so today we're opening a file that honestly It
kind of defines the modern era of the Internet.
It really does. It's a foundational story. It's
a story that has everything. I mean, you've got
a Rubik's Cube, a pole dancing girlfriend, a
frantic flight to Hong Kong. And look, the single
largest. I mean, it's the largest theft of classified
secrets in the history of the United States.
We are looking at the Edward Snowden archives.
And when you say archives, we really do need
to emphasize the sheer weight of what we're diving
into. Yeah. This isn't just about the man. It's
about. The mountain of documents he walked out
of a facility in Hawaii with. So for our sources
today, what are we looking at? We're looking
at the comprehensive Wikipedia records, which
are incredibly detailed. We're also pulling from
the original investigative reports from The Guardian
and the declassified assessments from the House
Intelligence Committee, plus the court rulings
that came years later. It's a huge pile of material.
It is a massive data set. And our mission today
really is to cut through all the noise. You know,
the endless hero versus traitor shouting match
that's been going on for a decade. Yeah. And
to actually look at the mechanics of it. Yes.
How did a community college dropout get what
they call God mode access to the NSA? What specific
technologies did he actually reveal? And how
did he end up trapped in a Russian airport for
over a month? That's the key. We want to understand
the system he revealed and just. as importantly,
the system that hunted him down. Because, look,
regardless of how you feel about him personally,
the internet you're using right now, the encryption
on your phone, the little lock icon in your browser,
that is a direct result of what happened in 2013.
So let's start with the scale of it. Because
I think people remember Snowden -Leet stuff,
but when you look at the source material, the
actual numbers are... They're all over the place.
They are. And that discrepancy tells a story
in itself. The NSA director at the time, Keith
Alexander, he initially panicked. Understandably.
He estimated Snowden took anywhere from 50 ,000
to maybe 200 ,000 documents. Which is already
a disaster for them. It's a catastrophe. But
then you look at the report that came out later
from the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. They put the number at 1 .5 million
documents. Wow. 1 .5 million. And it gets worse.
The Department of Defense did their own audit
and added another 900 ,000 of their specific
files to that estimate. That is just a staggering
variance. Yeah. It goes from, like you said,
a briefcase full of secrets to an entire library.
It is. And it suggests something that must have
been absolutely terrifying for the intelligence
community. What's that? They didn't actually
know what he took. They couldn't track it. They
couldn't audit their own systems well enough
to see what had been copied. They were just guessing.
They were guessing based on what he could have
accessed. Which brings us right to the central
tension of this whole story, doesn't it? It does.
On one hand, you have the government arguing
this was just a smash and grab that endangered
lives. And on the other, you have Snowden arguing
that he didn't just dump all this data online.
Right. He was very clear on that. He gave it
to journalists to curate, to decide what was
in the public interest. So before we get into
the leak itself, we have to understand the leaker.
Because when you look at his early life, he just...
It doesn't fit the profile of some kind of radical
anti -government activist. Not at all. Not even
close. If you look at the biographical data,
Edward Snowden is he's practically a legacy hire
for the federal government. A legacy hire. Yeah.
He's born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
His grandfather was a rear admiral in the Coast
Guard. A rear admiral. And later a senior FBI
official. He was literally at the Pentagon on
9 -11. His father was in the Coast Guard. His
mother worked for the U .S. District Court in
Maryland. So he was a child of the Beltway through
and through. Deeply embedded in it. They moved
to Fort Meade, Maryland in the 90s. And Fort
Meade is basically the company town for the NSA.
Right. It's right there. It's the kind of place
where your neighbor is probably a cryptographer
and the guy at the grocery store might have a
top secret clearance. But Snowden himself. His
path was different. He didn't go the, you know,
Ivy League officer training route. He dropped
out of high school. And this is one of those
details that his critics. always, always latch
on to. The high school dropout. Right. They use
it to paint him as undisciplined or unqualified.
But the context is really important here. It
wasn't about delinquency or bad grades. It was
a medical issue. A really severe case of mononucleosis.
It knocked him out for nearly nine months of
school. Wow. But what's so interesting is how
he recovered. He didn't just go back to high
school to finish up. He sort of, he hacked the
education system. He just took the GED and passed
it. Then he went. straight to Anne Arundel Community
College. The sources all paint a picture of someone
who was clearly very bright, but just impatient
with traditional structures. And culturally,
he was very much a product of that early 2000s
internet generation. Oh, absolutely. The sources
list his interests as, you know, anime, Japanese
popular culture, martial arts. He even put down
his religion as Buddhism on some of his personnel
forms later. He was a classic otaku. He learned
some Japanese. He even worked for a small anime
company for a bit called Ryu Hana Press. It's
a very relatable profile for anyone who grew
up on the Internet in that era. Living half your
life on message boards. Exactly. But then 9 -11
happens. And this is a pivot point that I think
gets overlooked a lot. He didn't run away from
the government after that. He ran directly toward
it. He enlisted in 2004. Yep. And he didn't sign
up to, you know, fix computers or work in logistics.
He signed up for the 18X program. Which is, that's
a direct pipeline to special forces. Right. He
wanted to be a Green Beret. He explicitly said
he wanted to free people from oppression. He
was buying into the narrative of the Iraq War
completely. So he was a true believer at that
point. He wanted to go overseas and fight for
what he believed were American ideals. But, uh...
The physical reality of that kind of training
caught up with him. The sources say he broke
both his legs. Is that right? Bilateral tibial
stress fractures. It's a common injury when you
push your body too hard, too fast in that kind
of intense training. So that was it for his military
career. He was administratively discharged a
few months later. So the door to physical combat
closes for him. But because of his background,
his family, his aptitude for tech, the door to
digital combat swings wide open. He gets a job
as a security specialist at the Center for Advanced
Study of Language at the University of Maryland.
Right. Now, security specialist sounds pretty
fancy, but from what I gather, he was basically
a guard. Technically, yes, he was guarding the
building. But this facility was an NSA -sponsored
research center. So to work security there, even
just to guard the door, he needed a top -secret
security clearance. And a polygraph. And a polygraph.
And that right there, that clearance? That's
the golden ticket. Right. Once you have that
clearance, you are an incredibly valuable commodity
in that world. In the intelligence community,
the clearance is often worth more than the college
degree. And that ticket gets him into the CIA
in 2006. He goes to a job fair and they just
scoop him up. Of course they do. They see this
computer wizard who already has a top secret
clearance. It's a no brainer for them. So they
send him off to training. They send him to what
they call The Hill, which is the CIA's secret
training school for technology specialists. He
lived in a hotel for six months, just training
day and night. And by March of 2007, he's on
a plane. He's stationed in Geneva, Switzerland,
with full diplomatic cover. Okay, so this Geneva
period is fascinating because it's his first
real taste of how the sausage is actually made.
It is. Geneva is this... Global hub for banking,
diplomacy and obviously espionage. And there's
this one anecdote that. Snowden tells the Swiss
banker incident that really seems to be a turning
point for him. It's a scene straight out of a
Spidey movie, honestly. Lay it out for us. So
Snowden claims that some CIA operatives he was
working with wanted to recruit a particular Swiss
banker to get access to secret financial records.
Okay, standard stuff. But it was the method.
He alleges they deliberately got the banker drunk,
encouraged him to drive home, and when he inevitably
got arrested for a DUI. The CIA swoops in to
save the day. Exactly. A CIA operative swoops
in and offers to fix the problem with the local
police in exchange for his cooperation. In other
words, in exchange for becoming an informant.
It's straight up blackmail. Or at least leveraged
recruitment. It's manipulation. Now, we have
to be rigorous with the sources here. This is
Snowden's account. The Swiss president at the
time, Willy Marmer, he publicly disputed this
story later on. On what grounds? He basically
said it was highly unlikely the CIA could just
bribe or manipulate the Geneva police or their
judiciary to make a DUI charge just disappear.
Which is fair. Swiss bureaucracy is famously
rigid. Exactly. But here's the thing. Whether
the event happened exactly as Snowden described
it or not, the impact on him was real. It planted
a seed of doubt. It was the beginning of his
disillusionment. He felt the agency was more
interested in manipulating people for its own
ends than in actually protecting them. He started
to see the human intelligence side of the business
as well as morally corrosive. So he resigns from
the CIA in 2009, but he doesn't leave the game.
Not at all. He just changes teams in a sense.
He jumps over to the private sector to Dell.
And this is a distinction that I think is absolutely
critical for you to understand if you want to
get this story. He's now working for the NSA,
but he is employed by Dell. This is the era of
massive outsourcing in the intelligence community.
Post 9 -11, the surveillance state just grew
so fast the government couldn't hire people fast
enough. So they turned to contractors. They turned
to contractors like Dell and later Booz Allen
Hamilton. So Snowden is at Dell from 2009 to
2013. He's assigned to NSA facilities, first
in Japan and then back in Maryland. And he is
not some low -level tech support guy. His title
is cyber strategist. He described his role as
literally sitting down with the CIO of the Central
Intelligence Agency to solve their hardest technical
problems. He had what they call privilege access.
Or God mode. Sys admin access. As a systems administrator,
you have to be able to see everything to fix
everything. You're the custodian of the entire
network. You have keys that the generals and
the agency directors don't have. You can see
the file structures, the user directories, the
raw data streams, everything. So he's in this
position of immense power and trust. He's seeing
the raw data. He's already disillusioned. But
what was the final catalyst? What turns him from
a disillusioned employee into a whistleblower
who is willing to literally burn his entire life
to the ground? Snowden himself points to a very
specific date, March 12, 2013. OK. He's watching
a televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
And Senator Ron Wyden asks James Clapper, who
is the director of national intelligence, a very
direct and actually a prepared. I remember this
clip so vividly. Wyden asks, does the NSA collect
any type of data at all on millions or hundreds
of millions of Americans? And you can see Clapper
just squirm. He rubs his forehead. He leans back
and he replies, no, sir. And then he adds the
weasel words. He pauses and then he adds, not
wittingly. Which Snowden knew, for a fact, was
an outright lie. He knew because he was one of
the people looking at the systems that did exactly
that every single day. Snowden said later that
seeing the highest intelligence official in the
entire country lie under oath to the Congressional
Oversight Committee. That meant the entire system
of checks and balances was broken. There was
no internal channel to report this to. How could
there be? The people at the very top were in
on the deception. If the oversight committee
is being lied to, then oversight doesn't exist.
It's a sham. So that's it. He decides to act.
And this move he makes in early 2013 is very,
very calculated. He leaves his job at Dell. A
job he apparently liked and was paid very well
for. And he takes a pay cut to go and join Booz
Allen Hamilton. Why that specific switch? It
was a tactical move. Booz Allen Hamilton had
a specific contract at the NSA's Regional Operations
Center in Hawaii, the place they call the Kunia
Tunnel. Right. And this specific position gave
him access to a different set of lists and directories
that he needed to complete his collection. He
explicitly sought out that job to get that specific
data. He was positioning himself for the heist.
Let's talk about the heist itself. So, Hawaii.
Paradise on the outside. A subterranean intelligence
bunker on the inside. How does one person move
potentially 1 .5 million classified documents
out of a secure facility like that? The reality
is surprisingly mundane. No Mission Impossible
style acrobatics? No. We know he started downloading
some documents while he was still at Dell, but
the bulk of it happened in Hawaii. And he used
thumb drives? Thumb drives. Mini SD cards. Things
you could easily conceal. But... Thumb drives.
Yeah. In a top -secret NSA facility. Don't they
check your pockets when you leave? Well, it highlights
a massive security gap at the time. The NSA's
systems were all designed to keep people out.
They weren't very good at monitoring the people
who were already inside. The insider threat.
The ultimate insider threat. But there was also
this social engineering element that has been
debated heavily ever since. What's that about?
Reuters reported on this, citing anonymous government
officials. They claim that Snowden persuaded
somewhere between 20 and 25 of his coworkers
to give him their login credentials. The classic
IT move. Hey, I just need your login to run a
system update real quick. That's exactly the
alleged pretext. He told them he needed their
credentials to perform his duties as a systems
administrator, to do maintenance on the servers.
And if that's true, it would have allowed him
to access parts of the network his own clearance
might not have covered. Or, perhaps more importantly,
to mask his activities. To make it look like
other people were accessing these files, not
just one guy downloading the entire library.
But Snowden denies this. He denies it vehemently.
His quote is, I never stole any passwords, nor
did I trick an army of coworkers. So what's his
argument? His argument is simple. Why would I
need their passwords? I was the system admin.
I already had the keys to the kingdom. It's possible
both things are true, in a way. He had the access,
but maybe he used their credentials to cover
his tracks. It's certainly possible. But regardless
of the exact method, by May of 2013, he has the
data. He's already made contact with journalists
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. He's using
code names. He used Cincinnati's, right? cincinnatus
and also verax which is latin for truth teller
cincinnatus is a really telling choice though
it's so specific for those who don't know cincinnatus
was the roman farmer who was granted absolute
dictatorial power to save rome from an invasion
he won the war saved the republic and immediately
gave up all that power and went back to his farm
it shows you exactly how snowden viewed himself
not as a new ruler Not as someone who wanted
to decide what happens next. But as a citizen
stepping in during a crisis to fix a problem
and then handing the power, the information back
to the public. Precisely. So May 20th, 2013,
he tells his supervisor at Booz Allen that he
needs to take some medical leave. He says he
needs treatment for epilepsy, a condition he
had been diagnosed with, which made the story
credible. So he packs a bag, heads to the airport.
But he's not going to a doctor's appointment.
No, he gets on a plane and flies to Hong Kong.
And why Hong Kong? He chose it very carefully.
He said he believed it had a spirited commitment
to free speech and the right of political dissent.
And crucially, a legal system that was at the
time still seen as independent from both mainland
China and the U .S., he thought he could fight
extradition there. He checks into the Mira Hotel,
and this is where the story really takes on that
spy thriller vibe. He's holed up in his room,
and he's paranoid about surveillance. But it's
a practical paranoia. The details are incredible.
He lined the crack under his hotel room door
with pillows to stop people from eavesdropping
from the hallway. And when he entered his passwords
into his laptop, he put a large red hood over
his head and the scream. A hood, like a blanket.
It's called a magic mantle. It's a specialized
hood, usually used by photographers to see their
screens in bright sunlight. But in the Intel
world, it's used to prevent hidden cameras from
seeing what you're typing. Like a camera and
a smoke detector. Or a vent. Exactly. Or even
a long -range camera from a window across the
street. If they can record your keystrokes, they
can get your password, and then all your encryption
is useless. So he's sitting there under this
red hood, communicating with the journalists.
And then... Early June 2013, the first articles
drop. The Guardian and the Washington Post start
publishing. The bomb goes off. The world finds
out about this massive surveillance state. And
the US government's reaction is swift. It's nuclear.
They immediately revoke his passport. They charge
him with multiple counts under the Espionage
Act and with theft of government property. The
manhunt begins. He needs to get out of Hong Kong.
And this is where the plan starts to fall apart,
isn't it? Yeah. He wasn't trying to stay in Hong
Kong forever, and he certainly was not trying
to end up in Russia. No, absolutely not. His
intended destination, his goal, was Ecuador.
Ecuador. That seems a bit random. Not really.
At the time, Ecuador had been granting asylum
to Julian Assange, who was living in their London
embassy. So it was seen as a safe harbor for
whistleblowers. So he had a plan to get there.
He had a whole plan. He had actually secured
an emergency travel document from Ecuador. The
flight path was supposed to be a multi -leg journey.
Hong Kong to Moscow, Moscow to Havana, Cuba,
and then Havana to Ecuador. So on June 23rd,
he boards the Aeroflot flight to Moscow. He lands
at Sheremetyevo Airport. He walks off the plane,
ready to go to the gate for his connecting flight
to Havana. And then, what happens? Nothing. The
computer says no. What do you mean? While he
was in the air, flying from Hong Kong to Moscow,
The U .S. State Department officially canceled
his passport. So the moment he landed in Moscow,
he was technically stateless. He couldn't legally
enter Russia because he didn't have a Russian
visa. And he couldn't board the next plane to
Cuba because he no longer had a valid travel
document. And there are reports that it wasn't
just a passport issue. that there was immense
geopolitical pressure being put on Cuba. Oh,
almost certainly. Sources suggest the U .S. basically
threatened Cuba with severe consequences if they
allowed that Aeroflot plane to land in Havana
with Snowden on it. So the flight leaves without
him. The Havana flight leaves without him. And
Edward Snowden is stuck. He is physically and
legally trapped in the transit zone of Charamatevo
Airport. Which is a kind of legal limbo, right?
It's not... Technically Russian soil. It's a
no man's land between borders. And he stays there
for 39 days. 39 days. Just imagine that for a
second. Living in an airport terminal. Sleeping
on benches. Eating whatever you can get from
vending machines or what the airport staff might
bring you. All the while not knowing if a U .S.
SEAL team is going to raid the terminal or if
the FSB is going to hand you over. And while
he's sitting there probably watching the news
on the airport TVs, the U .S. is becoming so
desperate to catch him that they cause this massive
international diplomatic crisis. The Evo Morales
incident. This story is just... Wild. It is absolutely
insane. And it's a story that I think got a bit
buried in the U .S. media at the time, but it
was a huge deal globally. So what happened? Evo
Morales, who was the president of Bolivia, was
in Moscow for a conference. He gets on his presidential
plane to fly back to Bolivia. Mid -flight, France,
Spain, and Italy all suddenly deny his plane
access to their airspace. They grounded a sovereign
president's plane. That's practically an act
of aggression. It is virtually unheard of in
modern diplomacy. And they did it because of
a tip or pressure from the U .S. who suspected
that Snowden was hiding on board. So the plane
was forced to land. It was forced to land in
Vienna, Austria. The Spanish ambassador allegedly
tried to invite himself onto the plane to drink
coffee and, you know, take a look around. Morales
was furious. He called it a kidnapping and a
violation of international law. And of course,
Snowden wasn't on the plane. No, he was still
sitting in the airport terminal, probably eating
a bag of chips. But the incident proved to Snowden
and his lawyers that there was a global dragnet
out for him. Right. If the U .S. could pressure
its European allies to ground a head of state's
plane, Snowden had zero chance of ever getting
on a commercial flight to Latin America without
being intercepted. It effectively sealed his
fate. Russia was the only place he could be.
Eventually, Russia granted him temporary asylum,
which allowed him to finally leave the airport.
And just like that, the whistleblower who wanted
to expose the American surveillance state and
flee to Latin America was stranded in Moscow.
So he's in exile, but the files are out. And
I want to shift gears to the what? Part three,
the revelations. Because I think a lot of people
get the different programs confused. You hear
PRISM, XC score, muscular. Let's break down what
these actually were. Let's start with PRISM.
Prism was the first big headline grabber. It
was the program that showed the NSA was collecting
user data directly from the servers of U .S.
service providers. We're talking Microsoft, Google,
Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. All of them. All the
big names. Now, the tech companies pushed back
on this really hard. They came out and said.
We do not give the government a backdoor to our
systems. And that's a crucial nuance that's important
to understand. It wasn't a backdoor in the sense
that the NSA could just hack in whenever they
wanted. It was more like a forced front door.
A front door that was opened by secret courts.
Exactly. The NSA would go to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, the FISA Court, get a secret
order, serve it to Google, and Google was legally
compelled to hand over the data. What kind of
data? Emails, photos, chat logs, videos, stored
data, pretty much anything associated with a
specific target. So it was a legal process, but
a secret legal process. Right. The big controversy
was about the scope. The NSA was only supposed
to target foreigners reasonably believed to be
outside the United States. But if that foreigner
was emailing an American citizen. Their data
gets swept up, too. It gets swept up in the collection.
They called it incidental collection. But given
how interconnected the world is, that's a lot
of incidental data on Americans. So PRISM is
the legal front door collection. But then there's
muscular. And this is the one that really, really
angered the engineers in Silicon Valley. Well,
they were furious. Muscular is a completely different
beast. This was a joint program between the NSA
and its British counterpart, GCHQ. And what was
it doing? They basically realized that while
they could ask Google and Yahoo for data through
the prism front door. That legal process was
sometimes slow and bureaucratic, so they just
decided to take the data instead. They hacked
the infrastructure between the company's own
data centers. So not from the public Internet,
but the private links. Exactly. So Google has
these massive data centers all over the world.
When you send an email, the data might move from
a server in Dublin to a server in Finland for
backup. That data travels over private, leased
fiber optic cables. The NSA found the physical
spots. often outside the U .S., where those cables
were unencrypted, and they tapped them. They
were just copying the entire data stream as it
flowed by. They were literally copying the data
as it flowed through the pipes, completely bypassing
the company's legal teams, their encryption,
everything. And there's that slide in the leaks
that showed this, the famous smiley face slide.
Yes. It's this hand -drawn diagram showing the
public internet and the Google Cloud. And right
in the middle, on the link connecting them, some
NSA analyst had drawn a little smiley face. That's
unbelievably arrogant. That smiley face represented
the point where the NSA was secretly siphoning
off all their data. When Google engineers saw
that slide, they were apoplectic. I can imagine.
One senior engineer posted on Google, plus, eh,
just F these guys, it felt like such a profound
violation of the basic trust of the Internet.
They were working so hard to encrypt the front
door, and the spies were just breaking in through
the basement window. Okay, so you have Prism
pulling data from the front door, Muscular from
the back, and then you have the tool that brings
it all together, XKeyscore. XKeyscore is, you
can think of it as Google for spies. Okay. All
that data from PRISM, from Muscular, from other
collection programs like Upstream, it all goes
into these massive databases. But WA data is
useless if you can't search it. X -key score
is the search bar for all of it. Snowden made
a claim about this program that at the time people
called hyperbole. They did. He said, I, sitting
at my desk, could wiretap anyone from you or
your accountant to a federal judge or even the
president if I had a personal email address.
And the government immediately denied that capability.
They called it a wild exaggeration. But the X
-key score training manuals that were in the
leaks, they basically confirmed it. So how did
it work? An analyst could sit at their terminal,
and with just an email address or a phone number
or an IP address, they could pull up a user's
entire internet history. Their chats, their metadata,
their browsing activity, it didn't require a
specific warrant for every single search. It
was an analyst -driven query system. So an analyst
could just type in an email address and hit enter?
Effectively, yes. Now, there were internal auditing
logs and rules about what you could search for,
but the technical capability to do so without
prior judicial approval was there. And it wasn't
just used for hunting terrorists. That's the
argument we always hear, right? We need these
tools to stop the bad guys. Right. But the leaks
show that the targets of this surveillance went
far, far beyond that. Absolutely. We saw clear
evidence of economic espionage. They were spying
on Petrobras, the state -owned Brazilian oil
company, to get an edge in oil contract negotiations,
to understand Brazil's energy strategy. That's
not counterterrorism. They were spying on Joaquin
Almunia, who was the EU's competition commissioner.
And most famously, they were monitoring the personal
cell phone of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.
Which caused a massive diplomatic rift, spying
on your closest allies. It destroyed a lot of
trust. But maybe the most disturbing aspect for
the average person was the revelation of the
Lovint scandal. Lovint. Like for signals intelligence
or HUMINT for human intelligence. Exactly. It's
a dark play on those acronyms. Lovint was the
internal slang term for NSA employees using these
incredibly powerful surveillance tools to stalk
their own love interest. You're kidding me. No.
Girlfriends, boyfriends, ex -spouses. There were
multiple documented cases. So is my husband cheating
on me? And you just. Check X -key score. Precisely.
Or, who was that cute person I met at the bar?
Let me run their email. It showed that without
strict, independent, external oversight, these
tools were being abused for petty, personal reasons.
Now, it wasn't widespread systemic abuse, but
the fact that it happened at all showed the internal
controls were just not sufficient. And then there
was that other tactic tracking the pornography
habits of people they considered radicalizers.
Yes. The idea there was that if someone was preaching
radical views online, the NSA could dig up embarrassing
personal details, like their specific porn habits,
and then leak that information to destroy their
reputation and their moral authority. It's a
weaponization of privacy. They weren't trying
to arrest them. They were just trying to ruin
them publicly. Exactly. So if the files are out,
the world is changing. Let's look at the aftermath,
part four. How did the U .S. government respond?
Officially. Aggressively. The narrative from
the top, from President Obama, from James Clapper,
from Secretary of State John Kerry, it was very
consistent. What was that narrative? They argued
that Snowden had caused grave and serious damage
to national security. They argued that by revealing
the how the. methods we use to track terrorists,
he had essentially taught them how to hide. They
said he put troops at risk. They did, though
it's worth noting that in the decades since,
the government has never publicly identified
a specific individual who was killed or a specific
military operation that was botched as a direct
result of the Snowden leaks. But the potential
for harm was their main argument. Dan Donald
Trump back in 2013, before he was president,
was even more blunt about it. Oh, yeah. He tweeted
multiple times that Snowden was a traitor and
implied he should be executed. He called him
a spy who should be executed. But ironically,
years later, when he was president in 2020, she
actually floated the idea of pardoning him. He
did. It was a complete reversal. He said, I'm
going to look at it and noted that a lot of people
think he's not being treated fairly. His attorney
general, Bill Barr, apparently shut that down
very quickly. It just shows you how the political
winds had shifted on the issue. But the real
vindication for Snowden didn't come from politicians.
It came from the courts. Yes. This is the part
of the story that often gets left out of the
traitor narrative. In September of 2020, seven
years after the leak, the U .S. Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling. In what
case? The case was United States v. Mullen. And
they reviewed the legality of the bulk collection
of American telephone metadata, the very first
program Snowden exposed. And what did the court
find? They ruled that the program was illegal
and possibly unconstitutional. They stated that
the program violated the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. That is a mic drop moment,
isn't it? It is. The program that started this
whole thing was illegal. The court essentially
confirmed that the intelligence leaders who had
defended the program publicly and under oath
to Congress had not been telling the truth about
its legality. And we saw legislative change,
too. We did. The USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015,
formally ended that specific type of bulk collection
of phone records. So the law changed. But I would
argue the Snowden effect on technology itself
was even bigger than the laws. 100%. It was a
sea change. Before Snowden, the vast majority
of the internet was unencrypted. HTTP was the
standard. Your emails were basically sent like
postcards. Anyone handling them along the way
could read them. And after Snowden. After Snowden,
Silicon Valley panicked. They realized they couldn't
trust the pipes, the basic infrastructure of
the Internet. They realized their entire business
model depended on user trust, and that trust
was gone. Exactly. So they raced to roll out
end -to -end encryption. WhatsApp, iMessage,
SignalDs became the standard. Websites rapidly
moved to HTTPS by default. If you look at a graph
of encrypted Internet traffic worldwide. There
is just this massive vertical spike right after
2013. So the Internet became hardened against
surveillance because of the leaks. Without a
doubt. So we've changed the Internet. We've changed
the laws. But Snowden himself, he's still in
Russia. Let's talk about part five, life in exile.
What is his life actually like over there? It's
a very strange, frozen existence that has slowly,
over a decade, thawed into a new reality. He
lives in Moscow. He lives in Moscow. He isn't
in a gulag or some safe house. He has an apartment.
And critically, he isn't alone. His longtime
girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. The woman he left
behind in Hawaii without a word. That's the one.
She actually moved to Russia in 2014 to be with
him. That is a serious testament to loyalty.
I mean, moving to Moscow to be with the most
wanted man in the world. It really is. They got
married in a private ceremony in 2017. And they
now have two sons, both born in Russia. So he
is raising a family there. He's learning the
language, though he admits he's not very good
at it. And how is he making a living? He's not
on the Russian payroll, according to him. No,
he's become a prominent figure on the global
speaker circuit. He beams into conferences, universities,
and tech events via video link. He gets paid
for that. He gets paid well. He has reportedly
earned over $1 .2 million from speaking fees
alone. He's a very popular speaker on topics
like privacy and cybersecurity. And then there's
his book, Permanent Record. A huge bestseller,
published in 2019. But there's a big catch with
the book. What's that? The U .S. government sued
him for all the proceeds. Not for the content.
They couldn't stop the book from being published
under the First Amendment. But because he had
violated the nondisclosure agreements he signed
when he joined the CIA and NSA. He didn't submit
the manuscript for pre -publication review. He
didn't. And a judge ruled that the U .S. government
is therefore entitled to seize every dollar he
made from it, over $5 million. So he wrote the
book, he told his story, but he didn't get rich
off it. Okay. We have to address the elephant
in the room here. He is in Russia. He is living
there as a guest of Vladimir Putin. It is the
great glaring irony of his entire narrative.
Right. He sacrificed his life to expose state
surveillance, and now he lives under a regime
that is notorious for state surveillance, for
suppressing dissent, and for jailing journalists.
It's a fundamental contradiction he has to live
with every day. Has he been critical of Russia
at all? He has, but carefully. He's called the
Russian government problematic. He's criticized
some of their big brother laws, like the Uravaya
law, which requires telecom companies to store
user data. But he walks a tightrope. He has to.
He can't push too hard or he risks losing his
sanctuary. There's nowhere else for him to go.
And in September of 2022, that relationship was
formalized. Vladimir Putin granted Edward Snowden
full Russian citizenship. He swore the oath of
allegiance. Snowden's reasoning was that it was
to ensure stability for his family. He didn't
want to be separated from his Russian -born sons
if his asylum status was ever revoked. He didn't
want to be stateless anymore. But for his critics?
For his critics, seeing the American whistleblower
accept a Russian passport from Putin was the
final confirmation of his traitor status. The
optics were terrible for him. And his stance
on the Ukraine invasion has complicated things
even further. It really has. In the weeks leading
up to the 2022 invasion, Snowden was very publicly
skeptical of the U .S. intelligence reports that
said Russia was about to attack. He tweeted that
he thought the warnings were a disinformation
campaign. He didn't trust the U .S. intelligence
agencies. Fundamentally, no. His default position
is to assume the CIA is lying. He thought they
were crying wolf again, like they did with WMDs
in Iraq. But this time they were right. And he
was wrong. And he was very publicly wrong. When
the invasion actually happened, he faced a massive
backlash for having, even if unintentionally,
echoed the Kremlin's line that they weren't the
aggressors. He later walked it back and said
he lost confidence in his own skepticism, but
the damage to his reputation was done. It shows
that even a world famous whistleblower can have
blind spots. Especially when their personal survival
depends on the goodwill of their host country.
It just muddies the water. It makes him an incredibly
complex and compromised figure. But I think it's
important that we try to separate the man from
the revelation. The man is in a very difficult
geopolitical position. The revelations themselves,
however, are facts. Facts that change the world
we live in. So we wrap up with this fundamental
question. Is there any way back for him? Can
he ever come home? He says he would return tomorrow
if he could be guaranteed a fair trial. But under
the law he was charged with, the Espionage Act
of 1917, a fair trial is basically impossible
for him. Explain that to the listener. What does
that mean? If you are charged under the Espionage
Act, you are not allowed to make a public interest
defense. So you can't tell the jury why you leaked
the documents. Correct. You cannot stand up in
court and say, I did this to save the Constitution
or I did this because the government was lying
to the American people. The court will not allow
that testimony. The only question the jury is
allowed to consider is, did you or did you not
take the documents and give them to an unauthorized
person? And since he freely admits he did that.
The trial will be over in 10 minutes. He would
be found guilty and would be facing decades,
potentially the rest of his life, in a federal
prison. So unless that law changes or a future
president decides to pardon him, he's a Russian
citizen for life. Which leaves us with a really
provocative thought to end on, I think. The U
.S. judicial system, years later, eventually
agreed with Snowden. The mass surveillance program
was illegal. The system corrected itself, but
only because of his leak. Right. So if the catalyst
for that correction is treated as a criminal
who can't even get a fair trial, what does that
say about our system of checks and balances?
Does it mean it only works when someone is willing
to break the law to trigger it? And to take that
one step further, if you look at it from a pure,
cold geopolitical perspective. By revoking his
passport and forcing him into the arms of an
adversary, did the U .S. intelligence community
accidentally create the very thing they feared?
Did they hand a permanent high -value intelligence
asset to Russia on a silver platter? Was trapping
him in that airport the greatest strategic failure
of this entire saga? That is a heavy question.
Thanks for diving deep with us on the Snowden
Files. Stay curious. And stay encrypted. We'll
see you on the next Deep Dive.