothing and letting people be content to the fact or letting people forget that his office existed because he was the only one in it.
01:05:12.000There's a manager who's like over him but it's actually over a larger group and he just looks over him as sort of a favor.
01:05:20.000So now I come in, and now I'm the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing, but I'm not close enough to retirement that I'm okay with just doing nothing at all.
01:05:31.000So I get ambitious, and I come up with this idea for a new system called the heartbeat.
01:05:37.000And what the heartbeat is going to do...
01:05:42.000Is connect to basically every information repository in the intelligence community, both at the NSA and across network boundaries, which you normally can't cross, but because I'd worked at both the CIA and the NSA, I knew the network well enough,
01:05:58.000both sides of it, sides that normal workers at the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other.
01:06:03.000I could actually connect these together.
01:06:05.000I could build bridges across this kind of network space.
01:06:11.000And then draw all of these records into a new kind of system that was supposed to look at your digital ID. Basically, your sort of ID card that says, this is who I am.
01:06:34.000Because of that, the system would be able to eventually aggregate records that were relevant to your job, that were related to you, and then it could provide them.
01:06:44.000And basically, you could hit this site.
01:06:46.000It would be an update of what we used to call read boards, which were manually created.
01:06:57.000These are all the things that are happening on network defense.
01:07:00.000You work on, I don't know, economic takeovers in Guatemala.
01:07:04.000This is what's going on for you there.
01:07:08.000But in my off time, I helped the team that sat next to me, which was a systems administration team for Windows Networks, because I had been a Microsoft-certified systems engineer, which means basically I knew how to take care of Windows Networks.
01:07:24.000And this was all those guys did, and they always had way too much work, way too much work, and I had basically no work that I needed to do at all.
01:07:35.000because all I was supposed to do was share information which was not something that was particularly in demand because most people already knew what they wanted or what they needed so it was basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck unless I wanted to get ambitious and so I did some side gigs for these other guys and one of them was running what were called dirty word searches Now,
01:08:34.000This over-classification problem is one of the central flaws in government right now.
01:08:40.000This is the reason we don't understand what they're doing.
01:08:42.000This is why they can get away with breaking the law or violating our rights for so long, you know, 5 years, 10 years, 15, 50 years, before we see what they were doing.
01:08:55.000And it's because of this routine classification, right?
01:08:59.000But every system, computer system, has a limit on what level of classified information is supposed to be stored on it.
01:09:08.000And we've got all these complicated systems for code words and caveats that Establish a system of what's called compartmentation.
01:09:34.000And the reason they have this is they don't want one person to be able to go and know everything, right, and tell everybody everything.
01:09:41.000They don't want anybody to know too much, particularly when they're doing lots of bad things, because then there's the risk that you realize they're doing so many bad things that it's past the point that we can justify, and they might develop sort of an ideological objection to that.
01:09:58.000Well, in the Office of Information Sharing, and actually in basically every part of my career before that, I had access to everything.
01:10:08.000I had what was called a special caveat on my accesses called PRIVAC, which means Privileged Access.
01:10:17.000What this means is you're a kind of super user.
01:10:19.000You know, most people have all of these controls and the kind of information they can access.
01:10:24.000But I'm in charge of the system, right?
01:10:25.000People who need information, they have to get it from somewhere.
01:10:41.000And so dirty word searches were these kind of automated queries that I would set up to go across the whole network and look at all of the different levels of classification and compartmentation and exceptionally controlled information that's kind of,
01:10:57.000you can think of it as above top secret in these special compartments, right, where you're not even supposed to know what these compartments are for.
01:11:04.000You only know the code word unless you work in them, unless you have access to them, unless you read into them.
01:11:11.000One day I get a hit on the dirty word search for a program that I'd never heard of called Stellar Wind.
01:11:19.000It came back because the little Caveat for it.
01:11:28.000They're called handling caveats, which is like, you know, you can think of like burn after reading or for your eyes only.
01:11:33.000But this one's called STLW, which means Stellar Wind.
01:11:37.000And unless you know what Stellar Wind is, you don't know how to handle it.
01:11:39.000All I knew was it wasn't supposed to be on my system.
01:11:44.000And it turned out this document was placed on the system because one of the employees who had worked on this program years before had come to Hawaii.
01:11:53.000And this person was a lawyer, I believe.
01:11:57.000And they had worked in the Inspector General's office, and they had compiled a report, part of the Inspector General's report, which is when the government is investigating itself, into a The operations and activities of this program.
01:12:14.000Well, this was the domestic mass surveillance program that I talked about in the very beginning of our conversation that started under the Bush White House.
01:12:23.000Stellar Wind was no longer supposed to be really an operation.
01:12:28.000It had been unveiled in a big scandal.
01:12:32.000In December 2005 in the New York Times by a journalist, James Risen.
01:12:38.000And I'm not going to name him because I don't want to get it wrong.
01:12:51.000What they had found was, of course, the Bush White House had constructed a warrantless wiretapping program, if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal, that was affecting everyone in the United States.
01:13:10.000Really put in a difficult position by this scandal.
01:13:13.000They would have lost the election over this scandal because the New York Times actually had this story in October 2004, which was the election year.
01:13:26.000With it, but at the specific request of the White House, talking to the publisher of the New York Times, Sulzberger and Bill Keller, then the executive editor of the New York Times, the New York Times said, we won't run the story.
01:13:43.000Because the president just said, if you run this story a month before the election, that's a very tight margin if you recall, you'll have blood on your hands.
01:13:53.000And it was so close to 2001, the New York Times just went, you know what, fine.
01:13:59.000Americans don't need to know that the Constitution is being violated.
01:14:02.000They don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think it means.
01:14:10.000If the government says it's alright and it's a secret and you shouldn't know about it, that's fine.
01:14:15.000Now, December 2005, why did that change?
01:14:18.000Why did the New York Times suddenly run this story?
01:14:20.000Well, it's because James Risen, the reporter who found this story, had written a book.
01:14:26.000And he was about to publish this book.
01:14:28.000And the New York Times was about to be in a very uncomfortable position of having to explain why they didn't run this story.
01:14:35.000And how they got scooped by their own journalists.
01:14:38.000And so they finally did it, but it was too late.
01:14:41.000And now it was sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights.
01:14:45.000So Congress, the Bush White House was very effective in, as I said before, telling a very few select members of Congress that this program existed.
01:14:56.000And they told them this program existed in ways that they wouldn't object to, but made them culpable.
01:15:03.000For hiding the existence of the program from the American people.
01:15:08.000And this is why someone like Nancy Pelosi, who you wouldn't exactly think would be buddy-buddy with George Bush, was completely okay in defending this kind of program, in fact.
01:15:17.000And you know, later she said, oh, well, she had objections to the program that she wrote in a letter to the White House, but she never showed us the letter.
01:15:24.000She went, oh, well, that was classified, right?
01:15:27.000And this is not to bag on her individually, it's just she's a great example in here, a named example everyone knows, of how this process works.
01:15:36.000The White House will implicate certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity.
01:15:43.000And so then when the White House gets in trouble for it, the Congress has to run cover for the White House.
01:15:50.000And so what happened was Congress passed an emergency law in 2007 It's called the Protect America Act, which should have been our first indication this is a very bad thing, because they never name a law something like that unless it's something terrible.
01:16:08.000And what it did Was it retroactively immunized all of the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day by handing your records over to the government,
01:16:25.000which they weren't allowed to do, simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying, please do this.
01:16:32.000And these companies went, look, now that we've been uncovered, now that we've been shown that we're breaking, or now that...
01:16:40.000These journalists have shown that we've broken the law and violated the rights of Americans on a staggering scale that could bankrupt our companies because we can be sued for this.
01:16:51.000We will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this.
01:16:58.000And so we get the Protect America Act, which they say is an emergency.
01:17:18.000Bush is going to end the warrantless wiretapping program and continue it under this new authority where it's going to have some special level of oversight and these kind of things eventually.
01:17:28.000But for now, we just have to make sure people are safe.
01:17:47.000The Bush White House gets off the hook.
01:17:48.000The Congress that was then chairing in criminal culpability for authorizing, or rather letting these things go by without stopping them, then passes in 2008 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008. This is called the FAA,
01:18:09.000FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And rather than stopping all of the unlawful and unconstitutional activities that the intelligence agency was doing, They continued it in different ways simply by creating a few legal hoops for them to jump through.
01:18:31.000Now, this is not to say, you know, these things aren't helpful at all.
01:18:34.000It's not to say they're not useful at all.
01:18:36.000But it's important to understand, when the government's response to any scandal, and this applies to any country, is not to make the activities of the person who was caught breaking the law comply with the law, But instead make the activities of the person who is breaking the law legal,
01:18:57.000They make the law comply with what the agencies want to do, rather than make the agencies comply with the law.
01:19:04.000That's a problem, and that's what happened here.
01:19:08.000Now, the intelligence community's powers actually grew in response to this scandal in 2008 because Congress was on the hook and they just wanted to move on and get this over with.
01:19:20.000There were people who knew this was a bad idea, but it passed on.
01:19:23.000Now, what the public took away from this, because a part of these laws...
01:19:28.000It was a requirement that the Inspector General of all of these different intelligence community elements and the Director of National Intelligence submit a report saying, this is what happened under that warrantless wiretapping program.
01:19:46.000This is how it complied with the law or how it didn't comply with the law.
01:19:49.000And basically look At how this program was constituted, what it did, what the impacts and effects were, and that was supposed to be sort of the Truth and Reconciliation Council, right?
01:20:06.000Now, why am I talking about all this ancient history?
01:20:09.000Well, I'm sitting here In 2012, with a classified inspector general's draft report from the NSA that names names that says Dick Cheney, that says David Addington, that says Nancy Pelosi, that says all these people who are involved in the program,
01:20:27.000It says the director of the NSA, that guy who was evacuating the building at the beginning of our podcast here, That guy was asked by the President of the United States if he would continue this program after being told by the White House and the Department of Justice that these programs were not lawful,
01:21:20.000And this is something that people have lost.
01:21:22.000We hear this phrase over and over again, national security, national security, national security, and we're meant to interpret that to mean public safety.
01:21:31.000But national security is a very different thing from public safety.
01:21:34.000National security is a thing that in previous generations we referred to as state security.
01:21:39.000National security was a kind of term that came out of the Bush administration to run cover for the fact that we were elevating a new kind of secret police across the country.
01:21:54.000And what does it mean when, again, in a democracy in the United States, The public is not partner to government.
01:22:03.000The public does not hold the leash of government anymore, but we are subject to government, right?
01:22:11.000And we're not even allowed to know that it happened.
01:22:13.000Now, in the book, I tell the fact that I had access to the unclassified version of this report back in Japan.
01:22:24.000And what's interesting is the unclassified version of a report, and we've all seen this today with things like the Mueller report and all of the intelligence reporting that's happened over the last several years, when the government provides a classified report to the public, it's normally the same document.
01:22:39.000The unclassified version, the classified version of the same thing, just the unclassified version has things blacked out or redacted that they say, oh, you're not allowed to know this sentence or this paragraph or this page or whatever.
01:22:51.000The document that the public had been given About the Warrantless Wiretapping Program was a completely different document.
01:23:02.000It was a document tailor-made to deceive and mislead the Congress and the public of the United States.
01:23:31.000It's ordinary people from the working level to the management level who go, if we don't explain this in a certain way, we're all going to lose our jobs.
01:23:46.000Or the other way, they go, we're going to get something out of this if we all work together.
01:23:52.000Civilization is the history of conspiracy, right?
01:23:54.000What is civilization but a conspiracy for all of us to do better by working together, right?
01:24:05.000That I think too often we forget because it's boring as hell.
01:24:08.000I want all your listeners to go to the Washington Post because this document that I discovered that really changed me has been published, courtesy of the Washington Post.
01:24:17.000It's called the Inspector General's Report on Stellar Wind.
01:24:22.000And you can look at the actual document that I saw that was unredacted.
01:24:29.000And what I believe it shows Some of the most senior officials in the United States, elected and unelected, worked together to actively undermine the rights of the American people to give themselves expanded powers.
01:24:51.000Now, in their defense, they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just and noble cause.
01:24:58.000They say they were trying to keep us safe.
01:26:08.000At the heart of it, in every expression of executive power, and by executive we mean the White House here, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the DOJ, these guys exist.
01:26:23.000As a part of the executive branch of government.
01:26:26.000In a real way, they work for the White House.
01:26:29.000Now there are laws and regulations and policies that are supposed to say they're supposed to do this, and they're supposed to say they're not supposed to do that.
01:26:36.000But when you look at federal regulations, when you look at policies as an employee of government, when you violate these policies, The worst thing that happens to you is you lose your job because there's no criminal penalty for the violation of these laws.
01:26:52.000And so it's very easy for people who exist in these structures, particularly the very top levels of these structures, to go, look, we have a given set of lawful authorities.
01:27:05.000And these are defined very broadly to give us leeway to do whatever it is we think is proper and appropriate and just.
01:27:14.000Now, take that proper and appropriate and just from the perspective of any given individual, any given president, and now intersect that with what's good for them politically.
01:27:29.000And that's where problems begin to arise.
01:27:32.000Now, the safety measure that's supposed to protect us from this in the US system and any democracy broadly is these people are supposed to be what are called public officials.
01:27:47.000That means we know their programs and prerogatives and powers, like what they are doing, both in our name and what they're doing against us.
01:27:56.000And because they are transparent to us, we, the people, can then police their activities.
01:28:07.000We can try to become the president, do whatever.
01:28:11.000They are public officials, and we are private citizens.
01:28:14.000They're not supposed to know anything about us, right?
01:28:17.000Because we, in relative terms, hold no power, and they hold all the power, so they have to be under the tightest constraints.
01:28:23.000We need to be in the freest circumstances.
01:28:27.000And yet, The rise of the state secrets doctrine, right, this whole classification system that goes all the way back to last century, about the middle of the last century, I believe, is when it really started getting tested in court.
01:28:41.000And I think you know more about this in many cases than I do when you start talking about what happened in the FBI and the CIA and the NSA's sort of old dirty work in the 20th century.
01:29:01.000They abused their powers repeatedly and continuously.
01:29:04.000They did active harm to domestic politics in the United States.
01:29:08.000The FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself before the Nobel Prize was going to be awarded.
01:29:18.000In fact, after MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech, Two days later, the FBI classified him as the greatest national, or I think it was the greatest national security threat in the United States.
01:29:33.000And again, this is the FBI. This is the group that everybody's applauding today, saying, oh, these wonderful patriots and heroes.
01:29:40.000Now, I'm not saying everybody in the FBI is bad.
01:29:43.000I'm not saying everybody at the CIA and the NSA is bad.
01:29:47.000I'm saying that you don't become a patriot based on where you work.
01:29:51.000Patriotism is not about loyalty to government.
01:29:57.000Patriotism, in fact, is not about loyalty to anything.
01:30:01.000Patriotism is a constant effort to do good for the people of your country.
01:30:14.000And we'll get into loyalty later because I think one of the big criticisms against me that should be talked about is they go, look, this guy is disloyal.
01:30:49.000But yeah, when you get back into this whole thing about sort of where it came from, Why it happened, how it could come out of just this small group, and then they could slowly kind of poison by implication,
01:31:05.000by complicity, by bringing them into the conspiracy and then having them not say anything about it, a wider and wider broad body of people.
01:31:15.000And then once you've got enough people in on it, it's much easier to convince other people that it's legitimate, because they can go, look, we've got 30 people who know about this, and none of them have objected to it.
01:31:27.000All of this derives from that original sin, which is in a democracy, creating a system of government, That is, in fact, a secret government, a body of secret law, a body of secret policy, that is far beyond what legitimate government secrets could be.
01:31:47.000This is not to say, like, government can have no secrecy at all.
01:31:51.000If the government wants to investigate someone without having them respond, right?
01:31:56.000We're talking traditional law enforcement.
01:31:57.000Sure, you're not going to tell this mobster, hey, you know, we're going to start investigating you.
01:32:02.000We, the public, don't need to know the names of every terrorist suspect out in the world, right?
01:32:07.000But we do need to know, again, the powers and programs, the policies that a government is asserting, at least the broad outlines of it, because otherwise how can we control it?
01:32:17.000How do we know if the government is applying its authorities that are supposed to be granted to it by us if we don't know what it is that they're doing?
01:32:29.000And so this is the main thing, and really the story behind the title, Permanent Record.
01:32:37.000Is, look, Joe, when you were a kid, you know, when I was a kid, when you were a teenager, right?
01:32:43.000Like, what's the worst thing you ever said?
01:32:46.000You know, did you say anything you weren't proud of?
01:32:49.000Did you do anything that you weren't proud of?
01:32:51.000Something that today, in like the wokest of Twitter land, you would get in trouble for.
01:32:58.000And that's one of the horrible things about kids growing up today is that they do have all this stuff out there on social media forever and they can be judged horribly by something they did when they were 13. It's exactly that.
01:33:15.000Our worst mistakes, our deepest shames, were forgotten.
01:33:34.000Now, we're forced to live in a real way naked before power.
01:33:40.000Whether we're talking about Facebook, whether we're talking about Google, whether we're talking about the government of any country, they know everything about us, or much about us, rather.
01:33:52.000And we know very little about them, and we're not allowed to know more.
01:33:56.000Everything that we do now lasts forever, not because we want.
01:34:01.000To remember, but because we're not allowed to forget.
01:34:06.000Just carrying a phone in your pocket is enough for your movements to be memorialized because every cell phone tower that you pass is keeping a record of that.
01:34:15.000And AT&T keeps those records going back to 2008 under a program called Hemisphere.
01:34:21.000If you search for Hemisphere in AT&T, you'll get a story in the Daily Beast about it.
01:34:26.000AT&T keeps your phone records going back to 1983. If any of your listeners were born after 1983, right, born after me, or it might be 1987, excuse me, 1987. If they were born after 1987, and they're an AT&T customer,
01:34:42.000or their calls across AT&T's network, AT&T has every phone call they ever made.
01:34:47.000Rather, the record that it happened, not necessarily the content that's on the phone call.
01:34:52.000And so, I mean, let me turn this around for you, Joe, because I feel like I've just been giving a speech.
01:34:59.000When you look at this stuff, when you look at what's happening with government, when you look at what's happening with the Trump White House, the Obama White House, the Bush White House, you could see this trend happening.
01:35:12.000When you look at what's happening with Facebook, when you look at what's happening with Google, when you look at the fact that you go to every restaurant today and you see people looking at phones, you get on a bus, you get on a subway, you see somebody sitting next to you in traffic, you see people looking at phones.
01:35:28.000These devices are connected all the time.
01:35:43.000And what is it that gives you sort of trust in the system, faith in the system?
01:35:49.000Just so we can start a conversation here, what strikes you about this?
01:35:55.000Well, it's completely alien and it's new.
01:35:58.000This is something that's unprecedented.
01:36:00.000We don't have a long human history of being completely connected via technology.
01:36:05.000This is something we're navigating right now for the first time.
01:36:08.000And it's probably the most powerful thing that the human race has ever seen in terms of the distribution of information.
01:36:16.000There's nothing That even comes close to it in all of human history, and we're figuring it out as we go along.
01:36:23.000And what you exposed is that not only are we figuring out as we go along, but that to cover their ass, these cell phone companies in cahoots with the government have made it legal for them to gather up all of your phone calls,
01:36:39.000all of your text messages, all of your emails.
01:36:42.000And store them somewhere so that retroactively, if you ever say anything they don't like or do something they don't like, they can go back, find that, and use it against you.
01:36:52.000And we don't know who they are, we don't know why they're doing it, and we didn't know they could do it until you exposed it.
01:36:58.000The connection of human beings via technology is both amazing and powerful and incredible in terms of our access to knowledge, but terrifying in terms of the government's ability to track our movements,
01:37:14.000track your phone calls, track everything.
01:37:16.000And under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and protecting us from sleeper cells, protecting us from attacks, they really are protecting us from these attacks.
01:37:26.000But there's There's no provision in the Constitution that allows any of this.
01:37:34.000And this is where it gets really squirrely because they're making up the rules as they go along and they're making up these rules the way you're describing it.
01:37:43.000This has happened to sort of protect their ass and keep themselves from being implicated in what has been a violation of our rights and our privacies and the Fourth Amendment.
01:37:54.000Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that...
01:38:00.000Everybody needs to understand, when you look at these things, and the reason, you know, we talked about before, when I got this information, why I didn't just put it on the internet, and people criticize me for this, they go, I didn't share enough information, because the journalists are gatekeeping,
01:38:42.000If you're spying on a Russian general in charge of a, you know, rocket division, useful, right?
01:38:49.000But there are lines and degrees in that where it's not useful.
01:38:55.000Now, the examples that I just gave you, these are targeted.
01:38:58.000This is where you're spying on an individual, their known named person that is being monitored for a specific reason that is related broadly to things that people...
01:39:09.000Well, even for foreign intelligence in some indications, you don't need a warrant strictly, although I think they should have warrants for all of these investigations because they established a court for precisely this reason called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
01:39:57.000And these kind of things I think people miss.
01:40:01.000I'm gonna throw up some slides here, so forgive me if this gets weird and I put up the wrong ones.
01:40:08.000But since I came forward, This Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the government says authorized these programs 15 different times was overruled by the first open courts to look at the program.
01:40:23.000These are federal courts here, right, that said, no, actually, these programs are unlawful.
01:40:29.000When you start looking at the facts, you see, even within the context of the very loose restrictions and laws that apply to the NSA and surveillance, They say they broke their own laws, you know, 2,776 times in a single year.
01:40:45.000And then you ask about that thing that motivates me, like why I came forward.
01:40:51.000We had been trying as a country before I came forward to prove the existence of these programs legally.
01:41:01.000Because this is our means of last sort of recourse in our system, right?
01:41:08.000We got the executive, we got the legislature, we got the judiciary, right?
01:41:13.000So Congress makes the laws, the executive's supposed to carry them out, the courts are supposed to play referee.
01:41:23.000Congress was turning a blind eye to the laws.
01:41:26.000And the courts were, and this is just months before I came forward, going, well, it does appear that the ACLU and Amnesty International, like all of these Human rights groups and non-governmental organizations had established that,
01:41:46.000you know, these programs are likely unlawful.
01:41:54.000But the government responded with this argument that you just saw, saying that, well, it's a state secret if they do exist.
01:42:02.000You, the plaintiffs, don't have hard, concrete evidence that they do exist, and the government is saying, legally, you have no right to discover evidence from the government, write documents, demand documents, or demand an answer from the government as to whether or not these things exist,
01:42:20.000because the government's just going to give its standard, what they call, Glomar response.
01:42:24.000We can neither confirm nor deny that these things exist.
01:42:30.000Which leaves the courts out in the cold.
01:42:31.000The courts go, look, the government could be breaking the law here.
01:42:35.000Look, they could be violating the Constitution here.
01:42:37.000But because you can't prove it, and because the government doesn't want to play ball, and the government says, if we were Doing this, it would be legal and it would be necessary for national security or whatever.
01:42:51.000The court can't presume to know national security better than the executive because the courts aren't elected.
01:42:59.000And so this leads to this fundamentally broken system where, okay, the only way to have the courts review the legality of the programs is to establish the programs exist.
01:43:10.000But the programs are classified, so you can't establish they exist unless you have evidence.
01:43:15.000But providing that evidence to courts, to journalists, to anyone, is a felony, right, that's punishable by 10 years per count under the Espionage Act.
01:43:26.000And the government has charged every source of public interest journalism, who's really made a significant difference in these kind of cases, Since Daniel Ellsberg, really going back to that, under the same Espionage Act, it's always the same law.
01:43:40.000And there's no distinction to government between whether you've sold information to a foreign government for private benefit, right?
01:43:49.000Or whether you provided information only to journalists for the public interest.
01:43:55.000And then that's a fundamentally harmful thing, I think.
01:45:11.000One of those senators I told you that objected to this stuff, that was doing the lassie barks for all those years, Ron Wyden.
01:45:18.000Was confronting the most senior spy in the United States, General James Clapper, who was then the Director of National Intelligence, right?
01:45:38.000And Ron Wyden asked him a very specific question about a program, mind you, that Ron Wyden knows exists.
01:45:45.000Because he has security clearance, he sits on the Intelligence Committee.
01:45:49.000And he knows there's domestic mass surveillance, and this is how it goes.
01:45:52.000This is how the top spy responds under oath.
01:45:58.000So, what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
01:46:34.000He actually admitted it was a lie after I came forward, you know, three months later.
01:46:41.000But he said it was the least untruthful thing he could think of to say in the context of being in the hot seat there.
01:46:50.000But what does it mean for a democracy when you can lie under oath to Congress, and the congressman even knows you're lying to them, but they're afraid to correct you?
01:46:59.000And Wyden, by the way, it wasn't a surprise.
01:47:01.000Wyden gave him those questions 24 hours in advance, and he wrote a letter afterwards asking for Clapper to amend his testimony, right?
01:47:09.000Not even at a press conference, but just say this was incorrect, whatever, so he could go through the legal process and show his fellow congressman That there was a problem and that they needed to do it.
01:47:48.000Even many people, many experts who have studied this, know are lies.
01:47:53.000But if you can't prove they are lies, how do you move beyond that?
01:47:58.000And that's really a question that has never been more relevant than I think it is today under the current White House.
01:48:05.000So you're in this position where you have this information and you know that these surveillance systems are in place and they're unconstitutional and you feel this deep responsibility to let the American people know about this.
01:48:34.000People, you know, yeah, right, exactly.
01:48:37.000People like to think it's like a cinematic moment where I find this golden document, like the Stellar Wind Report, and that's the closest thing to a smoking gun, right, that exists.
01:48:50.000But look, if you found that, you can read that later.
01:48:53.000And imagine yourself being like, oh, I'm going to go outside on the courthouse steps and wave this thing and burn my life to the ground, burn my family to the ground.
01:49:29.000To get over that hump because I was waiting for somebody else to do it.
01:49:32.000When I saw people like Ron Wyden on this, when I saw people like the court case that I showed before, where people were actively challenging these programs, right?
01:49:44.000And, you know, there are a lot of people who are going to be in, you know, the YouTube comments or whatever and go, oh, I knew this was happening.
01:49:56.000He initially was the one that came out and spoke about this issue.
01:50:04.000Bill Binney is part of, shall we say, the group of early NSA whistleblowers who came with Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, I believe, and Ed Loomis.
01:50:15.000And these guys all got their doors kicked in.
01:50:19.000By the FBI, Tom Drake, who was a senior executive at the NSA, this is a guy who had a lot to lose, was charged under the same law as the Espionage Act, and these guys were doing it earlier during the Bush administration.
01:50:31.000Some of them were talking to the journalists that, you know, maybe it's alleged, I don't want to put them on the spot, maybe they deny it, maybe they don't, leave that to them.
01:50:42.000But somebody somewhere was informing this reporting, right, that got into the New York Times about the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program.
01:50:50.000And eventually journalists put this out there.
01:50:51.000People knew these capabilities existed.
01:50:55.000But yeah, then there's the person in the YouTube comments who's like, oh, we knew all about this.
01:51:15.000You can have like the Juul versus NSA case that's run by the EFF, which is about AT&T. Setting up secret rooms in their telecommunications facilities where they basically drag all the fibers for their domestic internet communications and phone communications into a room that's purpose-built for the NSA and then they bring it out.
01:51:42.000But AT&T denies it's the NSA. The NSA denies that these things happen or that are done at all, right?
01:52:33.000And if you don't have the evidence, you can't prove it.
01:52:35.000And, of course, when we talk about the earlier stuff, right, like a more corporatized media, They've got a thousand incentives not to get involved in this stuff.
01:53:06.000And so, the only way to make sure people understand this broadly is if we all work together.
01:53:15.000If we collectively can establish a corpus of evidence, a body of facts that is so large and so persuasive, it overcomes the natural and understandable resistance of these more corporatized media groups.
01:53:34.000It overcomes the political and partisan sort of loyalties that all of these political factions in the country do, where they go, you know, it's my president.
01:53:44.000Even if I don't like this stuff, even if I don't agree with this stuff, I don't want to say it exists.
01:53:48.000I want to deny it until it's proved You know, in HD, on video, you know, signing the order to do this, that, or the other.
01:53:57.000Because otherwise, there's a chance my guy might not get re-elected.
01:54:00.000And that's the only way this kind of stuff can happen.
01:54:02.000And the sad fact is, the opportunities that we have to prove this, like the moments in history where we do prove something, anything, beyond a reasonable doubt, are so few and so rare that they almost always only come From whistleblowers.
01:54:22.000And I think that's one of the problems that we have, particularly in the climate movement.
01:54:31.000Did you take any comfort from knowing that Obama, when he was running for office and in his Hope and Change website, he had provisions to protect whistleblowers and provisions to reward people?
01:55:56.000During the campaign, they get clearances and they get read into all this stuff.
01:55:58.000But when they finally become president, right, now they're the only people who can sign what these are called the covert action findings and things like that.
01:56:07.000Which are basically, you know, the intelligence community wants to assassinate somebody.
01:56:11.000They want to run this illegal program here, there, or everywhere.
01:56:17.000Because they're executive agencies without that top-level executive sign-off.
01:56:21.000And so they've got to open the vest, right?
01:56:23.000They've got to get these guys on side.
01:56:27.000And basically every president since Kennedy, they have been successful in what they call fearing up, where as soon as they come in, they read you the litany of horribles.
01:56:42.000These are all the threats that we're facing.
01:56:45.000And let's be real, it is a dangerous world.
01:56:48.000It's not just all made-up BS. Some of it is, right, where it's inflated.
01:56:54.000It's not that it's completely false, but they make it sound more serious than it actually is.
01:56:59.000But there are real bad people out there who are trying to do real bad things.
01:57:03.000And you have just gone through a hellish election because our electoral politics are so diseased.
01:57:12.000And now, after you've crawled through fire, you're already thinking four years ahead.
01:57:20.000And these guys are basically saying, if you don't do X, Y, and Z, this is going to fall on your lap.
01:57:27.000And the implication, which I don't think they actually say, but every president knows, is these guys can undermine you to death.
01:57:36.000If you've got the IC against you, they can stonewall you, they can put out stories that are going to be problematic for you every day of your presidency.
01:57:48.000And it's not that it's necessarily going to cast you out of the White House, but it's a problem that as a president you very much don't want.
01:57:55.000So in the most charitable interpretation of this, you've got a new guy coming in.
01:58:00.000In Obama's case, this is a pretty young guy.
01:58:03.000Doesn't focus in this kind of national security foreign policy stuff throughout his earlier career.
01:58:09.000He's more interested in domestic policy and always has been.
01:58:12.000That's actually one of the positive things to say about Barack Obama.
01:58:16.000He's just trying to make things better at home.
01:58:18.000And now suddenly they go, look, you need to worry about this country.
01:58:22.000You need to worry about this group that you've never heard of.
01:58:24.000You need to worry about, you know, this technology.
01:58:28.000And the only reason we can tell you this stuff and the only thing dividing America and the abyss are these terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible programs, right?
01:58:41.000That are in fact wonderful things because they keep back the darkness.
01:59:20.000Nobody can have perfect privacy and also have perfect security, so we've got to sort of divide a line here between the Constitution and what the government wants to do.
02:00:57.000Whereas the president, they don't know who these people are.
02:01:00.000These people have been there before the president.
02:01:02.000They're going to be there after the president.
02:01:04.000And so they give this very effective, very fear-inducing speech.
02:01:09.000And then they follow it up with their asks, which are really demands, just politely provided.
02:01:17.000And anyone in that position who is not an expert on this stuff, who is not ready for this sort of trade-off, and who you have to understand as a career politician, is entirely used to the horse-trading game,
02:01:33.000And going, I'll deal with this later, or not now, or what is the cost-benefit here?
02:01:37.000And the intelligence community goes, if you give us what we want, no one will ever know about it because it's classified It's obviously the easy answer.
02:01:48.000And maybe Barack Obama honestly did want to get to this later.
02:01:53.000But what we can say today is, for all the good that may have been done in that White House, this is an issue where the president went through two full terms and did not fix the problem, but in fact made it worse.
02:02:08.000Well, it seems like the president has a job that's absolutely impossible.
02:02:12.000And if you come across someone who has been in the position like someone who's the head of an intelligence agency for a long time and is very persuasive and has some legitimate credentials that show that he's very good at his job and he tells you this is important for national security.
02:02:28.000We need to keep these things in place.
02:02:31.000It doesn't seem like any one person can run the country and be aware of every single program that every single agency is implementing.
02:02:41.000And the job itself, it doesn't seem like any person can do it adequately.
02:02:46.000And when it comes to something like this mass surveillance state, I could see a president being persuaded by someone who comes to him and says, this is why we need to do this.
02:03:01.000Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think is The underlying problem in everything that you just described is the president has too much power.
02:03:11.000And because they have too much power, that means they have too much responsibility.
02:03:15.000And I don't think people understand, if they haven't lived outside the United States, if they haven't sort of traveled or studied broadly, just how exceptional the American presidency is.
02:03:27.000Most countries don't have a single individual with this level of power.
02:03:33.000It's really only the Superstates, and that may By design, perhaps.
02:03:43.000But when we look at sort of complex, advanced democracies that are more peaceful, they tend to have a more multilateral system that has more people involved in smaller portfolios.
02:03:56.000And a lot of this derives from just the size of the government.
02:03:59.000Like you said, you know, the president is responsible for basically everything in the executive branch, and the executive branch is basically every agency that actually does any work.
02:04:08.000And so, how do you correct for that without breaking it up where you have smaller ministers and ministries and things like that that have different levels of responsibility, having a smaller government overall?
02:04:22.000You know, back in 1776, The federal government, you know, was pretty much a dream.
02:04:29.000We weren't even interested in having standing armies.
02:04:33.000The idea of an army that existed from year to year was a terrifying, forbidding thing.
02:04:39.000And then when you moved this idea that we have a president, that they have these extraordinary powers, it's okay because the government is very small.
02:04:48.000The federal government especially is seen as sort of this small and toothless and weak thing.
02:05:52.000I was concerned, really, about very bad things happening to me because the government made it very clear that from their position I was the most wanted man in the world.
02:06:02.000They literally brought down the president of Bolivia, his aircraft, and would not let it depart as it tried to cross the airspace of Europe, not even the United States.
02:06:15.000They wouldn't let it leave until they confirmed I was not on board.
02:06:18.000So yeah, that made me a little bit nervous, but you can't live like that forever.
02:06:24.000And although I was as careful as I could be, I still lived pretty happily because I was an indoor cat to begin with.
02:06:55.000So this is a funny thing is I'm almost never recognized.
02:06:59.000One of those things is I don't give Russian interviews because I don't want my face all over the news.
02:07:07.000Which is nice because it just allows people to sort of forget about my face and I can go about my life.
02:07:15.000But it's one of the weird things that I'm recognized a couple times a year.
02:07:21.000Even when I'm not wearing my glasses in a museum or a grocery store or something like that or out on the street, just by somebody who I swear, like these people are, you might have read a story about them, like super recognizers, the people who just have a great memory for faces.
02:08:09.000Because I'm a privacy advocate, like I would much rather go unrecognized, like I don't want to be a celebrity.
02:08:17.000But the other thing is, I'll get recognized in computer stores.
02:08:21.000And I think there's just like a mental association where people are like, their brain...
02:08:27.000When it's cycling through faces that it recognizes, it's going through like the subset of nerdier people or something like that when you're in a computer store.
02:08:34.000Because for whatever reason, I'm recognized much more frequently when there's some kind of technological, like, locus.
02:09:16.000I mean, look, if we're being frank, I think all your audience knows, the chance of me getting a fair shake in the eastern district of Virginia, a couple miles from the headquarters of the CIA, is probably pretty slim,
02:09:32.000because that's where they draw the jury pool from, right?
02:09:45.000If I spend the rest of my life in jail, that's less important than what I'm actually requiring the government to agree to, which is a single thing.
02:09:53.000They say, face the music, face the music, and I'm saying, great, let's pick the song.
02:09:58.000The thing is, The law that I've been charged under, the one that all these whistleblowers have been charged under, Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower who is in prison right now going through a trial that is precisely similar to what I would be facing,
02:10:16.000his lawyer is asking the court, or telling the court, that we want to tell the jury why he did what he did.
02:10:27.000That the government is violating laws, the government is violating human rights, that these programs are immoral, that they're unethical.
02:10:37.000This is what motivated this guy to do it, and the jury should be able to hear why he did what he did, and the jury should be able to decide whether that was right or wrong.
02:10:48.000And the government has responded, you know, to this whistleblower argument, basically, saying, we demand the court forbid this guy from breathing the word whistleblower in court.
02:10:59.000He cannot talk about what motivated him.
02:11:02.000He cannot talk about what was revealed, why it was revealed, what the impacts and effects were.
02:11:07.000He can't talk about whether the public benefited from it or was harmed by it because it doesn't matter.
02:11:13.000Now, this might surprise a lot of people, because to a lot of us, we think that's what a jury trial is.
02:11:20.000But the Espionage Act that the government uses against whistleblowers, meaning broadly here the sources of journalism, is fairly unique in the legal system in that it is what's called a strict liability crime.
02:11:36.000A strict liability crime is what the government considers to be basically a crime worse than murder.
02:11:42.000Because if you murdered somebody, like if you just beat Jamie with the microphone stand right now, You would be able to go to the court and say it was self-defense.
02:12:10.000But if you were, in fact, acting in self-defense, if the jury did, in fact, believe you, they could take that into consideration in establishing their verdict.
02:12:21.000The jury is not allowed to consider why you committed a crime.
02:12:27.000They're only allowed to consider if you committed a crime.
02:12:32.000They're not allowed to consider if the murder was justified.
02:12:35.000They're only allowed to consider if the murder took place.
02:12:37.000And the funny thing in this case is that the murder that we're talking about The Espionage Act, in every case, is a law the government exclusively uses against people who told the truth.
02:12:54.000That's what it's about in the context of journalism.
02:12:57.000They don't bring the Espionage Act against people who lied.
02:13:00.000Then they would use fraud or some other statute.
02:13:04.000The government is arguing, in the context of whistleblowing, that telling an important truth To the American people, by way of a journalist, is a crime worse than murder.
02:13:17.000And I believe, and I think most Americans would agree, this is fundamentally, indefensibly wrong.
02:13:23.000And so, my whole argument with the United States government since the very beginning was been, I'll be back for a jury trial tomorrow, but you have to agree to permit.
02:13:33.000A whistleblower is a public interest offense.
02:13:36.000It doesn't matter whether they are a whistleblower or not.
02:14:01.000No, this is from the Obama administration.
02:14:03.000There's been no contact since the Trump administration because the government basically, when they got to this point, they went, we have no good argument against this.
02:14:14.000And we will never permit this to happen.
02:14:16.000And again, I just want to make clear this is not speculation.
02:14:22.000This is actively happening in the case of Daniel Hale right now.
02:14:26.000I hope you guys can pull up a graphic for it because this story just at the papers, like two or three weeks ago, saying the government is forbidding this guy from making this argument.
02:14:37.000So, you're seemingly in a state of limbo then.
02:14:42.000They're not actively pursuing you, it seems, if you're able to move around freely.
02:14:48.000They haven't discovered where you are.
02:14:54.000It's one of these things where, you know, whether they know where I am or whether they don't know where I am, where I put my head on the pillow, it doesn't matter so much.
02:15:04.000And we should lean into that because I think people, they hear Russia particularly in the context of today's news and you see like what people are saying about Tulsi Gabbard and things like that.
02:15:15.000Any kind of association, any time your name appears in the same sentence, same paragraph, same story as the word Russia, it's considered a negative thing now.
02:15:27.000And don't get me wrong, I've been a longtime critic of the Russian government.
02:15:30.000I just actually had a major story written about me in a Russian state news outlet called Ria Novosti.
02:15:44.000That's saying because I spoke favorably about a member of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, which I wasn't even speaking positively about this guy.
02:15:57.000I was saying, look, I think people have a right.
02:16:01.000to express their opposition in a country and they should be able to do that without fearing retaliation in the future because the background here is this this opposition figure has been a long time thorn in the Russian administration side.
02:16:17.000And they've just suddenly, magically, been accused of being foreign agents or something like that.
02:16:24.000And so everyone connected to this, which is like a big civil society body, had their doors simultaneously kicked in across the country and they're being investigated for some kind of corruption or something.
02:16:38.000And, you know, I said I oppose that, just like I was tweeting, you know, footage of ballot stuffing in the Russian elections, just like I've criticized the Russian president by name, I've criticized Russian surveillance laws, so many things again and again and again and again and again.
02:16:55.000But yeah, so look, it does not make my life easier.
02:17:00.000To be trapped in a country that I did not choose.
02:17:03.000I was actually en route to Latin America when the U.S. government canceled my passport, which trapped me in Russia.
02:17:09.000And for those who are interested, again, I wrote an entire book that has a lot of detail on this.
02:17:16.000But, yeah, it's difficult to be basically engaged in civil opposition to policies of the United States government at the same time as the Russian government.
02:17:33.000It's not a happy thing, but I feel like it's a necessary thing.
02:17:36.000The problem is nobody wants to talk about that.
02:17:39.000Nobody wants to engage in that kind of nuance.
02:17:41.000Nobody wants to consider those kind of conversations in the current world.
02:17:45.000People believe, and this is actually one of the worst things, That Western media does in the context of discussing Russia is they create this aura of invincibility around the Russian president.
02:17:56.000They go, you know, this guy's calling all the shots, he's pulling all the strings, you know, this guy's in charge of the world.
02:18:02.000And that's very useful for the Russian government broadly.
02:18:07.000Because they can then take that and replay that on their domestic media and they can go, look how strong we are.
02:18:12.000You know, the Americans are afraid of us, the Chinese are afraid of us, everybody's afraid of us, the French are afraid of us.
02:18:31.000And again, I need to substantiate that now that I've said that.
02:18:33.000I've got an old note that I've signed a billion times.
02:18:38.000The New York Times published a story in the wake of this contested 2016 election where they looked into the history of electoral interference in Russia and the Soviet Union.
02:18:51.000And they found in roughly 50 years, 36 different cases of election interference by Russia or the Soviets, right?
02:19:00.000This is something that always happens because that's what intelligence services do.
02:19:04.000That's what they think they're being paid for, which is a sad thing, but it's a reality because we aren't wise enough to separate covert action from intelligence gathering.
02:19:16.000But in that same study that they found 36 different cases by the Russians and the Soviets, they found 81 different cases by the U.S. And this was published by Scott Chain and the New York Times and both the Washington Post as well.
02:20:42.000It's got to be renewed every three years.
02:20:44.000So yeah, sure, it's possible they could kick me out.
02:20:46.000And this was what the story I was telling you about before in Russian media was.
02:20:49.000They were saying, you know, the Russian government should take some action against me, or I shouldn't be welcome here, or I should go home.
02:20:56.000Because why is he criticizing the Russian government, right, when they're the people who are...
02:21:00.000Is that like the Russian version of Fox News?
02:22:42.000All you have to do is lay down one brick.
02:22:45.000All you have to do is make things a little bit better in a small way so that other people can lay their brick on top of that or beside that.
02:22:52.000And together, step by step, day by day, year by year, we build the foundation of something better.
02:23:00.000But yeah, it's not going to be safe, but it doesn't matter.
02:23:04.000Because individually, it's not, you know...
02:23:10.000Me, whoever you are, that's the Iron Man.
02:23:13.000I don't care if you're the biggest doomsday prepper with cans full of beans.
02:23:18.000If the world ends, it's going to affect you.
02:23:46.000You can be more clever, and there's nothing wrong with that.
02:23:49.000But at the end of the day, you have to recognize if you're trying to eliminate all risks from your life, what you're actually doing is eliminating all possibility from your life.
02:23:59.000You're trying to collapse The universe of outcomes such that what you've lost is freedom.
02:24:07.000You've lost the ability to act because you're afraid.
02:24:39.000And the intelligence community was very much grappling to get its hands around it and to deal with it.
02:24:46.000But now people are much less likely to use a laptop than use a desktop than use, you know, God, any kind of wired phone than they are to use a smartphone.
02:24:57.000And both Apple and Android devices, unfortunately, are not especially good in protecting your privacy.
02:25:37.000How is it that if someone from any corner of the earth dials a number, your phone rings and nobody else's rings?
02:25:43.000How is it that you can dial anybody else's number and only their phone rings, right?
02:25:47.000Every smartphone Every phone at all is constantly connected to the nearest cellular tower.
02:25:54.000Every phone, even when the screen is off, you think it's doing nothing, you can't see it because radio frequency emissions are invisible.
02:26:02.000It's screaming in the air, saying, here I am, here I am.
02:26:07.000Here is my IMEI, I think it's Individual Manufacturers Equipment Identity, and IMEI, Individual Manufacturers Subscriber Identity.
02:26:20.000I could be wrong on the breakout there, but the acronyms are the IMEI and the IMSI, and you can search for these things.
02:26:27.000They're two globally unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in the world in one place, right?
02:26:35.000This makes your phone different than all the other phones.
02:26:37.000The IMEI is burned into the handset of your phone.
02:26:40.000No matter what SIM card you change to, it's always going to be the same and it's always going to be telling the phone network it's this physical handset.
02:26:48.000The IME-SI is in your SIM card, right?
02:26:52.000And this is what holds your phone number, right?
02:26:54.000It's basically the key, the right to use that phone number.
02:26:57.000And so your phone is sitting there doing nothing, you think, but it's constantly shouting and saying, I'm here.
02:27:18.000I see all these phones that are here right now.
02:27:22.000And it compares notes with the other network towers and your smartphone compares notes with them to go who do I hear the loudest and who you hear the loudest is a proxy for proximity for closeness distance right they go whoever I hear more loudly than anybody else that's close to me so you're gonna be bound to this cell phone tower and that cell phone tower is gonna make a note a permanent record saying this phone this
02:27:53.000phone handset With this phone number, at this time, was connected to me, right?
02:27:59.000And based on your phone handset and your phone number, they can get your identity, right?
02:28:06.000Because you pay for this stuff with your credit card and everything like that.
02:28:09.000And even if you don't, it's still active at your house overnight.
02:28:14.000It's still active on your nightstand when you're sleeping.
02:28:32.000And anyway, it's constantly shouting this out.
02:28:34.000And then it compares notes with the other parts of the network.
02:28:36.000And when somebody is trying to get to a phone, it compares notes.
02:28:41.000The network compares notes to go, where is this phone with this phone number in the world right now?
02:28:48.000And to that cell phone tower that is closest to that phone, it sends out a signal saying, we have a call for you.
02:28:55.000Make your phone start ringing so your owner can answer it.
02:28:58.000And then it connects it across this whole path.
02:29:00.000But what this means is that whenever you're carrying a phone, whenever the phone is turned on, there's a record of your presence at that place that is being made and created by companies.
02:30:18.000How is it that Facebook knows where you're at?
02:30:20.000You know, all of these things, these analytics They are trying to keep track through location services on your phone, through GPS, through even just what wireless access points you're connected to because there's a global constantly updated map.
02:30:34.000There's actually many of them of wireless access points in the world because just like we talked about, every phone has a unique identifier that's globally unique.
02:30:41.000Every wireless access point in the world, right?
02:30:44.000Your cable modem at home, whether it's in your laptop, every device that has a radio modem has a globally unique identifier in it.
02:31:23.000So even if you have GPS turned off, right?
02:31:26.000As long as you're connected to Wi-Fi, those apps can go, well, I'm connected to Joe's Wi-Fi.
02:31:34.000But I can also see his neighbor's WiFi here, and the other one in this apartment over here, and the other one in the apartment here, and you should only be able to hear Those four globally unique Wi-Fi access points from these points in physical space,
02:32:13.000The thing with shutting your phone off that is a risk is how do you know your phone's actually turned off?
02:32:18.000It used to be, when I was in Geneva, for example, working for the CIA, We would all carry, like, drug dealer phones.
02:32:29.000You know, the old smart phones, or sorry, old dumb phones, they're not smart phones.
02:32:34.000And the reason why was just because they had the removable backs, where you could take the battery out, right?
02:32:41.000And the one beautiful thing about technology is if there's no electricity in it, right, if there's no go juice available to it, if there's no battery connected to it, it's not sending anything, because you have to get power from somewhere.
02:32:54.000You have to have Power in order to do work.
02:32:58.000But now, your phones are all sealed, right?
02:33:36.000But if they're actually manipulating the way devices display, it's just too great a level of effort, even for someone like me, to keep that up on a constant basis.
02:33:46.000Also, if they get me, I only trust phones so much.
02:33:51.000So there's only so much they can derive from the compromise.
02:33:53.000And this is how operational security works.
02:33:57.000You think about what are the realistic threats that you're facing that you're trying to mitigate?
02:34:02.000And the mitigation that you're trying to do is what would be the loss?
02:34:07.000What would be the damage done to you if this stuff was exploited?
02:34:12.000Much more realistic than worrying about these things that I call voodoo hacks, right?
02:34:48.000And it'll go as deep down in the weeds, I promise you, as you want.
02:34:51.000We take an iPhone 6, this was back when it was fairly new, and we modified it so we could actually not trust the device to report its own state, but physically monitor its state to see if it was spying on you.
02:35:03.000But for average people, right, this academic That's not your primary threat.
02:35:10.000Your primary threats are these bulk collection programs.
02:35:14.000Your primary threat is the fact that your phone is constantly squawking to these cell phone towers that's doing all of these things because we leave our phones in a state that is constantly on.
02:35:45.000You don't know what it's connected to.
02:35:47.000You don't know how frequently it's doing it.
02:35:49.000Apple and iOS, unfortunately, makes it impossible to see what kind of network connections are constantly made on the device and to intermediate them.
02:35:57.000Going, I don't want Facebook to be able to talk right now.
02:36:00.000You know, I don't want Google to be able to talk right now.
02:36:02.000I just want my secure messenger app to be able to talk.
02:36:06.000I just want my weather app to be able to talk.
02:36:10.000And now I'm done with it, so I don't want that to be able to talk anymore.
02:36:13.000And we need to be able to make these intelligent decisions on not just an app-by-app basis, but a connection-by-connection basis, right?
02:36:22.000Let's say you use Facebook, because for whatever judgment we have, a lot of people might do it.
02:36:30.000You want it to be able to connect to Facebook's content servers.
02:36:34.000You want it to be able to message a friend.
02:36:36.000You want it to be able to download a photograph or whatever.
02:36:38.000But you don't want it to be able to talk to an ad server.
02:36:41.000You don't want it to talk to an analytics server that's monitoring your behavior, right?
02:36:45.000You don't want it to talk to all these third-party things because Facebook crams their garbage into almost every app that you download, and you don't even know it's happening because you can't see it, right?
02:36:54.000And this is the problem with the data collection used today.
02:36:58.000There is an industry that is built on keeping this invisible.
02:37:02.000And what we need to do is we need to make the activities of our devices, whether it's a phone, whether it's a computer, whatever, more visible and understandable to the average person and then give them control over it.
02:37:16.000So, like, if you could see your phone right now.
02:37:19.000And at the very center of it is a little green icon that's your, you know, handset or it's a picture of your face, whatever.
02:37:25.000And then you see all these little spokes coming off of it.
02:37:28.000That's every app that your phone is talking to right now, or every app that is active on your phone right now, and all the hosts that it's connecting to.
02:37:37.000And you can see right now, once every three seconds, your phone is checking into Facebook, And you could just poke that app and then boom, it's not talking to Facebook anymore.
02:38:04.000And both Google and Apple, unfortunately, Apple's a lot better at this than Google.
02:38:08.000But neither of them allow that button to exist.
02:38:13.000In fact, they actively interfere with it because they say it's a security risk.
02:38:17.000And from a particular perspective, they actually aren't wrong there.
02:38:21.000But it's not enough to go, you know, we have to lock that capability off from people because we don't trust they would make the right decisions.
02:38:29.000We think it's too complicated for people to do this.
02:38:31.000We think there's too many connections being made.
02:38:33.000Well, that is actually a confession of the problem right there.
02:38:38.000If you think people can't understand it, if you think there are too many communications happening, if you think there's too much complexity in there, It needs to be simplified.
02:38:47.000Just like the president can't control everything like that, if you have to be the president of the phone, and the phone is as complex as the United States government, we have a problem, guys.
02:38:56.000This should be a much more simple process.
02:38:59.000And the fact that it's not, and the fact that we read story after story, year after year, saying all your data's been breached here, This company is spying on you here.
02:39:08.000This company is manipulating your purchases or your search results or they're hiding these things from your timeline or they're influencing you or manipulating you in all of these different ways.
02:39:19.000That happens as a result of a single problem and that problem is an inequality of available information.
02:39:31.000They can see everything about you, they can see everything about what your device is doing, and they can do whatever they want with your device.
02:39:36.000You, on the other hand, Owned the device.
02:39:40.000Well, rather, you paid for the device.
02:39:42.000But increasingly these corporations own it.
02:39:45.000Increasingly these governments own it.
02:39:47.000And increasingly we are living in a world where we do all the work, right?
02:40:53.000The story of our lifetimes is how intentionally, by design, a number of institutions, both governmental and corporate, realized it was in their mutual interest to conceal their data collection activities.
02:41:12.000To increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks that were sort of spread out through society.
02:41:19.000Remember, back in the day, intelligence collection in the United States, even in SIGINT, used to mean sending an FBI agent, right, to put alligator clips on an embassy building or sending in somebody disguised as a workman.
02:42:41.000They go, we put that terms of service page up, and you click that.
02:42:45.000You clicked a button that said, I agree.
02:42:48.000Because you were trying to open an account so you could talk to your friends.
02:42:52.000You were trying to get driving directions.
02:42:54.000You were trying to get an email account.
02:42:55.000You weren't trying to agree to some 600-page legal form that even if you read, you wouldn't understand.
02:43:01.000And it doesn't matter even if you did understand because one of the very first paragraphs in it said, this agreement can be changed at any time unilaterally without your consent by the company, right?
02:43:12.000They have built a legal paradigm that presumes records collected about us do not belong to us.
02:43:22.000This is sort of one of the core principles on which mass surveillance, from the government's perspective in the United States, is legal.
02:43:30.000And you have to understand that all the stuff we talked about today, the government says everything they do is legal, right?
02:43:37.000Our perspective as a public should be, well, that's actually the problem because this isn't okay.
02:43:42.000The scandal isn't how they're breaking the law.
02:43:45.000The scandal is that they don't have to break the law.
02:43:48.000And the way they say they're not breaking the law is something called the third-party doctrine.
02:43:53.000And a third-party doctrine is a legal principle derived from a case in, I believe, the 1970s called Smith versus Maryland.
02:44:05.000And Smith was this knucklehead who was harassing this lady, making phone calls to her house.
02:44:12.000And when she would pick up, he'd just, I don't know, sit there heavy breathing, whatever, like a classic creeper.
02:44:19.000And, you know, it was terrifying, this poor lady.
02:44:22.000So she calls the cops and says, one day I got one of these phone calls and then I see this car creeping past my house on the street and she got a license plate number.
02:44:32.000So she goes to the cops and she goes, is this the guy?
02:44:35.000And the cops, again, they're trying to do a good thing here.
02:44:40.000They look up his license plate number, and they find out where this guy is, and then they go, well, what phone number is registered to that house?
02:44:47.000And they go to the phone company, and they say, can you give us this record?
02:44:50.000And the phone company says, yeah, sure.
02:45:40.000And they go, it wasn't actually, they weren't his records.
02:45:46.000And so because they didn't belong to him, he didn't have a Fourth Amendment right to demand a warrant be issued for them.
02:45:55.000They were the company's records, and the company provided them voluntarily, and hence no warrant was required because you can give whatever you want without a warrant as long as it's yours.
02:46:06.000The government extrapolated a principle in a single case of a single known suspected criminal who they had real good reasons to suspect was their guy.
02:46:20.000And used that to go to a company and get records from them and establish a precedent that these records don't belong to the guy.
02:46:50.000Modern society, modern communications don't exist.
02:46:53.000This is the very beginning of the technological era.
02:46:57.000And flash forward now 40 years, And they are still relying on this precedent about this one, you know, pervy creeper to go, nobody has a privacy right for anything that's held by a company.
02:47:13.000And so long as they do that, companies are going to be extraordinarily powerful and they're going to be extraordinarily abusive.
02:47:20.000And this is something that people don't get.
02:47:21.000They go, oh, well, it's data collection, right?
02:47:47.000And this is something that I think a lot of people are beginning to understand.
02:47:53.000The problem is the companies and the governments are still pretending they don't understand or disagreeing with this.
02:47:57.000And this reminds me of something that one of my old friends, John Perry Barlow, who served with me at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, I'm the president of the board, used to say to me, Which is,
02:48:13.000you can't awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep.
02:48:16.000He said it's an old Native American saying.
02:48:50.000When all is said and done, what you did and what you exposed is going to change the way we view mass surveillance, change the way we view government oversight, and change the way we view the distribution of information.
02:49:04.000I really think it's very, very important.
02:49:07.000And it was an honor to talk to you, man.