The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden

00:00:12.000 Dude, you're very professional.

00:00:15.000 Well, you know, people are like, how do you live?

00:00:19.000 And things like that.

00:00:20.000 They're like, are you taking money from the Russians?

00:00:21.000 And of course, the answer is no.

00:00:23.000 But I do this for a living.

00:00:25.000 Like, I speak.

00:00:26.000 I don't have a YouTube channel where it's, you know, I'm Joe Rogan.

00:00:30.000 But I give speeches at universities and things like that.

00:00:33.000 I do a lot of interviews.

00:00:34.000 We're recording now, right?

00:00:35.000 My own setup.

00:00:36.000 Is it possible that you could do a YouTube channel?

00:00:39.000 Would that work?

00:00:43.000 Yeah, I mean, if you introduce me so I get followers, yeah, we could do that.

00:00:48.000 Dude, I'm all in.

00:00:50.000 That could absolutely happen.

00:00:52.000 Do you want to do that?

00:00:53.000 Is that something you want to do?

00:00:54.000 Now, I mean, this is a big question.

00:00:56.000 So 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.

00:01:09.000 But it's more than that because I didn't just want to talk about me.

00:01:12.000 It's actually about the changing of technology and the changing of government in this sort of post 9-11 era.

00:01:18.000 Which in our generation just sort of happened to be growing up during.

00:01:23.000 And I was at the CIA and the NSA and all this stuff.

00:01:26.000 But the day that the book came out, the government hit me with a lawsuit.

00:01:30.000 And they hit the publisher of the books with a lawsuit.

00:01:35.000 Because they don't want to see books like this get written.

00:01:37.000 They especially don't want to see books like this get read.

00:01:41.000 And so the big thing was, you know, we didn't know where this was going.

00:01:45.000 We didn't know what was going to happen.

00:01:46.000 And 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.

00:01:54.000 We didn't know where...

00:01:55.000 Where that's going.

00:01:56.000 The government is still pursuing that case quite strongly.

00:02:01.000 They'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.

00:02:16.000 More so than taking the book off the shelves, but that's not because they're okay with the book being on the shelves.

00:02:22.000 It's because, thankfully, we've got the First Amendment, and so they can't.

00:02:25.000 And that's a very rare and good thing.

00:02:28.000 But anyway, in the context of that...

00:02:32.000 They were like, well, what about Joe Rogan?

00:02:35.000 I 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.

00:02:52.000 Yeah, to hear him in those sound bites, you don't really get an understanding of who he actually is.

00:02:58.000 Right, and this is the other thing.

00:02:59.000 They're like, well, you know, you can go on all these major network shows.

00:03:04.000 And I did a couple of them.

00:03:05.000 I did like a morning show.

00:03:07.000 I did Brian Williams.

00:03:10.000 But broadly, the media, the sort of more corporatized media, as we might say, is exactly what you just described, right?

00:03:18.000 They want you to be able to answer in like 8, 15 seconds or less.

00:03:23.000 And 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.

00:03:38.000 And so instead, these guys all want to say, repeat these long discredited sort of criticisms.

00:03:43.000 And, you know, I'm sure you'll ask the same thing.

00:03:45.000 And that's okay.

00:03:47.000 They're fair questions.

00:03:48.000 But it's like, we can't have the conversation if we can't have the space to think and breathe and have this sort of discussion.

00:03:56.000 So anyway, they mentioned you.

00:03:57.000 And I was like, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, where do I know this name from before Bernie Sanders?

00:04:05.000 And I look back through my Twitter mentions.

00:04:08.000 And the funny thing is your fans have been harassing me to death for like the last years.

00:04:15.000 Wonderful people, wonderful people.

00:04:17.000 But like, go on Joe Rogan, go on Joe Rogan.

00:04:19.000 And I remember like after I had just made a Twitter account, Neil deGrasse Tyson actually helped me get on Twitter.

00:04:27.000 Gave me that little initial boost.

00:04:29.000 And they said, Joe Rogan.

00:04:32.000 And so they, like, linked you.

00:04:34.000 And, you know, I mouse over your name because I use a desktop.

00:04:36.000 I'm not mobile for this because of security reasons.

00:04:39.000 And it pops up.

00:04:40.000 And I get your avatar, man.

00:04:41.000 And, like, I have to say, your logo...

00:04:45.000 It'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.

00:04:52.000 Because, 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?

00:05:00.000 That doesn't look good.

00:05:02.000 But it's actually, like, when you watch, you know, when you watch what you're doing, it's great stuff, man.

00:05:06.000 It's great.

00:05:07.000 But 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.

00:05:20.000 And for me, it's a wonderful thing because nobody understands that better than I do, right?

00:05:24.000 Like, 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.

00:05:32.000 I'll get back to it.

00:05:33.000 Fine.

00:05:34.000 There's no such thing as off topic.

00:05:36.000 We could talk about whatever.

00:05:38.000 Okay.

00:05:39.000 Great, great.

00:05:40.000 Okay, 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,

00:05:56.000 a staff officer at the CIA. I was undercover working at embassies.

00:06:01.000 And 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.

00:06:09.000 But I saw something wrong.

00:06:11.000 And 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.

00:06:20.000 There were domestic surveillance programs, there were mass surveillance programs that worked internationally.

00:06:26.000 Basically everything that they could monitor They were monitoring.

00:06:30.000 And this is actually, like, people go, well, isn't that obvious?

00:06:33.000 Isn't that what they're supposed to do?

00:06:34.000 And this is weird, but the answer actually is no.

00:06:38.000 Under 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?

00:06:48.000 We think about this in the investigative means, right?

00:06:51.000 Like all those TV shows where they're like, go and get a warrant.

00:06:55.000 The 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,

00:07:10.000 you know, is this guy a pot smoker?

00:07:11.000 Get his diary, you know, whatever it is.

00:07:13.000 And just like, if you find evidence of a crime, you march them off to prison and it's all good.

00:07:17.000 You found evidence, they're criminal.

00:07:19.000 Or you didn't find evidence, well, no harm, no foul.

00:07:21.000 You're just doing what government does.

00:07:23.000 Um, 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?

00:07:36.000 Where they're proportionate to the threat that is presented by this person.

00:07:40.000 You 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.

00:07:47.000 That is not a threat to national security.

00:07:49.000 That is not a threat to public safety.

00:07:52.000 But what happened in the wake of 9-11 was a whole bunch of government officials got together behind closed doors.

00:07:58.000 And this was actually led, interestingly enough, by the Vice President of the United States, Cheney.

00:08:03.000 Everybody remembers that name or hopefully can look that name up, Dick Cheney.

00:08:09.000 And his personal attorney, sort of the Giuliani of Dick Cheney, a guy named David Addington.

00:08:18.000 And this lawyer, David Addington, wrote a secret legal interpretation that no one else was allowed to see.

00:08:26.000 It was kept in the Vice President's safe at the White House.

00:08:30.000 They 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.

00:08:39.000 When 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.

00:08:57.000 But we can't tell you why.

00:08:59.000 We can't show you the legal authorization for it.

00:09:01.000 You've just got to take our word for it.

00:09:03.000 And so they did this.

00:09:04.000 And 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.

00:09:20.000 Because if you remember, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, they were singing...

00:09:28.000 We 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.

00:09:34.000 Of course, like weapons of mass destruction, it just didn't exist.

00:09:37.000 It was all a power grab.

00:09:39.000 But on that basis, they started doing this in secret and it was completely unconstitutional.

00:09:44.000 It was completely illegal, even under the very loose requirements of the Patriot Act.

00:09:49.000 But they did it for so long That they got comfortable with it.

00:09:54.000 And they thought, you know, this is a really powerful capability.

00:09:57.000 What if we started using this for stuff that was other than terrorism?

00:10:00.000 Because it wasn't finding any terrorists, because there weren't any terrorists in this context that they were looking for them.

00:10:07.000 And the ones who, where there were terrorists, the program wasn't affected because these were guys in Pakistan that weren't using terrorism.

00:10:13.000 You know, email and phone calls.

00:10:15.000 They 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.

00:10:25.000 But, bit by bit over time, this grew and grew and grew.

00:10:28.000 And there were scandals, and if you want to drill down on these later, I'll go into them.

00:10:31.000 But what happened was, step by step by step, our constitutional rights were changed.

00:10:40.000 And we weren't allowed to know it.

00:10:42.000 We were never granted a vote on it.

00:10:44.000 And even the many members of Congress, right, 535 in the United States, they were prohibited from knowing this.

00:10:52.000 And instead, they told only a few select people.

00:10:55.000 In the original case, there were only eight members of Congress, called the Gang of Eight, who knew about this.

00:11:02.000 Then there were the people on the intelligence committees, both in the Senate and the House, who were told about this.

00:11:08.000 But they were only told partially about it.

00:11:10.000 They weren't told the full scope of it.

00:11:12.000 And 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.

00:11:19.000 And we had one Senator, Ron Wyden.

00:11:23.000 And 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.

00:11:38.000 But nobody knew what they were talking about.

00:11:40.000 And so journalists were like, you know, they've got concerns.

00:11:42.000 What is that lassie?

00:11:43.000 What are you trying to say?

00:11:44.000 Tinnies and well?

00:11:45.000 But they were getting it wrong.

00:11:46.000 They couldn't tell what was happening.

00:11:47.000 And so what had happened was that we, the American people, It sort of lost our seat at the table of government.

00:11:55.000 We were no longer partner to government.

00:11:57.000 We had simply become subject to government.

00:11:58.000 And 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?

00:12:09.000 They 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,

00:12:25.000 a government class and then the public, a civil class, that are held to different standards of behavior.

00:12:31.000 And when we start talking about leaking and whistleblowing, this becomes even more clear.

00:12:35.000 And so, what I did I wanted to clarify that kind of Lassie mark, right?

00:12:41.000 I just wanted everybody to know what was going on.

00:12:44.000 I didn't want to say the government can't do this.

00:12:47.000 I didn't want to say this is how you guys have to live, because that's not for me to say.

00:12:52.000 But 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,

00:13:09.000 so 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.

00:13:16.000 This is not okay.

00:13:17.000 I object and I want things to change.

00:13:19.000 And so I gathered evidence of what I believe to be.

00:13:22.000 Criminal or unconstitutional activity on the part of the government.

00:13:26.000 And I gave this to journalists, right?

00:13:29.000 Now, 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?

00:13:39.000 No clickbait, not anything just because they thought it would make news, it would get them awards.

00:13:44.000 They would only publish stories that they were willing to make an institutional judgment and stand behind.

00:13:50.000 And this was three different newspapers.

00:13:53.000 That it was in the public interest to know.

00:13:57.000 And 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.

00:14:16.000 The courts had abdicated their role in policing the executive in the Congress because terrorism was such a hot argument at the time.

00:14:25.000 They were worried about being criticized and blamed if something went wrong and an attack did go through.

00:14:29.000 And they didn't have access to the information that the programs were ineffective.

00:14:33.000 So they were just taking the government's word for it and they didn't want to weigh it in.

00:14:37.000 Congress Most of them didn't even know, right?

00:14:41.000 And the ones who did know, it was the same thing.

00:14:43.000 They 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.

00:14:52.000 So they benefited by just saying nothing.

00:14:55.000 And 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.

00:15:05.000 Because they're the ones whose hands were on the lever at the time.

00:15:08.000 They got to aim it.

00:15:09.000 They got to use it.

00:15:11.000 If you had a little search box in front of you, they would give you the email history of everybody in the United States.

00:15:17.000 Anybody you want.

00:15:18.000 If you could pull up their text messages.

00:15:20.000 Anybody you want.

00:15:21.000 If you could see anything they've ever typed into that Google search box, right?

00:15:24.000 Joe, what is the worst thing you've ever typed into that search box?

00:15:28.000 That lasts forever.

00:15:30.000 And they have a record of that.

00:15:32.000 They can get that from Google.

00:15:34.000 And so this was the whole thing.

00:15:36.000 How do we correct for that?

00:15:40.000 So 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,

00:15:56.000 right?

00:15:56.000 That's the whole origin of the program is they want to do something that they're not allowed to do.

00:16:02.000 What do you do, right?

00:16:04.000 And so I didn't want to say I'm the president of Secrets.

00:16:06.000 I didn't want to just put this stuff on the internet and I could have.

00:16:08.000 I'm a technologist, right?

00:16:11.000 I worked with the journalists and then to create an adversarial step, right?

00:16:16.000 Someone who would argue against what I believed and hopefully what the journalists believed once they consulted the documents and basically authenticated them.

00:16:27.000 Can we get the government to play that role, right?

00:16:31.000 And so before the journalists published any story, and this is a controversial thing.

00:16:36.000 People still criticize me for this, actually.

00:16:38.000 They say I was too accommodated in government.

00:16:39.000 They could be right.

00:16:42.000 is that the journalists would go to the government and give them a warning.

00:16:45.000 Say, we're about to run this story about this secret program that says you did X, Y, and Z bad thing.

00:16:51.000 One, is that right?

00:16:53.000 And the government will always go, oh, no comment.

00:16:56.000 Two, is this going to cause harm?

00:16:58.000 Is anybody going to get hurt?

00:16:59.000 Is this program effective?

00:17:01.000 Is there something we don't understand?

00:17:03.000 Is there something Snowden doesn't understand?

00:17:05.000 Does this guy just not get it?

00:17:07.000 Are these documents fake?

00:17:08.000 Whatever you want, say we shouldn't run this story.

00:17:12.000 In every case I'm aware of, that process was followed.

00:17:15.000 And that's why, right?

00:17:16.000 Because 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.

00:17:23.000 We're in 2019 now.

00:17:26.000 I 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.

00:17:39.000 We've had six years to show harm.

00:17:40.000 And you know, as well as I do, the government's happy to leak things when it's in their interest.

00:17:46.000 Nobody has been hurt as a result of these disclosures because everyone who was involved in them was so careful.

00:17:52.000 We wanted to maximize the public benefit while mitigating the potential risks.

00:17:58.000 And I think we did a pretty good job of it.

00:18:00.000 But 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,

00:18:15.000 Glenn Greenwald, Ewan McCaskill.

00:18:18.000 And I said who I was.

00:18:19.000 I said why I was doing this.

00:18:20.000 I said what this was about, why it matters.

00:18:23.000 And that we were constructing a system of turnkey tyranny.

00:18:26.000 And even if you trust that to Obama, you never know whose hand is going to be on that key next.

00:18:30.000 And all they have to do is turn it.

00:18:31.000 And there's nothing we can do to stop it.

00:18:34.000 The only thing that's restraining these programs really is policy more so than law.

00:18:39.000 And the president at any time can sign a napkin and those policies change.

00:18:45.000 Well, after that, I went six months without giving any interviews because I didn't want people to talk about me.

00:18:51.000 I wanted them to talk about what actually mattered.

00:18:53.000 And the government, of course, was trying very hard to change the conversation, as they always do, to be about, who is this guy?

00:18:59.000 What have they done?

00:19:00.000 What's wrong with them?

00:19:01.000 What are their problems? 0.95

00:19:02.000 Who is this loony guy?

00:19:04.000 So they can controversialize the source of a story rather than having to confront the story itself.

00:19:12.000 And 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. 0.95

00:19:28.000 They'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? 0.63

00:19:36.000 Where I think it's a certain kind of show with a certain kind of guy and it's this crazy stuff. 0.92

00:19:41.000 But 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.

00:19:50.000 Actually, 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.

00:19:59.000 I work hard on that.

00:20:00.000 I try to mislead people.

00:20:01.000 It's good.

00:20:03.000 Works to my advantage.

00:20:04.000 You're doing a good job, man.

00:20:05.000 Thank you.

00:20:06.000 I want to bring it back to when you first started with the NSA. You started as a contractor, right?

00:20:13.000 What was your initial impression and when did you know that things were really squirrely?

00:20:20.000 With the programs they're implementing.

00:20:22.000 So I'm not saying this to put you on the spot.

00:20:25.000 I know you've been a busy guy.

00:20:26.000 I know you haven't done.

00:20:28.000 I think shows recently.

00:20:30.000 You've come back from break, right?

00:20:32.000 But have you read the book?

00:20:34.000 Because it'll just help me put things in frame.

00:20:36.000 If you haven't got a chance to read it.

00:20:37.000 No, I have not read your book or got a copy of it.

00:20:41.000 Okay, well, I will send you a signed copy, brother.

00:20:43.000 Beautiful.

00:20:43.000 Thank you.

00:20:43.000 And I hope you'll read it, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

00:20:46.000 But, all right.

00:20:47.000 So, I had a really weird history in the intelligence community.

00:20:53.000 I grew up in a federal family.

00:20:57.000 In the shadow of Fort Meade, right?

00:20:59.000 All 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.

00:21:18.000 All 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,

00:21:34.000 and those are the courts that are trying to throw me in jail for the rest of my life now.

00:21:38.000 My father worked for the Coast Guard, retired after 30 years.

00:21:41.000 My 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.

00:21:56.000 So it was pretty ordinary, pretty expected for me to go into the same kind of work.

00:22:01.000 Now, 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,

00:22:24.000 you know, biology class.

00:22:27.000 And so I spent more and more time focusing on technology, then I got mono, and I dropped out of high school.

00:22:34.000 And now it's like, alright, how do I make this up?

00:22:39.000 I say drop out of high school, but I'm actually going to community college, right?

00:22:43.000 They called it concurrent enrollment, where I'm not taking any classes at high school, I'm going to community college instead.

00:22:50.000 And I'm not doing that great there either.

00:22:53.000 It's fine.

00:22:54.000 I'm enjoying it.

00:22:55.000 But school is school.

00:22:57.000 I can't wait to be grown.

00:23:00.000 You were bored.

00:23:03.000 I think a lot of people have felt that.

00:23:07.000 But I ran into somebody at the community college who ran their own home-based business.

00:23:12.000 Doing web design and they could see I was kind of technical and they went, hey, do you want to work for me?

00:23:17.000 And I was like, well, that sounds great.

00:23:20.000 And so I started doing web design really, really early on.

00:23:23.000 This is like, gosh, I don't know, probably 1998 vintage during the big boom and then the collapse that followed.

00:23:34.000 And the funny thing is she worked, she was married to an NSA analyst, a linguist, right?

00:23:42.000 And so she lived on Fort Meade and she ran her business out of their home on Fort Meade.

00:23:49.000 It'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.

00:24:00.000 And I enjoy this.

00:24:01.000 It's a good thing for me.

00:24:02.000 It works well.

00:24:04.000 And I start getting trained and certified.

00:24:07.000 All these little industry stamps you've got to get as a technologist to say, oh, you know this program or whatever.

00:24:13.000 And just start climbing the ladder.

00:24:16.000 But then 9-11 happens.

00:24:19.000 And I'm on Fort Meade when 9-11 happens.

00:24:22.000 I'm just going into work.

00:24:23.000 And I tell this in the book in some detail.

00:24:27.000 And I think it's very much worth reading for people who don't know this because this is forgotten history.

00:24:32.000 How old were you at the time?

00:24:35.000 Gosh, I was born in 83. So I was probably 18 years old.

00:24:42.000 And...

00:24:45.000 Yeah, I had just turned 18 a couple months before.

00:24:51.000 And what people forget is who knew what was going on before anybody else on September 11th?

00:25:01.000 The intelligence community, right?

00:25:05.000 And what did they do?

00:25:06.000 Did they give out a public warning?

00:25:09.000 Did they tell you guys to evacuate?

00:25:10.000 Did they say do this, that, or that?

00:25:11.000 No.

00:25:12.000 No.

00:25:14.000 Not for everybody.

00:25:15.000 Not for a long time.

00:25:18.000 But at the NSA, then director Michael Hayden, he was a general.

00:25:25.000 He 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?

00:25:37.000 The CIA did the same thing.

00:25:39.000 They were running on skeleton crews.

00:25:41.000 At the moment, the country needed them more than they ever had, right?

00:25:47.000 And I get a call Well, I hear a call that's from my boss's wife, her husband, to her.

00:25:58.000 He'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.

00:26:07.000 And I'm like, this is crazy.

00:26:08.000 It never closes down.

00:26:09.000 We don't know what's happening.

00:26:10.000 Then we start checking the news, which is through websites, right, because we're doing all this stuff.

00:26:15.000 And suddenly it's the big story everywhere.

00:26:19.000 And, you know, nobody understands how big it is yet.

00:26:23.000 Most of us are like, oh, it's gonna mess with our workday.

00:26:25.000 Oh, it's gonna mess with our commute.

00:26:27.000 But when I'm leaving, I hear car horns all over the base.

00:26:32.000 It's the craziest thing.

00:26:33.000 Because this is a military base, right?

00:26:34.000 It'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.

00:26:46.000 And it's just a parking lot as far as you can see.

00:26:49.000 They have military police out under...

00:26:53.000 The stoplights directing traffic because it's this massive evacuation.

00:26:57.000 And I still have no idea what's happening.

00:26:59.000 The story is still developing.

00:27:03.000 But I will never forget that image.

00:27:11.000 Why 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?

00:27:23.000 And, 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.

00:27:39.000 About what was happening.

00:27:40.000 He was going, well, you know, he called his wife and he was asking where their kids were and everything like that.

00:27:46.000 And 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?

00:27:56.000 And this sort of shows how self-centric the intelligence community is.

00:28:03.000 This is the D.C. metro area, right?

00:28:05.000 They could hit the White House.

00:28:06.000 They could hit Congress.

00:28:08.000 They could hit the Supreme Court, right?

00:28:10.000 And they go, oh...

00:28:11.000 They're going to fly their planes into the CIA headquarters.

00:28:14.000 They're going to fly their planes into the NSA headquarters.

00:28:17.000 And, of course, it was never realistic that these would be the targets.

00:28:22.000 But on that basis, they were like, ooh, let's get our bacon out of the pan.

00:28:27.000 Now, I don't say this...

00:28:28.000 I'm sorry, but just in the interest of, wasn't it possible that they could have attacked those places?

00:28:35.000 I mean, they attacked the Pentagon.

00:28:36.000 They knew that there was attacks.

00:28:39.000 Look, it's absolutely possible they could have attacked your Denny's.

00:28:43.000 Right.

00:28:44.000 But it's a question of risk assessment.

00:28:48.000 If 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,

00:29:04.000 the 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?

00:29:24.000 Well, somebody else We'll get hit with those.

00:29:28.000 As you say, it's gonna be the Pentagon, right?

00:29:29.000 It's gonna be the World Trade Center.

00:29:32.000 It's gonna be someone somewhere.

00:29:34.000 And 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?

00:29:42.000 Maybe if it's somebody who normally works finance in North Korea, right?

00:29:47.000 But they go, look, this is an emergency.

00:29:48.000 Everybody understands.

00:29:49.000 You don't need to explain this.

00:29:50.000 You just go, stop what you're doing.

00:29:53.000 Look at financial transactions related to who purchased these plane tickets.

00:29:57.000 Do this.

00:29:57.000 You just go full spectrum and go, anything you can do right now.

00:30:01.000 If the building gets hit, we get hit.

00:30:02.000 That's what we signed up for.

00:30:04.000 Nobody wants that, right?

00:30:06.000 That's not the desired outcome.

00:30:08.000 But if they had asked the staff to do that...

00:30:13.000 They all would have agreed.

00:30:15.000 That's what these people signed up to do.

00:30:17.000 And yet the director goes, no, you know, we're just, just no.

00:30:21.000 We're not going to take that risk.

00:30:22.000 And this is, I think, it says so much about the bureaucratic character of how government works, right?

00:30:31.000 The people who rise to the top of these governments.

00:30:36.000 It's about risk management for them, right?

00:30:39.000 It's about never being criticized for something.

00:30:41.000 And 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.

00:30:50.000 People ask about, you know, people still criticize me.

00:30:53.000 In the book, you know, I talk about aliens and chemtrails and things like that, and the fact that there's no evidence for that.

00:30:59.000 I went looking on the network, right?

00:31:02.000 And I know, Joe, I know you want there to be aliens.

00:31:08.000 I do.

00:31:09.000 I know Neil deGrasse Tyson badly wants there to be aliens.

00:31:13.000 And there probably are, right?

00:31:15.000 But 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.

00:31:25.000 I couldn't find anything.

00:31:27.000 So if it's hidden, and it could be hidden, it's hidden really damn well, even from people who are on the inside.

00:31:34.000 But the main thing is conspiracy theories.

00:31:36.000 Everybody wants to believe in conspiracy theories because it helps life make sense.

00:31:41.000 It helps us believe That somebody is in control, right?

00:31:46.000 That somebody is calling the shots.

00:31:47.000 These things all happen for a reason, this, that, and the other.

00:31:52.000 There 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,

00:32:07.000 I think there's 4 million or 1.4 million people in the United States who hold security clearances.

00:32:15.000 And you can get all of these people to not talk, ever, to journalists, to this, that, or the other.

00:32:21.000 But 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?

00:32:29.000 Not what we can speculate on, but what are at least the commonly agreed facts.

00:32:36.000 It'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.

00:32:49.000 And in fact, the government says this, too.

00:32:52.000 But the government goes, the reason that these attacks happened, the reason that they weren't prevented, is what they call stove piping, right?

00:33:01.000 There was not enough sharing.

00:33:03.000 They 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.

00:33:13.000 And to some extent, they're correct on this, right? 0.95

00:33:16.000 There 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.

00:33:27.000 Those 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.

00:33:42.000 If the FBI wanted to send absolutely everything they had to the CIA, they could have done so.

00:33:46.000 If the CIA wanted to send everything they had to the FBI, they could have done so.

00:33:51.000 They didn't, and people died as a result.

00:33:53.000 Now, government goes, bureaucratic proceduralism was responsible, and it's because we had too many restrictions on the intelligence community.

00:34:01.000 And 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.

00:34:10.000 Therefore, naturally, we just have to unchain these guys and everything will be better, right?

00:34:15.000 And if you remember that post-9-11 moment, you can understand how that actually could come off as persuasive.

00:34:21.000 How that might be a kind of thing that you go, alright, well that makes sense.

00:34:25.000 Because everybody was terrified, right?

00:34:29.000 There were people quite quickly who got their heads back on their shoulders the right way.

00:34:33.000 There 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.

00:34:44.000 We'll get into that in a minute.

00:34:47.000 But 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,

00:35:06.000 and 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.

00:35:22.000 And we went, look, you know, terrorists.

00:35:25.000 We 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.

00:35:34.000 We entered this era of increasingly unlimited government as a result.

00:35:39.000 And now, in hindsight, we go, oh, we shouldn't have been surprised.

00:35:43.000 But at the time, everyone panicked, right?

00:35:46.000 But if you go back to, did that help?

00:35:48.000 And we know the answer now is, in fact, no, it did not.

00:35:51.000 It made things worse.

00:35:54.000 I 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.

00:36:03.000 But 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,

00:36:19.000 why are we trading people's information like baseball cards and all of this stuff?

00:36:24.000 It'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.

00:36:42.000 A judge isn't going to question that.

00:36:43.000 Any judge in the world will stamp that warrant without even thinking about it and then go to bed that night.

00:36:49.000 You know, without a care in the world.

00:36:51.000 Because you're not spying on a journalist.

00:36:53.000 You're not spying on a human rights defender, right?

00:36:55.000 This is not an edge case.

00:36:56.000 This is someone that you believe to be associated with Al-Qaeda or whatever.

00:37:00.000 Now, this is all a lot of preamble to say that essential fact.

00:37:06.000 Government agrees.

00:37:07.000 Everyone agrees.

00:37:08.000 The attacks probably could have been prevented if information had been shared.

00:37:13.000 So, why wasn't the information shared?

00:37:16.000 Government 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.

00:37:26.000 And there were these barriers.

00:37:28.000 But the reality is, why were those barriers respected in the case of a major terrorist plot?

00:37:35.000 Why 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?

00:37:45.000 And 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.

00:38:01.000 And this is the sad reality of what actually happened.

00:38:05.000 Every one of those agencies wanted to be the guy who busted the plot.

00:38:10.000 They wanted to be the one who got credit for it.

00:38:12.000 And they didn't realize how serious it was until it was too late because they were competing with each other rather than cooperating.

00:38:21.000 That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

00:38:23.000 If 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.

00:38:36.000 Yeah, 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.

00:38:49.000 Again, this happens in every industry.

00:38:51.000 This 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.

00:38:59.000 And if you're the guy who does that, you're going straight to the top.

00:39:02.000 But their solution instead of...

00:39:05.000 So we have a weird delay here for folks that are listening.

00:39:08.000 So 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?

00:39:19.000 Well, no, they're different things.

00:39:22.000 9-11 is what woke these guys up, basically.

00:39:26.000 And they went, well, we screwed up and Americans died as a result.

00:39:33.000 We really don't want to take the hit on that.

00:39:36.000 And to be honest, the government had no interest in putting the hit on them.

00:39:39.000 To be honest, the public had no interest in putting the hit on them at the time.

00:39:45.000 Because everybody understood terrorism is a real thing.

00:39:48.000 There are bad people in the world.

00:39:50.000 And that's true, right?

00:39:51.000 That will always be true.

00:39:52.000 There's always going to be criminals.

00:39:53.000 There's always going to be terrorists.

00:39:55.000 Whether 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.

00:40:08.000 They want to change something, even in a negative way, because that's what they feel.

00:40:15.000 Is all they have left.

00:40:17.000 Which, these are criminals, right?

00:40:19.000 These are people that we don't need to pity.

00:40:21.000 But if we ever want to stop it, we do need to understand it.

00:40:24.000 And where those things come from.

00:40:25.000 Where those drives come from in the first place.

00:40:28.000 But, basically everybody went, alright, how do we stop this?

00:40:33.000 Because nobody wants to feel unsafe.

00:40:34.000 Nobody wants to feel like the building is going to come down the next time you go in it.

00:40:38.000 And so everybody just went, I don't care who does it.

00:40:43.000 Stop it.

00:40:44.000 And they said this to Dick Cheney, which is a historic mistake, because Dick Cheney knows how government works.

00:40:51.000 He 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.

00:41:05.000 And 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.

00:41:16.000 And you were there while this was happening?

00:41:19.000 No, I was not.

00:41:21.000 Again, this is 2001. I was 18 years old.

00:41:28.000 I was working on the base.

00:41:29.000 I drove past the building, but that was it.

00:41:30.000 This is all hindsight.

00:41:31.000 This is biography.

00:41:32.000 This is documented history, but this is not, you know, the gospel of Edward Snowden.

00:41:37.000 I don't know this, right?

00:41:38.000 This is public record.

00:41:39.000 This is what we all know.

00:41:43.000 What 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.

00:41:55.000 He's abusing it against immigrants.

00:41:56.000 He's abusing it against domestic opponents.

00:41:58.000 He's doing whatever.

00:41:59.000 He's trying to hurt political rivals in the next election.

00:42:02.000 All of this stuff.

00:42:04.000 And, you know, we can get into this stuff later if you want in detail.

00:42:07.000 But the bottom line is they're going, this is a guy who's in the White House who's thrown elbows.

00:42:12.000 He doesn't really care.

00:42:13.000 He wants to hurt people as long as he can convince the Americans that those are the bad guys.

00:42:20.000 That's the enemy.

00:42:21.000 Doesn't matter if they're far away.

00:42:22.000 It doesn't matter if they're close at home.

00:42:24.000 Whoever he's against, he's gonna harm.

00:42:27.000 And the dark thing is, this is actually why he was elected.

00:42:33.000 In 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?

00:42:46.000 President for basically 20 years.

00:42:48.000 Think about that.

00:42:49.000 You 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.

00:42:59.000 But think about that.

00:43:01.000 How do you get that kind of political longevity?

00:43:04.000 And 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.

00:43:13.000 If you look at Russian cinema, all they had were gangster movies, right?

00:43:17.000 All 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.

00:43:26.000 Like, there's nothing to buy, there's nothing to do, there's no job, no one had a future.

00:43:31.000 And 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.

00:43:41.000 We see it happen in Turkey with Erdogan, right?

00:43:44.000 We've seen it happen successively with bad governments, even in Western democracies.

00:43:50.000 We see it happening, sadly, in places like Poland and Hungary.

00:43:55.000 You can even argue it's happening in the United Kingdom, right?

00:43:59.000 And 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.

00:44:06.000 And 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,

00:44:22.000 even if they will actively make things worse, even if they will make things better for themselves and their buddies by taking from you.

00:44:30.000 But 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.

00:44:40.000 So sorry, let me turn this back over to you because we got way off track there.

00:44:43.000 No, that's alright.

00:44:44.000 I want to bring it back to the initial question.

00:44:46.000 So 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?

00:44:56.000 Like, when do you contact these journalists, and what was the thought process regarding this?

00:45:01.000 Like, what steps did you go through?

00:45:03.000 Once 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.

00:45:19.000 Okay, so since we gave so much historical preamble, let me just give the CliffsNotes version to get us up to that.

00:45:27.000 So, after September 11th, I'm a little bit lost.

00:45:30.000 I'm doing my technical stuff, but it doesn't really feel like it matters anymore.

00:45:33.000 Like, I'm making more money, I'm becoming more accomplished.

00:45:37.000 But the world's on fire, right?

00:45:39.000 You remember there was a crazy mood of patriotism in the country because we were all trying to come together and get through it.

00:45:45.000 You remember people were sticking Dixie cups on the top of every chain-link fence on every overpass.

00:45:50.000 It was like, stand together, you know, never forget.

00:45:54.000 United we stand.

00:45:55.000 Flags on every car.

00:45:57.000 Exactly.

00:45:58.000 And he was a young guy who was not especially political, right?

00:46:04.000 And I come from a military background, federal family, all that stuff, and so that means I'm very vulnerable to this kind of stuff.

00:46:11.000 I 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,

00:46:27.000 you 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.

00:46:38.000 You probably can't tell from looking at me, but I'm not going to be at the top of the MMA circuit anytime soon.

00:46:46.000 So it didn't work out.

00:46:47.000 I 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.

00:46:55.000 So you train harder in special platoons, you go further.

00:46:59.000 And I ended up breaking my legs, basically.

00:47:01.000 So they put me out under special discharge.

00:47:04.000 Both your legs?

00:47:04.000 Yeah, it was basically what it was.

00:47:06.000 They were shin splints that I was too dumb to get off of, right? 0.98

00:47:11.000 So I kept marching underweight, and I'm a pretty light guy to begin with.

00:47:14.000 I had a 24-inch waist when I joined the Army.

00:47:18.000 Girls are jealous. 1.00

00:47:19.000 I would.

00:47:20.000 Yeah.

00:47:21.000 I think I weighed like 128 pounds.

00:47:25.000 I 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.

00:47:39.000 And 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.

00:47:47.000 And then you're doing exercise and the army is like a whole chapter in the book.

00:47:52.000 You got your battle buddy, right, because they never allow you to be alone.

00:47:55.000 You always got to have somebody watching you.

00:48:01.000 Yeah.

00:48:25.000 And then I got to put him on me and I'm just like, oh God, dying!

00:48:28.000 And it was weirdly fun.

00:48:33.000 I enjoyed it, but it was no good for my body.

00:48:35.000 And so in a land navigation movement, I step off a log.

00:48:39.000 Because I was on point.

00:48:40.000 And on the other side of the log, because it's the woods in Georgia, I'm at Sand Hill, I see a snake.

00:48:49.000 And so in my memory, you know, it's like time slows down.

00:48:54.000 Because in North Carolina, you know, where I grew up, you think all snakes are poisonous.

00:48:59.000 Sorry, there's an issue.

00:49:00.000 Do we need to take a break?

00:49:01.000 No, we're good.

00:49:02.000 It's completely fine.

00:49:03.000 No, we're fine.

00:49:03.000 There was something that happened on the screen.

00:49:05.000 I wanted to make sure it was okay.

00:49:07.000 That's just the FBI joining the chat.

00:49:09.000 That's what I was worried about.

00:49:10.000 There's a second image opened up here.

00:49:13.000 Yeah, so anyway, I try to take a much longer step in mid-air.

00:49:18.000 I land badly.

00:49:21.000 And it's just one leg is like fire.

00:49:23.000 I'm limping, I'm limping, I'm limping.

00:49:26.000 But, you know, everybody says don't go to sick call because if you go to sick call, you'll lose your slot.

00:49:30.000 You'll end up general infantry or regular infantry.

00:49:34.000 And so I go back.

00:49:36.000 I just tough it out.

00:49:38.000 I 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.

00:49:47.000 And I try to get up and I just can't get up.

00:49:50.000 And 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.

00:49:58.000 And he has a broken hip.

00:50:00.000 Where they had to bring him to surgery.

00:50:01.000 In the book, there's a lot more detail about it.

00:50:04.000 It's kind of a dramatic moment.

00:50:06.000 But for me, they just said I had bilateral tibial fractures, right?

00:50:10.000 All the way up my legs.

00:50:11.000 They said I had spider webs.

00:50:13.000 And the next phase of the training was jump school, right?

00:50:19.000 Where you've got to jump out of a plane.

00:50:21.000 And the doctor, you know, is like, Son, if you jump on those legs...

00:50:28.000 They're going to turn into powder.

00:50:29.000 And he's like, I can hold you back.

00:50:32.000 You know, we can put you for like six months.

00:50:35.000 You stay off them.

00:50:36.000 Then you can go back through the whole cycle, right?

00:50:40.000 Start basic from scratch.

00:50:42.000 But you'll lose your slot in the special forces pipeline because of the way these things are scheduled and everything like that.

00:50:49.000 And then you'll basically be reassigned to the needs of the army.

00:50:53.000 Or, which probably meant I was going back to IT, which was what I joined the army to kind of escape.

00:51:01.000 Or, you can go out on this special kind of discharge that's called an administrative discharge, right?

00:51:06.000 Normally you got honorable discharge, dishonorable discharge, things like that.

00:51:10.000 This is something for people who have been in for, I think, less than six months, where it's like annulling a marriage.

00:51:16.000 It's as if it never happened.

00:51:18.000 It's as if you never joined.

00:51:20.000 And at the time, I was like, well, you know, that's very kind of him to do that.

00:51:25.000 And I took it.

00:51:26.000 You 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.

00:51:39.000 And then they let you out once the paperwork all finishes.

00:51:42.000 But in hindsight, I realized that if you take an administrative discharge, it exempts the Army for liability for your injuries.

00:51:52.000 So 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.

00:52:01.000 And it was just a funny thing.

00:52:02.000 But anyway, I get out of the Army, and here...

00:52:07.000 I'm on crutches for a long time and just sort of trying to figure out, alright, well, what's next in life?

00:52:16.000 Because 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,

00:52:31.000 which was a higher clearance than I had at the time.

00:52:35.000 And 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.

00:52:52.000 So 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.

00:53:00.000 Because 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?

00:53:10.000 And I had gotten a GED just by going in and taking a test.

00:53:13.000 So for government purposes, it was the same as if I was a high school graduate.

00:53:19.000 So now suddenly it was like these doors were open.

00:53:21.000 Now this University of Maryland facility turned out to be an NSA facility.

00:53:29.000 It was called CASEL, the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland College Park.

00:53:37.000 And 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.

00:53:49.000 But once I had my foot in the door there, I could start climbing the ladder step by step.

00:53:56.000 And I applied for, or I went to a job fair, actually, that was only for people who had security clearances.

00:54:06.000 And I ended up going to the table for one of the technical companies.

00:54:08.000 It was a little tiny subcontractor nobody's ever heard of.

00:54:13.000 And they said, you know, we've got tons of positions for somebody like you.

00:54:18.000 Are you comfortable working nights?

00:54:20.000 And I was like, yeah, you know, I wake up in the middle of the day anyway.

00:54:24.000 That's fine with me.

00:54:26.000 And 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.

00:54:39.000 And this is government, man.

00:54:40.000 It's all these weird dodges and boondoggles for how people are employed there.

00:54:44.000 Now, suddenly...

00:54:46.000 I'm working at CIA headquarters, the place where all the movies show you swoop over the marble seal and everything like that.

00:54:54.000 I'm the king of the castle.

00:54:55.000 I'm there at the middle of the night when no one else is there.

00:54:58.000 The lights are on motion sensors.

00:55:00.000 It's the creepiest thing in the world.

00:55:03.000 There's flags on the wall that are just gently billowing in the air conditioning like ghosts.

00:55:09.000 The hallway lights up as you walk alongside it because it's like a green building and they disappear behind you.

00:55:17.000 And there's no one there.

00:55:18.000 I 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.

00:55:28.000 And this kind of thing was my end because they were like, look, it's the night shift.

00:55:34.000 Nothing that bad is going to happen.

00:55:36.000 But it was on a very senior technical team.

00:55:41.000 That was basically handling systems administration for everybody in the Washington metropolitan area, right?

00:55:47.000 So every, basically, CIA server.

00:55:52.000 This is a computer system that data is stored on, that reporting is stored on, that traffic is moved on, all of this stuff.

00:56:00.000 Suddenly, me...

00:56:02.000 This is circa 2005, I think.

00:56:10.000 I'm in charge of.

00:56:12.000 And it's just me and one other guy on the night shift.

00:56:15.000 And if you're interested in the book, there's a lot of detail on this.

00:56:19.000 But I get sort of scouted from this position because they realize I actually know a lot about technology.

00:56:24.000 They 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.

00:56:35.000 But they go, well, are you willing to go overseas?

00:56:40.000 And to a young man at that age, that's actually like, hey, that sounds kind of exciting.

00:56:43.000 You 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.

00:56:55.000 I'm one of them.

00:56:56.000 Because they're like, wait, the CIA's the bad guys, right?

00:56:57.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:58.000 They're like, what, are you going to go overthrow a government somewhere?

00:57:01.000 But you have to understand that I'm still very much a true believer.

00:57:05.000 The government is like the living, compressed embodiment of truth and goodness and light, you know, the shining city on the hill.

00:57:12.000 So I want to do my part to spread that to the world.

00:57:16.000 I didn't have skepticism is really what I'm trying to establish here.

00:57:22.000 And 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.

00:57:30.000 I'm sent to this actually much more secret facility called The Hill, which is in Warrington, Virginia.

00:57:41.000 This 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.

00:57:55.000 But yeah, so I go through training and then I get assigned overseas and I end up in Geneva, Switzerland, undercover as a diplomat, right?

00:58:02.000 I think my formal title for the embassy is like something super bland, like diplomatic attache.

00:58:10.000 And what I am is I'm a forward deployed tech guy.

00:58:13.000 They send you through this school to make you into kind of a MacGyver.

00:58:17.000 Yes, you can handle all the computers, but you can also handle the connections for the Embassy's power systems, the actual electrical connections.

00:58:28.000 You can handle the HVAC systems.

00:58:31.000 You can handle locks and alarms and security systems.

00:58:36.000 Basically, anything that's got an on button on it at the embassy that's secure, now you're responsible for.

00:58:42.000 And I traveled from Geneva to other countries in Europe for sort of assignments, and it was an exciting time.

00:58:52.000 I actually...

00:58:54.000 Still enjoyed it, but this was where I first, working with intelligence, started to get doubts.

00:59:01.000 And the story's been told many times, so I won't go over it in full detail here.

00:59:07.000 But the CIA does primarily, and it's not the only thing they do, what's called human intelligence.

00:59:16.000 Now, there are many different types of intelligence that the intelligence community is responsible for.

00:59:24.000 The primary ones are human intelligence and signals intelligence.

00:59:28.000 You 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.

00:59:41.000 That can be intercepted and then turned into information.

00:59:44.000 Human 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.

00:59:53.000 Basically they say, look, we'll give you money if you sell out your country.

00:59:59.000 It's not even your country a lot of times.

01:00:01.000 It's your organization.

01:00:02.000 These 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.

01:00:10.000 We wanted records on the bank's customers, so we wanted a guy on the inside.

01:00:15.000 But anyway, that's sort of how it works.

01:00:18.000 And what I saw was they were way more aggressive for the lowest stakes than was reasonable or responsible.

01:00:27.000 They 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.

01:00:37.000 And 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,

01:00:54.000 is that skepticism is something that needs to build up over time.

01:00:58.000 It's a skill, something that needs to be practiced, or you can think of it as something that you develop through exposure.

01:01:04.000 Kind of like a radiation poisoning, but in a positive way.

01:01:08.000 It's when you start to realize Inconsistencies, or hypocrisies, or lies.

01:01:19.000 And 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.

01:01:30.000 And over time, that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds and builds until it's something that you can no longer ignore.

01:01:38.000 Now after the CIA, I went to the NSA in Japan, where I was working there in Tokyo.

01:01:46.000 And then from there, a couple years later, I went to the CIA again.

01:01:52.000 Now 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,

01:02:08.000 but I'm sitting across the table from chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions.

01:02:12.000 I'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.

01:02:25.000 Here's what we want to do.

01:02:25.000 And it's my job to pitch them a system, right?

01:02:29.000 And I'm paired up with this sales guy.

01:02:31.000 And the whole thing is to just go, how much money can we get out of the government, right?

01:02:36.000 That's the whole goal.

01:02:37.000 And we'll build them.

01:02:38.000 What we were pitching was a private cloud system, right?

01:02:41.000 Everybody knows about cloud computing now.

01:02:44.000 It's like why your Gmail account is available wherever you go.

01:02:46.000 It's why Facebook has this massive system of records for everyone everywhere.

01:02:52.000 The government wanted to have these kind of capabilities too.

01:02:54.000 Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon.

01:02:58.000 Some people aren't familiar with this.

01:03:00.000 Many of them are.

01:03:00.000 But Amazon runs a secret cloud system for the government.

01:03:06.000 I forget what they've rebranded it now.

01:03:09.000 But 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.

01:03:18.000 But 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.

01:03:32.000 I was trying to ignore the inconsistencies.

01:03:36.000 And 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?

01:03:46.000 They got a job.

01:03:46.000 They got a family.

01:03:47.000 They got bills.

01:03:49.000 They're just trying to get by.

01:03:51.000 And they know that some of the things they're doing are not good things.

01:03:54.000 They know some of the things they're doing are actively wrong.

01:03:58.000 But they know what happens to people who rock the boat.

01:04:04.000 Eventually, I changed my mind.

01:04:10.000 And 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,

01:04:26.000 I wasn't supposed to be in this position at all.

01:04:28.000 I 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.

01:04:54.000 And I'm replacing this old-timer who's about to retire.

01:04:58.000 Really, really nice guy.

01:05:00.000 But 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.

01:05:12.000 There'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.

01:05:20.000 So 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.

01:05:31.000 So I get ambitious, and I come up with this idea for a new system called the heartbeat.

01:05:37.000 And what the heartbeat is going to do...

01:05:42.000 Is 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,

01:05:58.000 both sides of it, sides that normal workers at the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other.

01:06:03.000 I could actually connect these together.

01:06:05.000 I could build bridges across this kind of network space.

01:06:11.000 And 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.

01:06:27.000 I work for this agency.

01:06:28.000 I work in this office.

01:06:30.000 These are my assignments.

01:06:31.000 These are my group affiliations.

01:06:34.000 Because 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.

01:06:44.000 And basically, you could hit this site.

01:06:46.000 It would be an update of what we used to call read boards, which were manually created.

01:06:52.000 Then we go, look...

01:06:54.000 You work in network defense, right?

01:06:57.000 These are all the things that are happening on network defense.

01:07:00.000 You work on, I don't know, economic takeovers in Guatemala.

01:07:04.000 This is what's going on for you there.

01:07:08.000 But 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.

01:07:24.000 And 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.

01:07:35.000 because 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,

01:08:03.000 dirty word searches are...

01:08:06.000 Let me dial this back because I know we're sort of...

01:08:10.000 This is hard to track.

01:08:15.000 Everything that the NSA does, in large part, is classified.

01:08:21.000 Everything the CIA does, in large part, is classified.

01:08:28.000 If I made lunch plans with other people in my office, it was classified.

01:08:32.000 That was the policy. 1.00

01:08:33.000 It's dumb. 0.98

01:08:34.000 This over-classification problem is one of the central flaws in government right now. 0.99

01:08:40.000 This is the reason we don't understand what they're doing.

01:08:42.000 This 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.

01:08:55.000 And it's because of this routine classification, right?

01:08:59.000 But every system, computer system, has a limit on what level of classified information is supposed to be stored on it.

01:09:08.000 And we've got all these complicated systems for code words and caveats that Establish a system of what's called compartmentation.

01:09:19.000 And this is the idea.

01:09:19.000 When you work at the CIA, when you work at the NSA, you're not supposed to know what's happening in the office next to you, right?

01:09:27.000 Because you don't have need to know, right?

01:09:29.000 Again, that thing from the movies.

01:09:34.000 And 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.

01:09:41.000 They 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.

01:09:58.000 Well, in the Office of Information Sharing, and actually in basically every part of my career before that, I had access to everything.

01:10:08.000 I had what was called a special caveat on my accesses called PRIVAC, which means Privileged Access.

01:10:17.000 What this means is you're a kind of super user.

01:10:19.000 You know, most people have all of these controls and the kind of information they can access.

01:10:24.000 But I'm in charge of the system, right?

01:10:25.000 People who need information, they have to get it from somewhere.

01:10:28.000 They don't know.

01:10:29.000 Even the director of the CIA, right?

01:10:31.000 He says, I need to know everything about this.

01:10:33.000 Well, he doesn't know where to get it.

01:10:34.000 He's just a manager.

01:10:35.000 Somebody has to be able to actually cross these thresholds and get those things.

01:10:40.000 That guy was me.

01:10:41.000 And 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,

01:10:57.000 you 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.

01:11:04.000 You only know the code word unless you work in them, unless you have access to them, unless you read into them.

01:11:11.000 One day I get a hit on the dirty word search for a program that I'd never heard of called Stellar Wind.

01:11:19.000 It came back because the little Caveat for it.

01:11:28.000 They're called handling caveats, which is like, you know, you can think of like burn after reading or for your eyes only.

01:11:33.000 But this one's called STLW, which means Stellar Wind.

01:11:37.000 And unless you know what Stellar Wind is, you don't know how to handle it.

01:11:39.000 All I knew was it wasn't supposed to be on my system.

01:11:41.000 Anyway, this is a little bit unusual.

01:11:44.000 And 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.

01:11:53.000 And this person was a lawyer, I believe.

01:11:57.000 And 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.

01:12:14.000 Well, 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.

01:12:23.000 Stellar Wind was no longer supposed to be really an operation.

01:12:28.000 It had been unveiled in a big scandal.

01:12:32.000 In December 2005 in the New York Times by a journalist, James Risen.

01:12:38.000 And I'm not going to name him because I don't want to get it wrong.

01:12:41.000 Another journalist.

01:12:42.000 You can look at the byline if you want to see their involvement.

01:12:48.000 There's a lot of history here, too.

01:12:49.000 But...

01:12:51.000 What 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.

01:13:03.000 Well, the Bush White House was...

01:13:10.000 Really put in a difficult position by this scandal.

01:13:13.000 They 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.

01:13:23.000 They were ready to go.

01:13:26.000 With 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.

01:13:43.000 Because 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.

01:13:53.000 And it was so close to 2001, the New York Times just went, you know what, fine.

01:13:59.000 Americans don't need to know that the Constitution is being violated.

01:14:02.000 They don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think it means.

01:14:10.000 If the government says it's alright and it's a secret and you shouldn't know about it, that's fine.

01:14:15.000 Now, December 2005, why did that change?

01:14:18.000 Why did the New York Times suddenly run this story?

01:14:20.000 Well, it's because James Risen, the reporter who found this story, had written a book.

01:14:26.000 And he was about to publish this book.

01:14:28.000 And the New York Times was about to be in a very uncomfortable position of having to explain why they didn't run this story.

01:14:35.000 And how they got scooped by their own journalists.

01:14:38.000 And so they finally did it, but it was too late.

01:14:40.000 Bush had been re-elected.

01:14:41.000 And now it was sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights.

01:14:45.000 So 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.

01:14:56.000 And they told them this program existed in ways that they wouldn't object to, but made them culpable.

01:15:03.000 For hiding the existence of the program from the American people.

01:15:08.000 And 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.

01:15:17.000 And 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.

01:15:24.000 She went, oh, well, that was classified, right?

01:15:27.000 And 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.

01:15:36.000 The White House will implicate certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity.

01:15:43.000 And so then when the White House gets in trouble for it, the Congress has to run cover for the White House.

01:15:50.000 And 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.

01:16:08.000 And 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,

01:16:25.000 which they weren't allowed to do, simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying, please do this.

01:16:32.000 And these companies went, look, now that we've been uncovered, now that we've been shown that we're breaking, or now that...

01:16:40.000 These 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.

01:16:51.000 We will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this.

01:16:58.000 And so we get the Protect America Act, which they say is an emergency.

01:17:03.000 This is all public history, too.

01:17:05.000 You can look this up on Wikipedia.

01:17:09.000 And so then, uh...

01:17:11.000 They, um...

01:17:13.000 They go, it's an emergency law.

01:17:15.000 We have to pass this now.

01:17:16.000 We have to keep this program active.

01:17:18.000 Bush 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.

01:17:28.000 But for now, we just have to make sure people are safe.

01:17:31.000 Again, they go to fear.

01:17:33.000 They say, if we don't have this program, terrorist attacks will continue.

01:17:37.000 You know, people will die.

01:17:38.000 Blood on your hands, blood on your hands, blood on your hands. 0.56

01:17:40.000 Think of the children.

01:17:43.000 The Protect America Act passes.

01:17:45.000 The companies get off the hook.

01:17:47.000 The Bush White House gets off the hook.

01:17:48.000 The 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,

01:18:09.000 FISA 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.

01:18:31.000 Now, this is not to say, you know, these things aren't helpful at all.

01:18:34.000 It's not to say they're not useful at all.

01:18:36.000 But 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,

01:18:57.000 right?

01:18:57.000 They make the law comply with what the agencies want to do, rather than make the agencies comply with the law.

01:19:04.000 That's a problem, and that's what happened here.

01:19:08.000 Now, 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.

01:19:19.000 There were objections.

01:19:20.000 There were people who knew this was a bad idea, but it passed on.

01:19:23.000 Now, what the public took away from this, because a part of these laws...

01:19:28.000 It 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.

01:19:46.000 This is how it complied with the law or how it didn't comply with the law.

01:19:49.000 And 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?

01:20:06.000 Now, why am I talking about all this ancient history?

01:20:09.000 Well, 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,

01:20:26.000 the TikTok of how it happens.

01:20:27.000 It 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,

01:20:50.000 that they were not constitutional.

01:20:52.000 And the President said, would you Continue this program on my say-so alone, knowing that it's risky, knowing that it's unlawful.

01:21:02.000 And he said, yes, sir, I will, if you think that's what's necessary to keep the country safe.

01:21:07.000 And at that moment, I realize...

01:21:12.000 These guys don't care about the law.

01:21:13.000 These guys don't care about the Constitution.

01:21:15.000 These guys don't care about the American people.

01:21:16.000 They care about the continuity of government.

01:21:18.000 They care about the state, right?

01:21:20.000 And this is something that people have lost.

01:21:22.000 We hear this phrase over and over again, national security, national security, national security, and we're meant to interpret that to mean public safety.

01:21:31.000 But national security is a very different thing from public safety.

01:21:34.000 National security is a thing that in previous generations we referred to as state security.

01:21:39.000 National 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.

01:21:54.000 And what does it mean when, again, in a democracy in the United States, The public is not partner to government.

01:22:03.000 The public does not hold the leash of government anymore, but we are subject to government, right?

01:22:08.000 We are subordinate to government.

01:22:11.000 And we're not even allowed to know that it happened.

01:22:13.000 Now, in the book, I tell the fact that I had access to the unclassified version of this report back in Japan.

01:22:24.000 And 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.

01:22:39.000 The 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.

01:22:51.000 The document that the public had been given About the Warrantless Wiretapping Program was a completely different document.

01:23:02.000 It was a document tailor-made to deceive and mislead the Congress and the public of the United States.

01:23:11.000 And it was effective in doing that.

01:23:13.000 And in 2012, what I realized was...

01:23:18.000 This is what real world conspiracies look like, right?

01:23:23.000 It doesn't have to be smoking men behind closed doors, right?

01:23:29.000 It's lawyers and politicians.

01:23:31.000 It'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.

01:23:46.000 Or the other way, they go, we're going to get something out of this if we all work together.

01:23:52.000 Civilization is the history of conspiracy, right? 0.84

01:23:54.000 What is civilization but a conspiracy for all of us to do better by working together, right?

01:24:01.000 But it's this kind of thing.

01:24:05.000 That I think too often we forget because it's boring as hell.

01:24:08.000 I 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.

01:24:17.000 It's called the Inspector General's Report on Stellar Wind.

01:24:22.000 And you can look at the actual document that I saw that was unredacted.

01:24:26.000 I had no blacked out pages on mine.

01:24:29.000 And 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.

01:24:51.000 Now, in their defense, they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just and noble cause.

01:24:58.000 They say they were trying to keep us safe.

01:25:01.000 But that's what they always say.

01:25:03.000 That's what every government says.

01:25:04.000 That's no different than what the Chinese government says or the Russian government says.

01:25:10.000 And the question is, if they are truly keeping us safe, why wouldn't they simply just tell us that?

01:25:17.000 Why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress?

01:25:20.000 Why wouldn't they put that to a vote?

01:25:23.000 Because if they were, and they could convince us that they were, They'd win the vote.

01:25:30.000 And particularly, we all know, like the Patriot Act passed.

01:25:33.000 One of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history passed.

01:25:40.000 Why didn't we get a vote?

01:25:42.000 And I think if you read the report, the answer will be clear.

01:25:44.000 So I'm sorry, Joe.

01:25:45.000 I went on for a very long time.

01:25:47.000 No, it was amazing.

01:25:48.000 Don't apologize at all.

01:25:49.000 It's just completely fascinating that the continuation of this policy came down to one man and the president having this discussion.

01:25:58.000 That is...

01:26:01.000 Well, it's much more.

01:26:04.000 Much more, but literally the president...

01:26:07.000 At the heart of it, yes.

01:26:08.000 At 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.

01:26:23.000 As a part of the executive branch of government.

01:26:26.000 In a real way, they work for the White House.

01:26:29.000 Now 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.

01:26:36.000 But 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.

01:26:52.000 And 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.

01:27:05.000 And these are defined very broadly to give us leeway to do whatever it is we think is proper and appropriate and just.

01:27:14.000 Now, 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.

01:27:29.000 And that's where problems begin to arise.

01:27:32.000 Now, 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.

01:27:43.000 That means we know their decisions.

01:27:45.000 That means we know their policies.

01:27:47.000 That 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.

01:27:56.000 And because they are transparent to us, we, the people, can then police their activities.

01:28:03.000 We can go, I disagree with this.

01:28:04.000 We can protest it.

01:28:05.000 We can campaign against it, right?

01:28:07.000 We can try to become the president, do whatever.

01:28:11.000 They are public officials, and we are private citizens.

01:28:14.000 They're not supposed to know anything about us, right?

01:28:17.000 Because we, in relative terms, hold no power, and they hold all the power, so they have to be under the tightest constraints.

01:28:23.000 We need to be in the freest circumstances.

01:28:27.000 And 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.

01:28:41.000 And 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.

01:29:01.000 They abused their powers repeatedly and continuously.

01:29:04.000 They did active harm to domestic politics in the United States.

01:29:08.000 The 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.

01:29:18.000 In 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.

01:29:33.000 And again, this is the FBI. This is the group that everybody's applauding today, saying, oh, these wonderful patriots and heroes.

01:29:40.000 Now, I'm not saying everybody in the FBI is bad.

01:29:43.000 I'm not saying everybody at the CIA and the NSA is bad.

01:29:47.000 I'm saying that you don't become a patriot based on where you work.

01:29:51.000 Patriotism is not about loyalty to government.

01:29:57.000 Patriotism, in fact, is not about loyalty to anything.

01:30:01.000 Patriotism is a constant effort to do good for the people of your country.

01:30:08.000 It's not about the government.

01:30:09.000 It's not about the state.

01:30:14.000 And 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.

01:30:25.000 He broke an oath.

01:30:26.000 He did whatever.

01:30:29.000 Loyalty is a good thing.

01:30:34.000 When it's in the service of something good.

01:30:36.000 But it is only good when it's in the service of something good.

01:30:39.000 If you're loyal to a bad person, if you're loyal to a bad program, if you're loyal to a bad government, that loyalty is actively harmful.

01:30:47.000 And I think that's overlooked.

01:30:49.000 But 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,

01:31:05.000 by complicity, by bringing them into the conspiracy and then having them not say anything about it, a wider and wider broad body of people.

01:31:15.000 And 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.

01:31:24.000 Why are you going to object to this?

01:31:27.000 All 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.

01:31:47.000 This is not to say, like, government can have no secrecy at all.

01:31:51.000 If the government wants to investigate someone without having them respond, right?

01:31:56.000 We're talking traditional law enforcement.

01:31:57.000 Sure, you're not going to tell this mobster, hey, you know, we're going to start investigating you.

01:32:02.000 We, the public, don't need to know the names of every terrorist suspect out in the world, right?

01:32:07.000 But 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?

01:32:17.000 How 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?

01:32:29.000 And so this is the main thing, and really the story behind the title, Permanent Record.

01:32:37.000 Is, look, Joe, when you were a kid, you know, when I was a kid, when you were a teenager, right?

01:32:43.000 Like, what's the worst thing you ever said?

01:32:46.000 You know, did you say anything you weren't proud of?

01:32:49.000 Did you do anything that you weren't proud of?

01:32:51.000 Something that today, in like the wokest of Twitter land, you would get in trouble for.

01:32:57.000 I'm sure.

01:32:58.000 And 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.

01:33:15.000 Our worst mistakes, our deepest shames, were forgotten.

01:33:21.000 They were lost.

01:33:22.000 They were ephemeral.

01:33:23.000 Even the things we did get caught for, they were known for a time.

01:33:27.000 Maybe they're still remembered by people who are closest to us, whether we like them or dislike them.

01:33:32.000 But they were people connected to us.

01:33:34.000 Now, we're forced to live in a real way naked before power.

01:33:40.000 Whether 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.

01:33:52.000 And we know very little about them, and we're not allowed to know more.

01:33:56.000 Everything that we do now lasts forever, not because we want.

01:34:01.000 To remember, but because we're not allowed to forget.

01:34:06.000 Just 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.

01:34:15.000 And AT&T keeps those records going back to 2008 under a program called Hemisphere.

01:34:21.000 If you search for Hemisphere in AT&T, you'll get a story in the Daily Beast about it.

01:34:26.000 AT&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,

01:34:42.000 or their calls across AT&T's network, AT&T has every phone call they ever made.

01:34:47.000 Rather, the record that it happened, not necessarily the content that's on the phone call.

01:34:52.000 And so, I mean, let me turn this around for you, Joe, because I feel like I've just been giving a speech.

01:34:59.000 When 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.

01:35:12.000 When 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.

01:35:28.000 These devices are connected all the time.

01:35:30.000 Now people are getting Alexa, right?

01:35:32.000 Now people have OK Google, they have Siri on their phones, they're in their house.

01:35:37.000 They've always got these connected microphones.

01:35:41.000 Where do you think this leads?

01:35:43.000 And what is it that gives you sort of trust in the system, faith in the system?

01:35:49.000 Just so we can start a conversation here, what strikes you about this?

01:35:55.000 Well, it's completely alien and it's new.

01:35:58.000 This is something that's unprecedented.

01:36:00.000 We don't have a long human history of being completely connected via technology.

01:36:05.000 This is something we're navigating right now for the first time.

01:36:08.000 And it's probably the most powerful thing that the human race has ever seen in terms of the distribution of information.

01:36:16.000 There's nothing That even comes close to it in all of human history, and we're figuring it out as we go along.

01:36:23.000 And 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,

01:36:39.000 all of your text messages, all of your emails.

01:36:42.000 And 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.

01:36:52.000 And 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.

01:36:58.000 The 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,

01:37:14.000 track your phone calls, track everything.

01:37:16.000 And 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.

01:37:26.000 That's great.

01:37:26.000 But there's There's no provision in the Constitution that allows any of this.

01:37:34.000 And 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.

01:37:42.000 This is step by step. 0.60

01:37:43.000 This 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. 0.95

01:37:54.000 Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that...

01:38:00.000 Everybody 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,

01:38:15.000 right?

01:38:16.000 They've got a big archive and they haven't published everything from it.

01:38:18.000 And I told them not to publish everything.

01:38:20.000 Why did you do that?

01:38:22.000 Why did you do that?

01:38:24.000 Because, so again, it gets back to legitimate secrets and illegitimate secrets.

01:38:30.000 Some spying, from my perspective, you know, career spy, is okay, right?

01:38:36.000 Agreed.

01:38:36.000 If you have hacked a terrorist's phone, right, and you're getting some information about that, useful.

01:38:41.000 Agreed, yeah.

01:38:42.000 If you're spying on a Russian general in charge of a, you know, rocket division, useful, right?

01:38:49.000 But there are lines and degrees in that where it's not useful.

01:38:55.000 Now, the examples that I just gave you, these are targeted.

01:38:58.000 This 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...

01:39:09.000 Right.

01:39:09.000 Well, 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,

01:39:24.000 right?

01:39:25.000 And there's not a judge in the world who wouldn't stamp a warrant saying, hey, spy on Abu Jihad over here, right?

01:39:34.000 And if you want to spy on another guy, Boris Badenov of the rocket division, right, that's okay.

01:39:41.000 They're going to go with that.

01:39:45.000 But then you look at these edge cases.

01:39:49.000 In the archive that I provided to journalists, there have been stories that have come out where they've spied on journalists, right?

01:39:54.000 They've spied on human rights groups.

01:39:57.000 And these kind of things I think people miss.

01:40:01.000 I'm gonna throw up some slides here, so forgive me if this gets weird and I put up the wrong ones.

01:40:08.000 But 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.

01:40:23.000 These are federal courts here, right, that said, no, actually, these programs are unlawful.

01:40:27.000 They're likely unconstitutional.

01:40:29.000 When 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.

01:40:45.000 And then you ask about that thing that motivates me, like why I came forward.

01:40:51.000 We had been trying as a country before I came forward to prove the existence of these programs legally.

01:41:01.000 Because this is our means of last sort of recourse in our system, right?

01:41:08.000 We got the executive, we got the legislature, we got the judiciary, right?

01:41:13.000 So Congress makes the laws, the executive's supposed to carry them out, the courts are supposed to play referee.

01:41:19.000 The executive had broken the laws.

01:41:23.000 Congress was turning a blind eye to the laws.

01:41:26.000 And 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,

01:41:46.000 you know, these programs are likely unlawful.

01:41:50.000 They likely exist.

01:41:53.000 They're simply classified.

01:41:54.000 But the government responded with this argument that you just saw, saying that, well, it's a state secret if they do exist.

01:42:02.000 You, 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,

01:42:20.000 because the government's just going to give its standard, what they call, Glomar response.

01:42:24.000 We can neither confirm nor deny that these things exist.

01:42:28.000 Which leaves you out in the cold.

01:42:30.000 Which leaves the courts out in the cold.

01:42:31.000 The courts go, look, the government could be breaking the law here.

01:42:35.000 Look, they could be violating the Constitution here.

01:42:37.000 But 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.

01:42:51.000 The court can't presume to know national security better than the executive because the courts aren't elected.

01:42:59.000 And 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.

01:43:10.000 But the programs are classified, so you can't establish they exist unless you have evidence.

01:43:15.000 But 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.

01:43:26.000 And 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.

01:43:40.000 And there's no distinction to government between whether you've sold information to a foreign government for private benefit, right?

01:43:49.000 Or whether you provided information only to journalists for the public interest.

01:43:55.000 And then that's a fundamentally harmful thing, I think.

01:44:00.000 When you look at...

01:44:03.000 Things that have come in the wake of this.

01:44:05.000 We're talking about the post-2013 court rulings that found what the government was doing was unlawful.

01:44:13.000 You see the courts saying actually that leaks, or air quotes leaks, can actually be beneficial.

01:44:23.000 Leak is used in the governance, and this is from a federal court.

01:44:26.000 These are not exactly my biggest supporters.

01:44:29.000 They're recognizing that although leak implies harm, it implies something that's broken, it's actually helpful.

01:44:35.000 It's a leak that's letting in daylight in this context.

01:44:43.000 The system to operate in a context where one year before I came forward, we had the NSA saying this kind of stuff didn't happen.

01:44:53.000 We had, hang on, this famous exchange, which more than anything made me realize this was a point of no return.

01:45:01.000 Because I've told you this, you've heard this, but if you haven't seen it, You might not believe me, right?

01:45:08.000 Maybe I'm a sketchy guy, whatever.

01:45:11.000 One of those senators I told you that objected to this stuff, that was doing the lassie barks for all those years, Ron Wyden.

01:45:18.000 Was confronting the most senior spy in the United States, General James Clapper, who was then the Director of National Intelligence, right?

01:45:26.000 There's no guy higher than him.

01:45:28.000 The buck stops with him when it comes to intelligence.

01:45:31.000 He's testifying under oath in front of Congress, right?

01:45:35.000 But more broadly, in front of the public.

01:45:37.000 This is televised.

01:45:38.000 And Ron Wyden asked him a very specific question about a program, mind you, that Ron Wyden knows exists.

01:45:45.000 Because he has security clearance, he sits on the Intelligence Committee.

01:45:49.000 And he knows there's domestic mass surveillance, and this is how it goes.

01:45:52.000 This is how the top spy responds under oath.

01:45:58.000 So, 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?

01:46:12.000 No, sir.

01:46:14.000 It does not.

01:46:16.000 Not wittingly.

01:46:18.000 There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.

01:46:29.000 So that was a lie.

01:46:32.000 Wyden knew it was a lie.

01:46:33.000 Clapper knew it was a lie.

01:46:34.000 He actually admitted it was a lie after I came forward, you know, three months later.

01:46:41.000 But he said it was the least untruthful thing he could think of to say in the context of being in the hot seat there.

01:46:50.000 But 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?

01:46:59.000 And Wyden, by the way, it wasn't a surprise.

01:47:01.000 Wyden gave him those questions 24 hours in advance, and he wrote a letter afterwards asking for Clapper to amend his testimony, right?

01:47:09.000 Not 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.

01:47:20.000 But all of that was refused to us.

01:47:22.000 All of it was denied to us.

01:47:24.000 And here I am sitting at the NSA next to my buddies who I've talked to about these programs.

01:47:31.000 You know, I've gone, look at this.

01:47:33.000 And they're laughing at it.

01:47:35.000 You know, I'm laughing at it.

01:47:36.000 And it's not that we go, oh, ha, ha, ha, he's getting away with it.

01:47:39.000 It's like, what are you going to do? 1.00

01:47:41.000 These guys are, you know, they're bullshitters. 1.00

01:47:43.000 The system is built on lies. 1.00

01:47:48.000 Even many people, many experts who have studied this, know are lies.

01:47:53.000 But if you can't prove they are lies, how do you move beyond that?

01:47:58.000 And that's really a question that has never been more relevant than I think it is today under the current White House.

01:48:05.000 So 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.

01:48:19.000 What makes you take the leap?

01:48:24.000 So this is covered extensively in the book.

01:48:32.000 Because it took a long time.

01:48:33.000 I would imagine.

01:48:34.000 People, you know, yeah, right, exactly.

01:48:37.000 People 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.

01:48:50.000 But look, if you found that, you can read that later.

01:48:53.000 Look at that. 0.84

01:48:53.000 And 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. 0.84

01:49:00.000 I'm never going to be at work again.

01:49:02.000 I'm going to jail for the rest of my life. 0.95

01:49:06.000 The question is, what would it take for you to light a match and burn your life to the ground? 0.99

01:49:15.000 No time. 0.99

01:49:17.000 Too long.

01:49:19.000 The answer was nothing.

01:49:20.000 And I'm ashamed of that.

01:49:23.000 It took me so long.

01:49:29.000 To get over that hump because I was waiting for somebody else to do it.

01:49:32.000 When 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?

01:49:42.000 Journalists had the scent of it.

01:49:44.000 And, 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.

01:49:51.000 No, you didn't.

01:49:52.000 Well, Bill Bimini...

01:49:53.000 You had...

01:49:54.000 Bill Binney.

01:49:56.000 He initially was the one that came out and spoke about this issue.

01:50:04.000 Bill 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.

01:50:15.000 And these guys all got their doors kicked in.

01:50:18.000 They got harassed.

01:50:19.000 By 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.

01:50:31.000 Some 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.

01:50:42.000 But somebody somewhere was informing this reporting, right, that got into the New York Times about the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program.

01:50:50.000 And eventually journalists put this out there.

01:50:51.000 People knew these capabilities existed.

01:50:55.000 But yeah, then there's the person in the YouTube comments who's like, oh, we knew all about this.

01:50:59.000 It's nothing new.

01:50:59.000 And the thing is, you can know about some programs and not know about others.

01:51:03.000 You can have a suspicion.

01:51:04.000 You can know with a certainty that this stuff is capable or is possible the capability exists.

01:51:09.000 You can know that the government has done this stuff in the past.

01:51:12.000 You can know they are likely to do it again.

01:51:14.000 You can have all these indications.

01:51:15.000 You 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.

01:51:42.000 But AT&T denies it's the NSA. The NSA denies that these things happen or that are done at all, right?

01:51:50.000 And so this is the context.

01:51:52.000 You say you know, and you know, let's put it the other way.

01:51:55.000 Maybe you do know, right?

01:51:56.000 Maybe you are an academic researcher.

01:51:59.000 Maybe you're a technological specialist.

01:52:02.000 Maybe you're just somebody who reads all the reporting and you actually know.

01:52:06.000 You can't prove it, but you know this is going on.

01:52:09.000 But that's the thing in a democracy.

01:52:12.000 The distance between speculation and fact.

01:52:16.000 The distance between what you know and what you can prove to everybody else in the country is everything in our model of government.

01:52:25.000 Because what you know doesn't matter.

01:52:27.000 What matters is what we all know.

01:52:30.000 And the only way we can all know it is if somebody can prove it.

01:52:32.000 If you can prove it.

01:52:33.000 And if you don't have the evidence, you can't prove it.

01:52:35.000 And, 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.

01:52:45.000 They need access to the White House.

01:52:46.000 They need these officials to sit down with them and give interviews, right?

01:52:50.000 That's constant content that they need.

01:52:52.000 That's access that they need.

01:52:53.000 They need to be taken seriously.

01:52:55.000 They need to be admitted to briefers.

01:52:58.000 It is a codependent relationship.

01:53:01.000 And yet...

01:53:06.000 And so, the only way to make sure people understand this broadly is if we all work together.

01:53:15.000 If 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.

01:53:34.000 It 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.

01:53:44.000 Even if I don't like this stuff, even if I don't agree with this stuff, I don't want to say it exists.

01:53:48.000 I 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.

01:53:57.000 Because otherwise, there's a chance my guy might not get re-elected.

01:54:00.000 And that's the only way this kind of stuff can happen.

01:54:02.000 And 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.

01:54:22.000 And I think that's one of the problems that we have, particularly in the climate movement.

01:54:29.000 Go ahead.

01:54:31.000 I'm sorry.

01:54:31.000 Did 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?

01:54:47.000 Right?

01:54:47.000 I mean, do you remember all that?

01:54:48.000 I mean, it was eventually redacted or eventually deleted it from the website.

01:54:52.000 Disappeared it from the website.

01:54:54.000 Yes, but that was a big part of his program.

01:54:57.000 What he was running on was that when people were exposing unlawful activity, he was going to protect those people.

01:55:04.000 Did you take any comfort in that?

01:55:06.000 Obama also campaigned.

01:55:07.000 Well, Obama also, during his campaign, said he campaigned actively against the warrantless wiretapping, the Bush administration.

01:55:15.000 Because remember, Bush is in the scandal, the height of this, in 2007. You know, the election's coming up right after.

01:55:22.000 And he's going, Obama's saying, you know, that's not who we are.

01:55:28.000 That's not what we do.

01:55:30.000 Right.

01:55:31.000 And yet, within 100 days of him becoming president, now he's sitting in that chair.

01:55:36.000 Rather than extinguishing these programs, he embraces them and expands.

01:55:40.000 Why do you think that is?

01:55:42.000 I think it's actually, again, what we talked about earlier.

01:55:47.000 First thing, every time a new president comes into the White House, they get their clearances, right?

01:55:54.000 They get read into all this stuff.

01:55:56.000 During the campaign, they get clearances and they get read into all this stuff.

01:55:58.000 But 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.

01:56:07.000 Which are basically, you know, the intelligence community wants to assassinate somebody.

01:56:11.000 They want to run this illegal program here, there, or everywhere.

01:56:15.000 And they can't do it.

01:56:17.000 Because they're executive agencies without that top-level executive sign-off.

01:56:21.000 And so they've got to open the vest, right?

01:56:23.000 They've got to get these guys on side.

01:56:27.000 And 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.

01:56:42.000 These are all the threats that we're facing.

01:56:45.000 And let's be real, it is a dangerous world.

01:56:48.000 It's not just all made-up BS. Some of it is, right, where it's inflated.

01:56:54.000 It's not that it's completely false, but they make it sound more serious than it actually is.

01:56:59.000 But there are real bad people out there who are trying to do real bad things.

01:57:03.000 And you have just gone through a hellish election because our electoral politics are so diseased.

01:57:12.000 And now, after you've crawled through fire, you're already thinking four years ahead.

01:57:18.000 How do I stay in this seat?

01:57:20.000 And these guys are basically saying, if you don't do X, Y, and Z, this is going to fall on your lap.

01:57:27.000 And the implication, which I don't think they actually say, but every president knows, is these guys can undermine you to death.

01:57:36.000 If 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.

01:57:48.000 And 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.

01:57:55.000 So in the most charitable interpretation of this, you've got a new guy coming in.

01:58:00.000 In Obama's case, this is a pretty young guy.

01:58:03.000 Doesn't focus in this kind of national security foreign policy stuff throughout his earlier career.

01:58:09.000 He's more interested in domestic policy and always has been.

01:58:12.000 That's actually one of the positive things to say about Barack Obama.

01:58:16.000 He's just trying to make things better at home.

01:58:18.000 And now suddenly they go, look, you need to worry about this country.

01:58:22.000 You need to worry about this group that you've never heard of.

01:58:24.000 You need to worry about, you know, this technology.

01:58:25.000 You need to do all this stuff.

01:58:28.000 And 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?

01:58:41.000 That are in fact wonderful things because they keep back the darkness.

01:58:46.000 And so here's the real problem.

01:58:50.000 Every president hears that, and every president, you know, first off, they've got so many other things to do.

01:58:55.000 They just kind of nod their head and they'll go, I'll deal with this later in my administration.

01:58:58.000 And this is one of the ironies.

01:59:01.000 When I came forward in 2013, this is now Barack Obama's second-term president.

01:59:07.000 One of the responses that they had to the mass surveillance scandal was, yes, we think they went a little too far.

01:59:14.000 This is after the initial thing where they went, nobody's listening to your phone calls.

01:59:17.000 Just metadata.

01:59:20.000 Right.

01:59:20.000 Nobody 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.

01:59:32.000 But they said...

01:59:36.000 We were going to get to it.

01:59:38.000 We knew these programs were problematic, but if they just gave us more time, we would have fixed them.

01:59:45.000 Maybe it's true, right?

01:59:46.000 Seems awful convenient in hindsight that throughout the entirety of the first time.

01:59:50.000 Well, it seems like what you would say if you got caught.

01:59:53.000 Right, right, right, right.

01:59:56.000 But look, if we're being the most generous that we are here, I'm sure.

02:00:17.000 I'm sure.

02:00:21.000 They're no longer scared of it because they've been dealing with this for years.

02:00:25.000 This is the oldest thing.

02:00:26.000 They've given this briefing times before.

02:00:28.000 People talk about the deep state.

02:00:30.000 They talk about it like some conspiracy of lizard people.

02:00:35.000 It's not that it's something much simpler.

02:00:37.000 The deep state is simply the career government.

02:00:39.000 It's the people who are in the same offices who outlive and outlast presidencies.

02:00:45.000 They've seen Republicans.

02:00:46.000 They've seen Democrats.

02:00:47.000 They don't really care.

02:00:49.000 And they give that same briefing again and again, and they get good at it.

02:00:53.000 They know what they want.

02:00:54.000 They know what this person's saying.

02:00:57.000 Whereas the president, they don't know who these people are.

02:01:00.000 These people have been there before the president.

02:01:02.000 They're going to be there after the president.

02:01:04.000 And so they give this very effective, very fear-inducing speech.

02:01:09.000 And then they follow it up with their asks, which are really demands, just politely provided.

02:01:17.000 And 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,

02:01:32.000 right?

02:01:33.000 And going, I'll deal with this later, or not now, or what is the cost-benefit here?

02:01:37.000 And 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.

02:01:48.000 And maybe Barack Obama honestly did want to get to this later.

02:01:53.000 But 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.

02:02:08.000 Well, it seems like the president has a job that's absolutely impossible.

02:02:12.000 And 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.

02:02:28.000 We need to keep these things in place.

02:02:31.000 It doesn't seem like any one person can run the country and be aware of every single program that every single agency is implementing.

02:02:39.000 It seems completely unrealistic.

02:02:41.000 And the job itself, it doesn't seem like any person can do it adequately.

02:02:46.000 And 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.

02:03:01.000 Yeah, 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.

02:03:11.000 And because they have too much power, that means they have too much responsibility.

02:03:15.000 And 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.

02:03:27.000 Most countries don't have a single individual with this level of power.

02:03:33.000 It's really only the Superstates, and that may By design, perhaps.

02:03:40.000 That's why they're super states.

02:03:43.000 But 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.

02:03:56.000 And a lot of this derives from just the size of the government.

02:03:59.000 Like 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.

02:04:08.000 And 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?

02:04:22.000 You know, back in 1776, The federal government, you know, was pretty much a dream.

02:04:29.000 We weren't even interested in having standing armies.

02:04:33.000 The idea of an army that existed from year to year was a terrifying, forbidding thing.

02:04:39.000 And 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.

02:04:48.000 The federal government especially is seen as sort of this small and toothless and weak thing.

02:04:52.000 Can you pause for one second?

02:04:53.000 Over the span.

02:04:54.000 Pause for one second because my AirPods are about to die and I'm going to swap over to another pair.

02:04:59.000 These suckers are good for a couple hours, but we're two hours and 15 minutes here.

02:05:04.000 We'll have a little bit of a weird audio issue with the last half of it, but Jamie will take care of it.

02:05:10.000 I wanted to talk about you, where you are right now in your life and how you're handling this.

02:05:16.000 Because you've been in exile for how many years now?

02:05:21.000 It's been more than six years now.

02:05:24.000 Six years?

02:05:24.000 June of 2013, yeah.

02:05:26.000 I mean, well, actually, I left May, so...

02:05:29.000 What is life like?

02:05:31.000 I mean...

02:05:32.000 Are you in constant hiding?

02:05:34.000 I mean, what are the issues like?

02:05:38.000 In the beginning...

02:05:42.000 My operational security level, as we would call it, was very high.

02:05:47.000 I was concerned about being recognized.

02:05:51.000 I was concerned about being followed.

02:05:52.000 I 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.

02:06:02.000 They 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.

02:06:15.000 They wouldn't let it leave until they confirmed I was not on board.

02:06:18.000 So yeah, that made me a little bit nervous, but you can't live like that forever.

02:06:24.000 And although I was as careful as I could be, I still lived pretty happily because I was an indoor cat to begin with.

02:06:33.000 I've always been a technologist.

02:06:34.000 I've always been pretty nerdy.

02:06:37.000 So as long as I have a screen and an internet connection, I was pretty happy.

02:06:42.000 But in the years past, my life has become more and more open.

02:06:46.000 Now I speak openly.

02:06:48.000 I live openly.

02:06:49.000 I go out.

02:06:49.000 I ride the metro.

02:06:50.000 I go to restaurants.

02:06:51.000 I go for walks in the park.

02:06:55.000 So this is a funny thing is I'm almost never recognized.

02:06:59.000 One of those things is I don't give Russian interviews because I don't want my face all over the news.

02:07:07.000 Which is nice because it just allows people to sort of forget about my face and I can go about my life.

02:07:15.000 But it's one of the weird things that I'm recognized a couple times a year.

02:07:21.000 Even 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.

02:07:39.000 Yeah.

02:07:41.000 Because I can be, like, wearing a hood and, like, a jacket.

02:07:45.000 I can have a scarf around my face, like, in the winter.

02:07:48.000 And, like, you can barely see my face.

02:07:51.000 And they'll come up to me and they're like, are you Snowden?

02:07:54.000 And I'm like, whoa.

02:07:56.000 What do you say?

02:07:57.000 That's pretty impressive.

02:07:58.000 I'd say, yeah.

02:07:59.000 Wow.

02:08:00.000 It's nice to meet you.

02:08:02.000 And, yeah, I've never had a negative interaction from being recognized.

02:08:08.000 But for me...

02:08:09.000 Because I'm a privacy advocate, like I would much rather go unrecognized, like I don't want to be a celebrity.

02:08:17.000 But the other thing is, I'll get recognized in computer stores.

02:08:21.000 And I think there's just like a mental association where people are like, their brain...

02:08:27.000 When 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.

02:08:34.000 Because for whatever reason, I'm recognized much more frequently when there's some kind of technological, like, locus.

02:08:44.000 So, you're living freely.

02:08:46.000 You had to learn Russian?

02:08:48.000 Did you learn it?

02:08:49.000 Yeah, I mean, my Russian is still pretty crappy, to my great shame, because all of my life, all of my work is primarily in English, right? 1.00

02:08:59.000 Now, you've talked about returning home if you could get a fair trial.

02:09:05.000 Is that a feasible thing?

02:09:09.000 A fair trial for someone like you?

02:09:11.000 Is that even possible?

02:09:15.000 It's a good question.

02:09:16.000 I 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,

02:09:32.000 because that's where they draw the jury pool from, right?

02:09:35.000 Right.

02:09:37.000 But my objection here is on a larger principle.

02:09:43.000 What happens to me is less important.

02:09:45.000 If 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.

02:09:53.000 They say, face the music, face the music, and I'm saying, great, let's pick the song.

02:09:58.000 The 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,

02:10:16.000 his lawyer is asking the court, or telling the court, that we want to tell the jury why he did what he did.

02:10:27.000 That the government is violating laws, the government is violating human rights, that these programs are immoral, that they're unethical.

02:10:37.000 This 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.

02:10:48.000 And 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.

02:10:59.000 He cannot talk about what motivated him.

02:11:02.000 He cannot talk about what was revealed, why it was revealed, what the impacts and effects were.

02:11:07.000 He can't talk about whether the public benefited from it or was harmed by it because it doesn't matter.

02:11:13.000 Now, this might surprise a lot of people, because to a lot of us, we think that's what a jury trial is.

02:11:18.000 We think that's what a fair trial is.

02:11:20.000 But 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.

02:11:36.000 A strict liability crime is what the government considers to be basically a crime worse than murder.

02:11:42.000 Because 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.

02:11:56.000 You felt threatened.

02:11:58.000 You were in danger for your life.

02:11:59.000 Even if you weren't.

02:12:01.000 Even if you obviously weren't.

02:12:02.000 Even if you were on tape.

02:12:04.000 You could still argue that. 1.00

02:12:05.000 And the jury could go, you're full of crap. 1.00

02:12:08.000 And they could convict you. 0.99

02:12:10.000 But 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.

02:12:19.000 Strict liability crimes forbid that.

02:12:21.000 The jury is not allowed to consider why you committed a crime.

02:12:27.000 They're only allowed to consider if you committed a crime.

02:12:32.000 They're not allowed to consider if the murder was justified.

02:12:35.000 They're only allowed to consider if the murder took place.

02:12:37.000 And 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.

02:12:54.000 That's what it's about in the context of journalism.

02:12:57.000 They don't bring the Espionage Act against people who lied.

02:13:00.000 Then they would use fraud or some other statute.

02:13:04.000 The 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.

02:13:17.000 And I believe, and I think most Americans would agree, this is fundamentally, indefensibly wrong.

02:13:23.000 And 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.

02:13:33.000 A whistleblower is a public interest offense.

02:13:36.000 It doesn't matter whether they are a whistleblower or not.

02:13:38.000 It's just they argued.

02:13:39.000 It's the jury that decides whether they are a whistleblower or not.

02:13:43.000 They have to be able to consider the motivations of why someone did what they did.

02:13:46.000 The government says We refuse to allow that because that puts the government on trial.

02:13:53.000 And we don't trust the jury to consider those questions.

02:13:57.000 Wow.

02:13:57.000 So you have had these conversations then.

02:14:00.000 So this has been discussed.

02:14:01.000 No, this is from the Obama administration.

02:14:03.000 There'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.

02:14:14.000 And we will never permit this to happen.

02:14:16.000 And again, I just want to make clear this is not speculation.

02:14:20.000 This is not me thinking.

02:14:22.000 This is actively happening in the case of Daniel Hale right now.

02:14:26.000 I 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.

02:14:37.000 So, you're seemingly in a state of limbo then.

02:14:42.000 They're not actively pursuing you, it seems, if you're able to move around freely.

02:14:48.000 They haven't discovered where you are.

02:14:50.000 You're just free to live your life.

02:14:52.000 Well, yeah.

02:14:54.000 Sort of?

02:14:54.000 It'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.

02:15:03.000 I'm in Russia, right?

02:15:04.000 And 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.

02:15:15.000 Any 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.

02:15:27.000 And don't get me wrong, I've been a longtime critic of the Russian government.

02:15:30.000 I just actually had a major story written about me in a Russian state news outlet called Ria Novosti.

02:15:39.000 You guys could probably pull it.

02:15:41.000 It's only in Russian, though.

02:15:44.000 That'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.

02:15:57.000 I was saying, look, I think people have a right.

02:16:01.000 to 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.

02:16:17.000 And they've just suddenly, magically, been accused of being foreign agents or something like that.

02:16:24.000 And 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.

02:16:35.000 It doesn't even matter.

02:16:38.000 And, 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.

02:16:55.000 But yeah, so look, it does not make my life easier.

02:17:00.000 To be trapped in a country that I did not choose.

02:17:02.000 People don't remember this.

02:17:03.000 I was actually en route to Latin America when the U.S. government canceled my passport, which trapped me in Russia.

02:17:09.000 And for those who are interested, again, I wrote an entire book that has a lot of detail on this.

02:17:16.000 But, 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.

02:17:31.000 And it's a hard thing.

02:17:33.000 It's not a happy thing, but I feel like it's a necessary thing.

02:17:36.000 The problem is nobody wants to talk about that.

02:17:39.000 Nobody wants to engage in that kind of nuance.

02:17:41.000 Nobody wants to consider those kind of conversations in the current world.

02:17:45.000 People 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.

02:17:56.000 They 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.

02:18:02.000 And that's very useful for the Russian government broadly.

02:18:07.000 Because they can then take that and replay that on their domestic media and they can go, look how strong we are.

02:18:12.000 You know, the Americans are afraid of us, the Chinese are afraid of us, everybody's afraid of us, the French are afraid of us. 0.97

02:18:17.000 We are strong, right?

02:18:20.000 There's no question That Russia is going to be interfering in elections.

02:18:26.000 There's no question that America is going to be interfering in Russian elections.

02:18:29.000 Nobody likes to talk about this.

02:18:31.000 And again, I need to substantiate that now that I've said that.

02:18:33.000 I've got an old note that I've signed a billion times.

02:18:38.000 The 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.

02:18:51.000 And they found in roughly 50 years, 36 different cases of election interference by Russia or the Soviets, right?

02:18:59.000 This is not a new thing.

02:19:00.000 This is something that always happens because that's what intelligence services do.

02:19:04.000 That'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.

02:19:16.000 But 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.

02:19:31.000 But this is the thing.

02:19:33.000 There is a way to criticize the Russian government's policies.

02:19:40.000 Without criticizing the Russian people who are ordinary people who just want to have a happy life.

02:19:46.000 They just want to do better.

02:19:47.000 They want the same things that you do, right?

02:19:49.000 And every time people go, oh, Russia, Russia, Russia.

02:19:51.000 Every time people go, Russia bad. 0.84

02:19:53.000 Every time they go, Russia's doing this, they go, Russia's doing that. 0.86

02:19:55.000 Russian people who have nothing to do with the government feel implicated by that.

02:20:00.000 Like, do you feel like you're in charge of Donald Trump?

02:20:04.000 Like, do you want to have Donald Trump's legacy around your neck?

02:20:09.000 And then people go, oh, well, you know, you could overthrow Donald Trump.

02:20:12.000 You know, you could overthrow Putin.

02:20:13.000 Can you?

02:20:14.000 Really?

02:20:14.000 Like, is that how it works?

02:20:16.000 So, yeah, I mean, look, I have no affiliation.

02:20:21.000 I have no love for the Russian government.

02:20:23.000 It's not my choice to be here.

02:20:25.000 And I've made it very clear I would be happy to return home.

02:20:28.000 Is there any concern that they would deny you visa?

02:20:31.000 I mean, how are you staying there?

02:20:34.000 It's a good question.

02:20:36.000 So I have permanent residence.

02:20:37.000 People think I'm under asylum, but I'm no longer under it.

02:20:39.000 It's like a green card now.

02:20:42.000 It's got to be renewed every three years.

02:20:44.000 So yeah, sure, it's possible they could kick me out.

02:20:46.000 And this was what the story I was telling you about before in Russian media was.

02:20:49.000 They 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.

02:20:56.000 Because why is he criticizing the Russian government, right, when they're the people who are...

02:21:00.000 Is that like the Russian version of Fox News?

02:21:02.000 Yeah.

02:21:03.000 Is that what they have over there?

02:21:04.000 I don't know enough about Russian media to tell you.

02:21:07.000 I think it's supposed to be more like a Reuters or Associated Press, but the hell if I know.

02:21:13.000 But the thing is this.

02:21:18.000 What's the alternative? 0.97

02:21:21.000 Yes, the Russian government could screw me. 0.94

02:21:25.000 But they could screw me even if I didn't say anything. 0.92

02:21:28.000 And so should I shut up and be quiet in the face of things that I think are injustices?

02:21:34.000 Because it makes me safer.

02:21:36.000 Well, a lot of pragmatic people will say, yeah.

02:21:38.000 They say, you've done enough.

02:21:40.000 They say, you've done your part.

02:21:41.000 You know, they say, whatever.

02:21:43.000 Be safe, live long, be happy.

02:21:46.000 But I didn't come forward to be safe.

02:21:48.000 If I wanted to be safe, I'd still be sitting in Hawaii, making a hell of a lot of money to spy on all of you, right?

02:21:55.000 And nobody ever would have known about this.

02:21:56.000 The system would have gotten worse.

02:21:59.000 But the system, the world, the future gets worse every day that we don't do something about.

02:22:06.000 Every day that we stay silent about all the injustices we see, the world gets worse.

02:22:11.000 Things get worse.

02:22:11.000 And yeah, it's risky.

02:22:13.000 Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

02:22:14.000 But that's why we do it.

02:22:17.000 Because if we don't, no one else will.

02:22:19.000 All those years I was sitting...

02:22:21.000 Hoping for someone else to come forward, and no one did, right?

02:22:25.000 That's because I was waiting for a hero.

02:22:26.000 But there are no heroes, right?

02:22:29.000 There's only heroic decisions.

02:22:30.000 You are never further than one decision away from making a difference.

02:22:34.000 It doesn't matter whether it's a big difference.

02:22:36.000 It doesn't matter if it was a small difference, because you don't have to save the world by yourself.

02:22:41.000 And in fact, you can't.

02:22:42.000 All you have to do is lay down one brick.

02:22:45.000 All 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.

02:22:52.000 And together, step by step, day by day, year by year, we build the foundation of something better.

02:23:00.000 But yeah, it's not going to be safe, but it doesn't matter.

02:23:04.000 Because individually, it's not, you know...

02:23:10.000 Me, whoever you are, that's the Iron Man.

02:23:13.000 I don't care if you're the biggest doomsday prepper with cans full of beans.

02:23:18.000 If the world ends, it's going to affect you.

02:23:21.000 We make things better.

02:23:22.000 We become safe together, right?

02:23:25.000 Collectively, that is our strength.

02:23:27.000 That is the power of civilization.

02:23:28.000 That is the power that shapes the future.

02:23:30.000 Because even if you make life great for you, you're gonna die someday.

02:23:35.000 You're gonna be forgotten someday. 0.92

02:23:37.000 Your cans of beans are gonna rot someday.

02:23:41.000 You can make things safer.

02:23:44.000 You can be more careful, right?

02:23:46.000 You can be more clever, and there's nothing wrong with that.

02:23:49.000 But 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.

02:23:59.000 You're trying to collapse The universe of outcomes such that what you've lost is freedom.

02:24:07.000 You've lost the ability to act because you're afraid.

02:24:09.000 That's a beautiful way to put it.

02:24:11.000 That's a beautiful way to put it.

02:24:13.000 Are you aware at all of the current state of surveillance and what, if anything, has changed since your revelations?

02:24:23.000 Yeah, I mean, the big thing that's changed since I was in 2013 is now it's mobile first everything.

02:24:35.000 Mobile was still a big deal, right?

02:24:39.000 And the intelligence community was very much grappling to get its hands around it and to deal with it.

02:24:46.000 But 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.

02:24:57.000 And both Apple and Android devices, unfortunately, are not especially good in protecting your privacy.

02:25:06.000 Think right now.

02:25:09.000 You got a smartphone, right?

02:25:11.000 You might be listening to this on a train somewhere in traffic right now.

02:25:16.000 Or you, Joe, right now.

02:25:17.000 You got a phone somewhere in the room, right?

02:25:21.000 The phone is turned off, or at least the screen is turned off.

02:25:25.000 It's sitting there.

02:25:26.000 It's powered on.

02:25:28.000 And if somebody sends you a message, the screen blinks to life.

02:25:33.000 How does that happen?

02:25:37.000 How is it that if someone from any corner of the earth dials a number, your phone rings and nobody else's rings?

02:25:43.000 How is it that you can dial anybody else's number and only their phone rings, right?

02:25:47.000 Every smartphone Every phone at all is constantly connected to the nearest cellular tower.

02:25:54.000 Every phone, even when the screen is off, you think it's doing nothing, you can't see it because radio frequency emissions are invisible.

02:26:02.000 It's screaming in the air, saying, here I am, here I am.

02:26:07.000 Here is my IMEI, I think it's Individual Manufacturers Equipment Identity, and IMEI, Individual Manufacturers Subscriber Identity.

02:26:20.000 I could be wrong on the breakout there, but the acronyms are the IMEI and the IMSI, and you can search for these things.

02:26:27.000 They're two globally unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in the world in one place, right?

02:26:35.000 This makes your phone different than all the other phones.

02:26:37.000 The IMEI is burned into the handset of your phone.

02:26:40.000 No 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.

02:26:48.000 The IME-SI is in your SIM card, right?

02:26:52.000 And this is what holds your phone number, right?

02:26:54.000 It's basically the key, the right to use that phone number.

02:26:57.000 And so your phone is sitting there doing nothing, you think, but it's constantly shouting and saying, I'm here.

02:27:04.000 Who is closest to me?

02:27:05.000 That's a cell phone tower.

02:27:07.000 And every cell phone tower with its big ears is listening for these little cries for help and going, all right, I see Joe Rogan's phone.

02:27:16.000 I see Jamie's phone.

02:27:18.000 I see all these phones that are here right now.

02:27:22.000 And 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

02:27:53.000 phone handset With this phone number, at this time, was connected to me, right?

02:27:59.000 And based on your phone handset and your phone number, they can get your identity, right?

02:28:06.000 Because you pay for this stuff with your credit card and everything like that.

02:28:09.000 And even if you don't, it's still active at your house overnight.

02:28:14.000 It's still active on your nightstand when you're sleeping.

02:28:17.000 It's still whatever.

02:28:19.000 The movements of your phone are the movements of you as a person.

02:28:22.000 And those are often quite uniquely identifying.

02:28:25.000 It goes to your home.

02:28:26.000 It goes to your workplace.

02:28:28.000 Other people don't have it.

02:28:29.000 Sorry.

02:28:32.000 And anyway, it's constantly shouting this out.

02:28:34.000 And then it compares notes with the other parts of the network.

02:28:36.000 And when somebody is trying to get to a phone, it compares notes.

02:28:41.000 The network compares notes to go, where is this phone with this phone number in the world right now?

02:28:48.000 And to that cell phone tower that is closest to that phone, it sends out a signal saying, we have a call for you.

02:28:55.000 Make your phone start ringing so your owner can answer it.

02:28:58.000 And then it connects it across this whole path.

02:29:00.000 But 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.

02:29:10.000 It does not need to be kept forever.

02:29:13.000 In fact, there's no good argument for it to be kept forever.

02:29:15.000 But these companies see that as valuable information.

02:29:18.000 This is the whole big data problem that we're running into.

02:29:21.000 And all this information that used to be ephemeral.

02:29:24.000 Where were you when you were eight years old?

02:29:28.000 Where'd you go after you had a bad breakup?

02:29:31.000 Who'd you spend the night with?

02:29:32.000 Who'd you call after?

02:29:33.000 All this information used to be ephemeral.

02:29:35.000 Meaning it disappeared, right?

02:29:37.000 Like the morning dew.

02:29:38.000 It would be gone.

02:29:40.000 No one would remember it.

02:29:41.000 But now these things are stored.

02:29:43.000 Now these things are saved.

02:29:44.000 And it doesn't matter whether you're doing anything wrong.

02:29:46.000 It doesn't matter whether you're the most ordinary person on Earth.

02:29:50.000 Because that's how bulk collection, which is the government's euphemism for mass surveillance, works.

02:29:56.000 They simply collect it all in advance in hopes that one day it will become useful.

02:30:00.000 And that was just talking about how you connect to the phone network.

02:30:06.000 That's not talking about all those apps on your phone that are contacting the network even more frequently, right?

02:30:14.000 How do you get a text message notification?

02:30:16.000 How do you get an email notification?

02:30:18.000 How is it that Facebook knows where you're at?

02:30:20.000 You 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.

02:30:34.000 There'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.

02:30:41.000 Every wireless access point in the world, right?

02:30:44.000 Your cable modem at home, whether it's in your laptop, every device that has a radio modem has a globally unique identifier in it.

02:30:54.000 And this is standard term.

02:30:56.000 You can look it up.

02:30:57.000 And these things can be mapped when they're broadcasting in the air.

02:31:01.000 Because again, like your phone says to the cell phone tower, I have this identifier.

02:31:06.000 The cell phone tower responds and says, I have this identifier.

02:31:09.000 And anybody who's listening They can write these things down.

02:31:12.000 And all those Google Street View cars that go back and forth, right?

02:31:16.000 They're keeping notes on whose Wi-Fi is active on this block, right?

02:31:22.000 And then they build a new giant map.

02:31:23.000 So even if you have GPS turned off, right?

02:31:26.000 As long as you're connected to Wi-Fi, those apps can go, well, I'm connected to Joe's Wi-Fi.

02:31:34.000 But 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,

02:31:49.000 right?

02:31:50.000 The intersection in between the spreads, the domes, of all those wireless access points.

02:31:56.000 And it's a proxy for location.

02:31:57.000 And it just goes on and on and on.

02:31:59.000 We could talk about this for four more hours.

02:32:00.000 We don't have that kind of time.

02:32:02.000 Can I ask you this?

02:32:02.000 Is there a way to mitigate any of this, personally?

02:32:05.000 I mean, shutting your phone off doesn't even work, right?

02:32:10.000 Well, so it does, in a way.

02:32:12.000 It's yes and no.

02:32:13.000 The thing with shutting your phone off that is a risk is how do you know your phone's actually turned off?

02:32:18.000 It used to be, when I was in Geneva, for example, working for the CIA, We would all carry, like, drug dealer phones.

02:32:29.000 You know, the old smart phones, or sorry, old dumb phones, they're not smart phones.

02:32:34.000 And the reason why was just because they had the removable backs, where you could take the battery out, right?

02:32:41.000 And 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.

02:32:54.000 You have to have Power in order to do work.

02:32:58.000 But now, your phones are all sealed, right?

02:33:00.000 You can't take the batteries out.

02:33:03.000 There are potential ways that you can hack a phone where it appears to be off, but it's not actually off.

02:33:09.000 It's just pretending to be off, whereas in fact, it's still listening in and doing all this stuff.

02:33:12.000 But for the average person, that doesn't apply, right?

02:33:16.000 And I gotta tell you guys, they've been chasing me all over the place.

02:33:20.000 I don't worry about that stuff, right?

02:33:23.000 And it's because if they're applying that level of effort to me, They'll probably get the same information through other routes.

02:33:31.000 I am as careful as I can, and I use things like Faraday cages.

02:33:35.000 I turn devices off.

02:33:36.000 But 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.

02:33:46.000 Also, if they get me, I only trust phones so much.

02:33:51.000 So there's only so much they can derive from the compromise.

02:33:53.000 And this is how operational security works.

02:33:57.000 You think about what are the realistic threats that you're facing that you're trying to mitigate?

02:34:02.000 And the mitigation that you're trying to do is what would be the loss?

02:34:07.000 What would be the damage done to you if this stuff was exploited?

02:34:12.000 Much more realistic than worrying about these things that I call voodoo hacks, right? 1.00

02:34:16.000 Which are like next-level stuff.

02:34:18.000 And actually, just a shout-out for those of your readers who are interested in this stuff.

02:34:23.000 I wrote a paper on this specific problem.

02:34:26.000 How do you know when a phone is actually off?

02:34:28.000 How do you know when it's actually not spying on you?

02:34:30.000 With a brilliant, brilliant guy named Andrew Bunnyhuang.

02:34:35.000 He's an MIT PhD in, I think, electrical engineering.

02:34:40.000 Called the Introspection Engine.

02:34:42.000 It was published in the Journal of Open Engineering.

02:34:45.000 You can find it online.

02:34:48.000 And it'll go as deep down in the weeds, I promise you, as you want.

02:34:51.000 We 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.

02:35:03.000 But for average people, right, this academic That's not your primary threat.

02:35:10.000 Your primary threats are these bulk collection programs.

02:35:14.000 Your 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.

02:35:24.000 You're constantly connected, right?

02:35:26.000 Airplane mode doesn't even turn off Wi-Fi really anymore.

02:35:30.000 It just turns off the cellular modem.

02:35:32.000 But the whole idea is...

02:35:35.000 We need to identify the problem.

02:35:37.000 And the central problem with smartphone use today Is you have no idea what the hell it's doing at any given time.

02:35:44.000 Like, the phone has the screen off.

02:35:45.000 You don't know what it's connected to.

02:35:47.000 You don't know how frequently it's doing it.

02:35:49.000 Apple and iOS, unfortunately, makes it impossible to see what kind of network connections are constantly made on the device and to intermediate them.

02:35:57.000 Going, I don't want Facebook to be able to talk right now.

02:36:00.000 You know, I don't want Google to be able to talk right now.

02:36:02.000 I just want my secure messenger app to be able to talk.

02:36:06.000 I just want my weather app to be able to talk.

02:36:08.000 But I just check my weather.

02:36:10.000 And now I'm done with it, so I don't want that to be able to talk anymore.

02:36:13.000 And 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?

02:36:22.000 Let's say you use Facebook, because for whatever judgment we have, a lot of people might do it.

02:36:30.000 You want it to be able to connect to Facebook's content servers.

02:36:34.000 You want it to be able to message a friend.

02:36:36.000 You want it to be able to download a photograph or whatever.

02:36:38.000 But you don't want it to be able to talk to an ad server.

02:36:41.000 You don't want it to talk to an analytics server that's monitoring your behavior, right?

02:36:45.000 You 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?

02:36:54.000 And this is the problem with the data collection used today.

02:36:58.000 There is an industry that is built on keeping this invisible.

02:37:02.000 And 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.

02:37:16.000 So, like, if you could see your phone right now.

02:37:19.000 And 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.

02:37:25.000 And then you see all these little spokes coming off of it.

02:37:28.000 That'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.

02:37:37.000 And 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.

02:37:46.000 Facebook's not allowed.

02:37:47.000 Facebook's speaking privileges have been revoked, right?

02:37:50.000 You would do that.

02:37:52.000 We would all do that.

02:37:53.000 If there was a button on your phone that said, do what I want but not spy on me, you would press that button, right?

02:38:01.000 That button does not exist right now.

02:38:04.000 And both Google and Apple, unfortunately, Apple's a lot better at this than Google.

02:38:08.000 But neither of them allow that button to exist.

02:38:13.000 In fact, they actively interfere with it because they say it's a security risk.

02:38:17.000 And from a particular perspective, they actually aren't wrong there.

02:38:21.000 But 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.

02:38:29.000 We think it's too complicated for people to do this.

02:38:31.000 We think there's too many connections being made.

02:38:33.000 Well, that is actually a confession of the problem right there.

02:38:38.000 If 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.

02:38:47.000 Just 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.

02:38:56.000 This should be a much more simple process.

02:38:58.000 It should be obvious.

02:38:59.000 And 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.

02:39:08.000 This 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.

02:39:19.000 That happens as a result of a single problem and that problem is an inequality of available information.

02:39:31.000 They 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.

02:39:36.000 You, on the other hand, Owned the device.

02:39:40.000 Well, rather, you paid for the device.

02:39:42.000 But increasingly these corporations own it.

02:39:45.000 Increasingly these governments own it.

02:39:47.000 And increasingly we are living in a world where we do all the work, right?

02:39:51.000 We pay all the taxes.

02:39:53.000 We pay all the costs.

02:39:55.000 But we own less and less.

02:39:58.000 And nobody understands this better than the youngest generation.

02:40:01.000 Well, it seems like our data became a commodity before we understood what it was.

02:40:06.000 It became this thing that's insanely valuable to Google and Facebook and all these social media platforms.

02:40:12.000 Before we understood what we were giving up, they were making billions of dollars.

02:40:16.000 And then once that money is being earned and once everyone's accustomed to the situation, it's very difficult to pull the reins back.

02:40:24.000 It's very difficult to turn that horse around.

02:40:27.000 Precisely, because the money then becomes power.

02:40:30.000 The information then becomes influence.

02:40:32.000 That also seems to be the same sort of situation that would happen with these mass surveillance states.

02:40:36.000 Once they have the access, it's going to be incredibly difficult for them to relinquish that.

02:40:43.000 Yeah, no, you're exactly correct.

02:40:46.000 And this is the subject of the book.

02:40:48.000 I mean, this is the permanent record and this is where it came from.

02:40:51.000 This is how it came to exist.

02:40:53.000 The 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.

02:41:12.000 To increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks that were sort of spread out through society.

02:41:19.000 Remember, 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.

02:41:33.000 And they put a bug in a building.

02:41:35.000 Or they built a satellite listening site, right?

02:41:39.000 We call these foreign sat or foreign satellite collection.

02:41:43.000 Around the desert somewhere, they built a big parabolic collector, and it's just listening to satellite emissions, right?

02:41:51.000 But these satellite emissions, these satellite links, were owned by militaries.

02:41:56.000 They were exclusive to governments, right?

02:41:58.000 It wasn't affecting everybody broadly.

02:42:01.000 All surveillance was targeted because it had to be.

02:42:06.000 What changed with technology is that surveillance could now become indiscriminate.

02:42:11.000 It could become dragnet.

02:42:12.000 It could become bulk collection, which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language, if we have any kind of decency.

02:42:21.000 But we were intentionally This was intentionally concealed from us, right?

02:42:27.000 The government did it.

02:42:28.000 They used classification.

02:42:30.000 Companies did it.

02:42:31.000 They intentionally didn't talk about it.

02:42:33.000 They denied these things were going.

02:42:35.000 They said, you agreed to this, and you didn't agree to nothing like this.

02:42:40.000 I'm sorry, right?

02:42:41.000 They go, we put that terms of service page up, and you click that.

02:42:45.000 You clicked a button that said, I agree.

02:42:48.000 Because you were trying to open an account so you could talk to your friends.

02:42:52.000 You were trying to get driving directions.

02:42:54.000 You were trying to get an email account.

02:42:55.000 You weren't trying to agree to some 600-page legal form that even if you read, you wouldn't understand.

02:43:01.000 And 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?

02:43:12.000 They have built a legal paradigm that presumes records collected about us do not belong to us.

02:43:22.000 This is sort of one of the core principles on which mass surveillance, from the government's perspective in the United States, is legal.

02:43:30.000 And you have to understand that all the stuff we talked about today, the government says everything they do is legal, right?

02:43:35.000 And they go, so it's fine.

02:43:37.000 Our perspective as a public should be, well, that's actually the problem because this isn't okay.

02:43:42.000 The scandal isn't how they're breaking the law.

02:43:45.000 The scandal is that they don't have to break the law.

02:43:48.000 And the way they say they're not breaking the law is something called the third-party doctrine.

02:43:53.000 And a third-party doctrine is a legal principle derived from a case in, I believe, the 1970s called Smith versus Maryland.

02:44:05.000 And Smith was this knucklehead who was harassing this lady, making phone calls to her house. 0.59

02:44:12.000 And when she would pick up, he'd just, I don't know, sit there heavy breathing, whatever, like a classic creeper. 0.94

02:44:19.000 And, you know, it was terrifying, this poor lady. 0.66

02:44:22.000 So 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.

02:44:32.000 So she goes to the cops and she goes, is this the guy?

02:44:35.000 And the cops, again, they're trying to do a good thing here.

02:44:40.000 They 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?

02:44:47.000 And they go to the phone company, and they say, can you give us this record?

02:44:50.000 And the phone company says, yeah, sure.

02:44:52.000 And it's the guy.

02:44:53.000 The cops got their man, right?

02:44:56.000 So they go arrest this guy, and then in court, his lawyer brings all this stuff up, and they go...

02:45:07.000 You did this without a warrant.

02:45:10.000 Sorry, that was the problem.

02:45:12.000 They went to the phone company and they got the records without a warrant.

02:45:14.000 They just asked for it or they subpoenaed it, right?

02:45:17.000 Some lower standard of legal review.

02:45:19.000 And the company gave it to them and got the guy, they marched him off to jail.

02:45:24.000 And they could have gotten a warrant, right?

02:45:27.000 But it was just expedience.

02:45:28.000 They just didn't want to take the time.

02:45:29.000 Small town cops, you can understand how it happens.

02:45:32.000 They know the guy's a creeper, they just want to get him off to jail.

02:45:36.000 And so they made a mistake, but the government doesn't want to let it go.

02:45:38.000 They fight on this.

02:45:40.000 And they go, it wasn't actually, they weren't his records.

02:45:46.000 And so because they didn't belong to him, he didn't have a Fourth Amendment right to demand a warrant be issued for them.

02:45:55.000 They 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.

02:46:04.000 Now here's the problem.

02:46:06.000 The 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.

02:46:20.000 And 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.

02:46:27.000 They belong to the company.

02:46:28.000 And then they said, well, if one person doesn't have a Fourth Amendment interest in records held by a company, no one does.

02:46:36.000 And so the company then has absolute proprietary ownership of all of these records about all of our lives.

02:46:42.000 And remember, this is back in the 1970s.

02:46:44.000 You know, the internet hardly exists in these kind of contexts.

02:46:48.000 Smartphones, you know, don't exist.

02:46:50.000 Modern society, modern communications don't exist.

02:46:53.000 This is the very beginning of the technological era.

02:46:57.000 And 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.

02:47:13.000 And so long as they do that, companies are going to be extraordinarily powerful and they're going to be extraordinarily abusive.

02:47:20.000 And this is something that people don't get.

02:47:21.000 They go, oh, well, it's data collection, right?

02:47:24.000 They're exploiting data.

02:47:26.000 This is data about human lives.

02:47:30.000 It's data about people.

02:47:31.000 These records are about you.

02:47:33.000 It's not data that's being exploited.

02:47:36.000 It's people that are being exploited.

02:47:38.000 It's not data that's being manipulated.

02:47:42.000 It's you that's being manipulated.

02:47:47.000 And this is something that I think a lot of people are beginning to understand.

02:47:53.000 The problem is the companies and the governments are still pretending they don't understand or disagreeing with this.

02:47:57.000 And 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,

02:48:13.000 you can't awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep.

02:48:16.000 He said it's an old Native American saying.

02:48:19.000 That's a great expression.

02:48:22.000 I think that's a good way to end this.

02:48:25.000 Ed, thank you very much for doing this.

02:48:26.000 I really appreciate it.

02:48:27.000 Please tell everybody the title of your book, and it's available right now.

02:48:32.000 Sure.

02:48:32.000 Yes, it is.

02:48:33.000 It's on shelves everywhere, at least until the government finds some other way to ban it.

02:48:37.000 It is called Permanent Record.

02:48:41.000 And I hope you will read it.

02:48:43.000 I will read it.

02:48:43.000 And I think what you've done is incredibly brave.

02:48:47.000 And I think you're a very important part of history.

02:48:49.000 I think...

02:48:50.000 When 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.

02:49:04.000 I really think it's very, very important.

02:49:07.000 And it was an honor to talk to you, man.

02:49:09.000 Thank you.

02:49:10.000 It was my pleasure.

02:49:11.000 Thank you so much for having me on.

02:49:12.000 Take care of yourself, man.

02:49:13.000 Stay safe.

02:49:15.000 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

02:49:16.000 No, don't stay safe.

02:49:17.000 Don't stay safe.

02:49:18.000 Open stage 3. Open to possibilities.

02:49:22.000 Take care.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 23, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden

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