Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we examine the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #[Número del Episodio]. Our goal is to provide a searchable, high-fidelity research resource for students of cultural history, technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been optimized for academic reference and archival preservation regarding And OK, that'll just be very professional. You
know, people are like, how do you live and things
like that? They're taking money from the Russians.
And of course, the answer is no. But I do this
for a living. Like I speak. I don't have a YouTube
channel where it's, you know, I'm Joe Rogan.
But I give speeches at universities and things
like that. I do a lot of interviews. And so we're
recording now. My own setup. Is it possible that
you could do a YouTube channel? Would that work?
Yeah. I mean, if you introduce me so I get followers,
yeah, we could do that. Dude, I'm all in. That
could absolutely happen. Do you want to do that?
Is that something you want to do? No, I mean,
this is a big question. 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. But it's more than that because
I didn't just want to talk about me. It's actually
about the changing of technology and the changing
of government in this sort of post -9 -11 era,
which, you know, our generation just sort of
happened to be growing up during. And I was at
the CIA and the NSA and all this stuff. But the
day that the book came out, the government hit
me with a lawsuit. And they hit the publisher
of the books with a lawsuit. because they don't
want to see books like this get written. They
especially don't want to see books like this
get read. And so the big thing was, you know,
we didn't know where this was going. We didn't
know what was going to happen. 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. We didn't
know where that's going. The government is still
pursuing that case quite strongly. They're more
focused on the financial censorship side of it,
basically taking any 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. More so than taking the book off the shelves,
but that's not because... they're okay with the
book being on the shelves. It's because, thankfully,
we've got the First Amendment, and so they can't.
And that's a very rare and good thing. But anyway,
in the context of that, they were like, well,
what about Joe Rogan? And, you know, I had heard
about you at this point, but, you know, the only
thing that I had really seen, that I really understood,
had familiarity with, was, like, 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 yeah
to hear him in those sound bites you don't really
get an understanding of who he actually is right
and this is the other thing like they're like
well you know you can go on all these major network
shows and I did a couple of them I did like a
morning show I did Brian Williams But broadly,
the media, the sort of more corporatized media,
as we might say, is exactly what you just described,
right? They want you to be able to answer in
like 8, 15 seconds or less. 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. And so
instead, these guys all want to say, repeat these
long, discredited sort of criticisms. And, you
know, I'm sure you'll ask the same thing. And
that's okay. They're fair questions. 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. So anyway, they mentioned
you. And I was like, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe
Rogan, where do I know this name from before
Bernie Sanders? And I look back through my Twitter
mentions. And the funny thing is your fans have
been harassing me to death for like the last
years. Wonderful people, wonderful people. But
like, go on, Joe Rogan, go on, Joe Rogan. And
I remember like after I had just made a Twitter
account, Neil deGrasse Tyson actually helped
me get on Twitter, gave me that little initial
boost. They said Joe Rogan. And so they, like,
linked you, and, you know, I mouse over your
name because I use a desktop and not mobile for
this because of security reasons. And it pops
up, and I get your avatar, man. And, like, I
have to say, your logo. 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
because like this bald guy with this Maniacal
grin and like the third eye on his forehead and
I'm like, oh man, that's Joe Doesn't look good,
but it's actually like when you watch, you know,
when you watch what you do, it's great stuff,
man It's great. 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're painted. And for me,
it's a wonderful thing because nobody understands
that better than I do, right? 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. I'll get back
to it. Fine. There's no such thing as off topic.
We could do, talk about whatever. Great, great.
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, a staff officer
at the CIA. I was undercover working at embassies.
And I talk about the difference between this
and a book and contractor and government official
and how it's all sort of lost its meaning. But
I saw something wrong. 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. There
were domestic surveillance programs, there were
mass surveillance programs that worked internationally.
Basically everything that they could monitor,
they were monitoring. And this is actually like
people go, well, isn't that obvious? Isn't that
what they're supposed to do? And this is weird,
but the answer actually is no. 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. We
think about this in the investigative means.
All those TV shows where they go and get a warrant,
the reason they have to do that, we fought a
revolution over this a couple hundred years back.
is the idea that when we had, you know, kings,
when we had governments of absolute power, they
could simply go in your home and go, you know,
is this guy a pot smoker? Get his diary, you
know, whatever it is. And just like if you find
evidence of a crime, you march them off to prison
and it's all good. You found evidence, they're
criminal. Or you didn't find evidence, well,
no harm, no foul. You're just doing what government
does. We were trying to build a better system.
Yes, the government has extraordinary capabilities,
but it only uses them where they're necessary,
where they're proportionate to the threat that
is presented by this person. We shouldn't be
afraid of the person who's got a baggie of weed
in their dresser or something like that. That
is not a threat to national security. That is
not a threat to public safety. But what happened
in the wake of 9 -11 was a whole bunch of government
officials got together behind closed doors. And
this was actually led, interestingly enough,
by the vice president of the United States, Cheney.
Everybody remembers that name or hopefully can
look that name up, Dick Cheney. And his personal
attorney, sort of the Giuliani of Dick Cheney,
a guy named David Addington. And this lawyer,
David Addington. wrote a secret legal interpretation
that no one else was allowed to see. It was kept
in the vice president's safe at the White House.
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. 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. But we can't
tell you why. We can't show you the legal authorization
for it. You just got to take our word for it.
And so they did this, and this became a mass
surveillance program called Stellar Wind, which
they said was supposed to monitor the phone calls
and Internet communications, e -mails, 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. Because if you remember,
in the wake of the September 11th attacks, they
were singing, 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. Of course,
like weapons of mass destruction, it just didn't
exist. It was all a power grab. But on that basis,
they started doing this in secret. And it was
completely unconstitutional. It was completely
illegal, even under the very loose requirements
of the Patriot Act. But they did it for so long.
That they got comfortable with it. And they thought,
you know, this is a really powerful capability.
What if we started using this for stuff that
was other than terrorism? Because it wasn't finding
any terrorists, because there weren't any terrorists.
in this context that they were looking for them.
And the ones who, where there were terrorists,
the program wasn't affected because these were
guys in Pakistan that weren't using, you know,
email and phone calls. 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. But bit
by bit over time, this grew and grew and grew.
And there were scandals. And if you want to drill
down on these later, I'll go into them. But what
happened? was step by step by step. Our constitutional
rights were changed. And we weren't allowed to
know it. We were never granted a vote on it.
And even the many members of Congress, right,
535 in the United States, they were prohibited
from knowing this. And instead, they told only
a few select people. In the original case, there
were only eight members of Congress, called the
Gang of Eight, who knew about this. Then there
were the people on the intelligence committees,
both in the Senate and the House, who were told
about this. But they were only told partially
about it. They weren't told the full scope of
it. 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. And we had
one senator, Ron Wyden. 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. But nobody knew what they were talking
about. And so journalists were like, you know,
they've got concerns. What is that lassie? What
are you trying to say? Timmy's in the well? But
they were getting it wrong. They couldn't tell
what was happening. And so what had happened
was that we, the American people, had sort of
lost our seat at the table of government. We
were no longer partner to government. We had
simply become subject to government. 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? 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, a government class
and then the public civil class that are held
to different standards of behavior. And when
we start talking about leaking and whistleblowing,
this becomes even more clear. And so what I did
was I wanted to clarify that kind of LASI mark,
right? I just wanted everybody to know what was
going on. on. I didn't want to say the government
can't do this. I didn't want to say this is how
you guys have to live, because that's not for
me to say. 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, 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. This is not okay. I
object, and I want things to change. And so I
gathered evidence of what I believed to be criminal
or unconstitutional activity on the part of the
government, and I gave this to journalists, right?
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? No clickbait,
not anything just because they thought it would
make news, it would get them awards. They would
only publish stories that they were willing to
make an institutional judgment and stand behind.
And this was three different newspapers that
it was in the public interest to know. 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. The courts had abdicated their role
in policing the executive in the Congress because...
Terrorism was such a hot argument at the time.
They were worried about being criticized and
blamed if something went wrong and an attack
did go through. And they didn't have access to
the information that the programs were ineffective.
So they were just taking the government's word
for it. And they didn't want to wait in Congress.
Most of them didn't even know, right? And the
ones who did know, it was the same thing. 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. So they benefited by
just saying nothing. And then the executives
themselves, whether we're talking about Bush,
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. Because they're the ones whose hands were
on the lever at the time. They got to aim it.
They got to use it. If you had a little search
box in front of you, they would give you the
email history of everybody in the United States.
Anybody you want. If you could pull up their
text messages. Anybody you want. If you could
see anything they've ever typed into that Google
search box. Joe, what is the worst thing you've
ever typed into that search box? That lasts forever.
And they have a record of that. They can get
that from Google. And so this was the whole thing.
How do we correct for that? 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, right?
That's the whole origin of the program is they
want to do something that they're not allowed
to do. What do you do? And so I didn't want to
say, I'm the president of secrets, I didn't want
to just put this stuff on the internet, and I
could have, I'm a technologist. I worked with
the journalists, and then to create an adversarial
step, someone who would argue against what I
believed, and hopefully what the journalists
believed once they consulted the documents and
basically authenticated them. Can we get the
government to play that role? And so before the
journalist published any story, and this is a
controversial thing. People still criticize me
for this, actually. They say I was too accommodating
to government. They could be right. Is that the
journalist would go to the government and give
them a warning. Say, we're about to run this
story about this secret program that says you
did X, Y, and Z bad thing. One, is that right?
And the government would always go, oh, no comment.
Two, is this going to cause harm? Is anybody
going to get hurt? Is this program effective?
Is there something we don't understand, right?
Is there something Snowden doesn't understand?
Does this guy just not get it, right? Are these
documents fake? Whatever you want, say we shouldn't
run this story. In every case I'm aware of, that
process was followed. And that's why, right?
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.
We're in 2019 now. 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. We've had
six years to show harm. And you know as well
as I do, the government's happy to leak things
when it's in their interest. Nobody has been
hurt as a result of these disclosures because
everyone who was involved in them was so careful.
We wanted to maximize the public benefit while
mitigating the potential risks. And I think we
did a pretty good job of it. 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, Glenn Greenwald, Ewan McCaskill.
And I said who I was. I said why I was doing
this. I said what this was about, why it matters.
And that we were constructing a system of turnkey
tyranny. And even if you trust that to Obama,
you never know whose hand is going to be on that
key next. And all they have to do is turn it.
And there's nothing we can do to stop it. The
only thing that's restraining these programs
really is policy, more so than law. And the president
at any time can sign a napkin and those policies
change. Well, after that, I went six months without
giving any interviews because I didn't want people
to talk about me. I wanted them to talk about
what actually mattered. And the government, of
course, was trying very hard to change the conversation.
as they always do, to be about who is this guy?
What have they done? What's wrong with them?
What are their problems? Who is this loony guy?
So they can controversialize the source of a
story rather than having to confront the story
itself. And that's why I said I really kind of
appreciate your take on the media and everything
like that. When you don't tell your story, you
know, other people will tell it for you. 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? Where I think it's a certain
kind of show with a certain kind of guy and it's
this crazy stuff. 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. 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. I work hard
on that. I try to mislead people. It's good.
Works to my advantage. You're doing a good job,
man. Thank you. I want to bring it back to when
you first started with the NSA. You started as
a contractor, right? What was your initial impression,
and when did you know that things were really
squirrely with the programs they were implementing?
So I'm not saying this to put you on the spot.
I know you've been a busy guy. I know you haven't
done, I think, shows recently. You come back
from a break, right? But have you read the book?
Because it'll just help me put things in frame.
If you haven't got a chance to read it, you have
my book. No, I have not read your book or got
a copy of it. Okay, well, I will send you a signed
copy, brother. Beautiful, thank you. And I hope
you'll read it and I hope you'll enjoy it. But
all right, so... I had a really weird history
in the intelligence community. I grew up in a
federal family. In the shadow of Fort Meade,
right, 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. 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, and those are
the courts that are trying to throw me in jail
for the rest of my life now. My father worked
for the Coast Guard, retired after 30 years.
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. So it was pretty
ordinary, pretty expected for me to go into the
same kind of work. Now, I started. I wasn't super
successful in school because 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, you know, biology
class. And so I spent more and more time focusing
on technology. Then I got mono, and I dropped
out of high school. And now it's like, all right,
how do I make this up? I say drop out of high
school, but I'm actually going to community college,
right? They called it concurrent enrollment,
where I'm not taking any classes at high school.
I'm going to community college instead. And I'm
not doing that great there either. Like, it's
fine. You know, I'm enjoying it. But, you know,
school is school. I want, I can't wait to be
grown. You're bored. And I think a lot of people
have felt that. But I ran into somebody at the
community college who ran their own home -based
business doing web design. And they could see
I was kind of technical, and they went, hey,
do you want to work for me? And I was like, well,
that sounds great. And so I started doing web
design really, really early on. This is like,
gosh, I don't know, probably 1998 vintage, during
the big boom and then the collapse that followed.
And the funny thing is she worked, she was married
to an NSA analyst, a linguist, right? And so
she lived on Fort Meade, and she ran her business
out of their home on Fort Meade. It's right up
the street from the NSA. So before I'm even working
there, I'm driving past this building all the
time and trying to figure out, you know, what
the next step is going to be. And I enjoy this.
It's a good thing for me, and, like, it works
well. And I start getting trained and certified,
all these little industry stamps you've got to
get as a technologist to say, oh, you know this
program or whatever. And just start climbing
the ladder. But then 9 -11 happens. And I'm on
Fort Meade when 9 -11 happens. I'm just going
into work. And I tell this in the book in some
detail. And I think it's very much worth reading
for people who don't know this because this is
forgotten history. How old were you at the time?
Gosh, I was born in 83, so I was probably 18
years old. And, yeah, I had just turned 18 a
couple months before. And what people forget
is who knew what was going on before anybody
else on September 11th? The intelligence community,
right? And what did they do? Did they give out
a public warning? Did they tell you guys to evacuate?
Did they say do this, that, or that? No, no.
Not for everybody, not for a long time. But at
the NSA, then director Michael Hayden, he was
a general, he later became director of the CIA,
ordered the entire campus evacuated. thousands,
tens of thousands of people, actually, and just
said, go home, right? The CIA did the same thing.
They were running on skeleton crews. At the moment,
the country needed them more than they ever had,
right? And I get a call. Well, I hear a call
that's from my boss's wife, her husband. To her.
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 in this business besides
her. Because I think they're going to close the
base down. And I'm like, this is crazy. It never
closes down. We don't know what's happening.
Then we start checking the news, which is through
websites, right? Because we're doing all this
stuff. And suddenly it's the big story everywhere.
And, you know, nobody understands how big it
is yet. Most of us are like, oh, it's going to
mess with our workday. Oh, it's going to mess
with our commute. But when I'm leaving, I hear
car horns all over the base. It's the craziest
thing because this is a military base, right?
It's right outside the NSA. And I enter just
this absolute state of pandemonium as I go past
K -9 Road, which is the road that travels right
in front of the NSA's headquarters. And it's
just a parking lot as far as you can see. They
have military police out under. The stoplights
directing traffic because it's this mass evacuation.
And I still have no idea what's happening. The
story is still developing. But I will never forget
that image. 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. 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 about
what was happening. He was going, well, you know,
he called his wife and he was asking where their
kids were and everything like that. 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? And this sort of shows
how self -centric the intelligence community
is. This is the D .C. metro area, right? They
could hit the White House. They could hit Congress.
They could hit the Supreme Court, right? And
they go, oh, they're going to fly their planes
into the CIA headquarters, or they're going to
fly their planes into the NSA headquarters. And,
of course, it was never realistic that these
would be the targets. But on that basis, they
were like, ooh, let's get our bacon out of the
pan. Now, I don't say this. I'm sorry, but just
in the interest of, wasn't it possible that they
could have attacked those places? I mean, they
attacked the Pentagon. They knew that there was
attacks. Look, it's absolutely possible they
could have attacked your Denny's. Right. But
it's a question of risk assessment. 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,
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? Well, somebody else
will. get hit with those as you say it's going
to be the pentagon right it's going to be at
the world trade center it's going to be someone
somewhere 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 maybe if it's
somebody who normally works finance in north
korea Right. But they go, look, this is an emergency.
Everybody understands. You don't need to explain
this. You just go stop what you're doing. Look
at financial transactions related to who purchased
these plane tickets. Do this. You just go full
spectrum and go anything you can do right now.
If the building gets hit, we get hit. That's
what we signed up for. Nobody wants that. Right.
That's not the desired outcome. But if they had
asked the staff to do that. They all would have
agreed. That's what these people signed up to
do. And yet the director goes, no, we're just
no. We're not going to take that risk. And this
is, I think, it says so much about the bureaucratic
character of how government works. The people
who rise to the top of these governments. It's
about risk management for them, right? It's about
never being criticized for something. And this
is, if we want to get really controversial, this
is something that will haunt me because people
will bring it up again and again and again. People
ask about, you know, people still criticize me.
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. I went looking
on the network, right? And I know, Joe, I know.
You want there to be aliens. I do. I know Neil
deGrasse Tyson badly wants there to be aliens.
And there probably are, right? 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. I couldn't
find anything, right? So if it's hidden, and
it could be hidden, it's hidden really damn well,
even from people who are on the inside. But the
main thing is, Conspiracy theories, right? Everybody
wants to believe in conspiracy theories because
it helps life make sense. It helps us believe
that somebody is in control, that somebody is
calling the shots, that these things all happen
for a reason, this, that, and the other. 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, I think there's 4 million or 1 .4
million people in the United States who hold
security clearances. And you can get all of these
people to not talk ever to journalists, this,
that, or the other. 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, not what we can speculate on, but what
are at least the commonly agreed facts, 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. And in fact, the government says this
too. But the government goes, the reason that
these attacks happened, the reason that they
weren't prevented, is what they call stovepiping,
right? There was not enough sharing. 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. And to some extent, they're
correct. on this, right? 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. 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. If the FBI wanted to send
absolutely everything they had to the CIA, they
could have done so. If the CIA wanted to send
everything they had to the FBI, they could have
done so. They didn't, and people died as a result.
Now, government goes, bureaucratic procedural
realism was responsible, and it's because we
had too many restrictions on the intelligence
community. 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.
Therefore, naturally, we just have to unchain
these guys and everything will be better, right?
And if you remember that post -9 -11 moment,
you can understand how that actually could come
off as persuasive, how that might be a kind of
thing that you go, all right, well, that makes
sense, because everybody was terrified. There
were people quite quickly who got their heads
back on their shoulders the right way. 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. We'll get
into that in a minute. 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. 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. And we went, look, you know, terrorists,
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. And we entered this era of increasingly
unlimited government as a result. And now, in
hindsight, we go, oh, we should have been surprised.
But at the time, everyone panicked, right? But
if you go back to, did that help? And we know
the answer now is, in fact, no, it did not. It
made things worse. 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. 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, why are
we trading people's information like baseball
cards and all of this stuff? 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. A judge isn't going
to question that. Any judge in the world will
stamp that warrant without even thinking about
it and then go to bed that night. you know, without
a care in the world. Because you're not spying
on a journalist. You're not spying on a human
rights defender, right? This is not an edge case.
This is someone that you believe to be associated
with Al -Qaeda or whatever. Now, this is all
a lot of preamble to say that essential fact.
Government agrees, everyone agrees, the attacks
probably could have been prevented if information
had been shared. So, why wasn't the information
shared? 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. And there were these barriers.
But the reality is, why were those barriers respected
in the case of a major terrorist plot? 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? 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. And this is the sad reality
of what actually happened. Every one of those
agencies wanted to be the guy who busted the
plot. They wanted to be the one who got credit
for it. And they didn't realize how serious it
was until it was too late because they were competing
with each other rather than cooperating. That's
exactly what I was going to ask you 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. 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. Again, this happens
in every industry. 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. And if you're the guy who
does that, you're going straight to the top.
But their solution instead of... So we have a
weird delay here for folks that are listening.
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? Well, no, they're
different things. 9 -11 is what woke these guys
up, basically. And they went, well, we screwed
up and Americans died as a result. We really
don't want to take the hit on that. And to be
honest, the government had no interest in putting
the hit on them. To be honest, the public had
no interest in putting the hit on them at the
time. Because everybody understood terrorism
is a real thing. There are bad people in the
world. And that's true, right? That will always
be true. There's always going to be criminals.
There's always going to be terrorists. 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. They want
to change something, even in a negative way,
because that's what they feel is all they have
left. Which, these are criminals, right? These
are people that we don't need to pity. But if
we ever want to stop it, we do need to understand
it and where those things come from, where those
drives come from in the first place. But basically
everybody went, all right, how do we stop this?
Because nobody wants to feel unsafe. Nobody wants
to feel like the building's going to come down
the next time you go in it. And so everybody
just went, I don't care who does it, stop it.
And they said this to Dick Cheney. which is a
historic mistake, because Dick Cheney knows how
government works. 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.
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. And you were there while this was happening?
No, I was not. Again, this is 2001. I was 18
years old. I was working on the base. I drove
past the building, but that was it. This is all
hindsight. This is biography. This is documented
history, but this is not the gospel of Edward
Snowden. I don't know this. This is public record.
This is what we all know. 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. He's abusing
it against immigrants. He's abusing it against
domestic opponents. He's doing whatever. He's
trying to hurt political rivals in the next election.
All of this stuff. And, you know, we can get
into this stuff later if you want in detail.
But the bottom line is they're going, this is
a guy. who's in the White House who's thrown
elbows, right? He doesn't really care. He wants
to hurt people as long as he can convince the
Americans that those are the bad guys, right?
That's the enemy. It doesn't matter if they're
far away. It doesn't matter if they're close
at home. Whoever he's against, he's going to
harm. And the dark thing is, this is actually
why he was elected. 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? President for
basically 20 years. Think about that. 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. But think about that. How do you get
that kind of political longevity? And it's because
if you know anything about Russian history, which
even I don't know that much about, the 90s, after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, were an extraordinarily
dark time. If you look at Russian cinema, all
they had were gangster movies, right? 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. Like, there's nothing to buy,
there's nothing to do, there's no job. No one
had a future. 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. We see it happen in
Turkey with Erdogan, right? We've seen it happen
successively with bad governments, even in Western
democracies. We see it happening, sadly. in places
like Poland and Hungary. You can even argue it's
happening in the United Kingdom, right? 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. And this is the lesson
that we didn't learn from 2001, is when we become
fearful, we become vulnerable, right? To anyone...
who promises they will make things better, even
if they have no ability to make things better,
even if they will actively make things worse,
even if they will make things better for themselves
and their buddies by taking from you. 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. So sorry,
let me turn this back over to you because we
got way off track there. No, that's all right.
I want to bring it back to the initial question.
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 like when when do you contact
these journalists and what was the thought process
regarding this like what what steps did you go
through 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 too things
had changed so radically that you knew this was
wrong and you had to do something about it you
felt a responsibility to speak out Okay. So since
we gave so much historical preamble, let me just
give the Cliff Notes version to get us up to
that. So after September 11th, I'm a little bit
lost. I'm doing my technical stuff, but it doesn't
really feel like it matters anymore. Like I'm
making more money. I'm becoming more accomplished.
But the world's on fire, right? You remember
there was a crazy mood. patriotism in the country
because we were all trying to come together to
get through it. You remember, like, people were
sticking Dixie cups on the top of every chain
-link fence on every overpass. It was like, stand
together, you know, never forget. United we stand.
Flags on every car. Exactly. And, you know, I
was a young guy who was not especially political,
right? 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. 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. 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. 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. So it didn't work out.
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. So you
train harder in special platoons, you go further.
And I ended up breaking my legs, basically. So
they put me out under special discharge. Yeah,
it was basically shin splints that I was too
dumb to get off of. So I kept marching underweight,
and I'm a pretty light guy to begin with. I had
a 24 -inch waist when I joined the Army. Girls
are jealous. I think I weighed like 128 pounds.
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. 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. And then
you're doing exercise. And the Army is like a
whole chapter in the book. You got your battle
buddy, right, because they never allow you to
be alone. You always got to have somebody watching
you. They thought it was funny to put me. the
smallest guy in the platoon, the drill sergeants
did, with the biggest dude in the platoon, who
was like an amateur bodybuilder. He was like,
you know, 230 or 260, something like that. He
was a big fellow. And so, you know, he would,
when we're off in the woods doing these marches
and things like that, we have to practice buddy
carries, like the fireman's carry and things
like that. He throws me around his neck, you
know, I'm like a towel. He's just skipping down
like it's nothing. And then I got to put him
on me, and I'm just like, oh, God, dying. And
it was... It was weirdly fun. I enjoyed it, but
it was no good for my body. And so in a land
navigation movement, I step off a log because
I was on point. And on the other side of the
log, because it's the woods in Georgia, Sand
Hill, I see a snake. And so in my memory, it's
like time slows down. Because in North Carolina,
where I grew up, you think all snakes are poisonous.
Sorry, there's an issue. No, we're good. It's
completely fine. No, we're fine. There was something
that happened on the screen. I wanted to make
sure it was okay. No, that's just the FBI joining
the chat. That's what I was worried about. There's
a second image opened up here. Yeah, so anyway,
I try to take a much longer step in midair. I
land badly. And it's just one leg is like fire.
I'm limping, I'm limping, I'm limping. But, you
know, everybody says don't go to sick call because
you go to sick call, you'll lose your slot, you'll
end up general infantry or regular infantry.
And so I go back. I just tough it out. I get
in my rack, and the next morning when I get out
of the rack, which is the top bunk bed, right?
I jumped out, and my legs, they just give out
underneath me. And I try to get up, and I just
can't get up. 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've got to go there with somebody
else. And he has a broken hip where they had
to bring him to surgery. In the book, there's
a lot more detail about it. It was kind of a
dramatic moment. But for me, they just said I
had bilateral tibial fractures, right, all the
way up my legs. They said I had spider webs.
And the next phase of the training was jump school,
right, where you got to jump out of a plane.
And the doctor, you know, is like, son, if you
jump on those legs, they're going to turn into
powder. And he's like, I can hold you back. You
know, we can put you for like six months, you
stay off them, then you can go back through the
whole cycle, right? Start basic from scratch.
But you'll lose your slot in the Special Forces
pipeline because of the way these things are
scheduled and everything like that. And then
you'll basically be reassigned to the needs of
the Army. Or, which probably meant I was going
back to IT, which was what I joined the Army
to kind of escape. You can go out on this special
kind of discharge that's called an administrative
discharge, right? Normally you've got honorable
discharge, dishonorable discharge, things like
that. This is something for people who have been
in for, I think, less than six months, where
it's like annulling a marriage. It's as if it
never happened. It's as if you never joined.
And at the time, I was like, well, you know,
that's very kind of him to do that. And I took
it. 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. And then they let you out once the paperwork
all finishes. But in hindsight, I realized that
if you take an administrative discharge, It exempts
the Army for liability for your injuries. 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. And it was
just a funny thing. But anyway, I get out of
the Army, and here I'm on crutches for a long
time and just sort of trying to figure out, all
right, well, what's next in life? 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, which was a higher
clearance than I had at the time. And I went,
well, that sounds good because I knew if I combined
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 top -secret security clearance and
tech skills, you get paid a ridiculous amount
of money for doing very little work. So it 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. 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? And I
had gotten a GED just by going in and taking
a test. So for government purposes, it was the
same as if I was a high school graduate. So now
suddenly it was like these doors are open. Now
this University of Maryland facility turned out
to be an NSA facility. It was called CASEL, the
Center for the Advanced Study of Language at
the University of Maryland College Park. 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. But once I had my
foot in the door there, I could start climbing
ladders step by step. And I applied for, or I
went to a job fair, actually, that was only for
people who had security clearances. And I ended
up going to the table for one of the technical
companies. It was a little tiny subcontractor
nobody's ever heard of. And they said, you know,
we've got tons of positions for somebody like
you. Are you comfortable working nights? And
I was like, yeah, you know, I wake up in the
middle of the day anyway. That's fine with me.
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,
of the college. And this is government, man.
It's all these weird dodges and boondoggles for
how people are employed there. Now, suddenly,
I'm working at CIA headquarters, right? The place
where all the movies show you swoop over the
marble seal and everything like that. I'm the
king of the castle, right? I'm there at the middle
of the night when no one else is there. The lights
are on motion sensors. It's the creepiest thing
in the world. There's like flags on the wall
that are just like gently billowing in the air
conditioning like ghosts. The hallway lights
up as you walk alongside it because it's like
a green building and they disappear behind you.
And there's no one there. I can go down to the
gym at like two 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. And this kind of thing was my end because
they were like, look, it's the night shift. Nothing
that bad is going to happen. But it was on a
very senior technical team that was basically
handling systems administration for everybody
in the Washington metropolitan area. So every
basically CIA server. This is a computer system
that data is stored on, the reporting is stored
on, traffic is moved on, all of this stuff. Suddenly,
me, this is circa 2005, I think, I'm in charge
of. And it's just me and one other guy on the
night shift. And if you're interested in the
book, there's a lot of detail on this. But I
get sort of scouted from this position because
they realize I actually know a lot about technology.
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. But they go, well, are you willing
to go overseas? And to a young man at that age,
that's actually like, hey, that sounds kind of
exciting. 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. I'm one
of them. Because they're like, wait, the CIA
is the bad guys, right? Yeah, exactly. They're
like, what, are you going to go overthrow government
somewhere? But you have to understand that I'm
still very much a true believer. The government
is like the living compressed embodiment of truth
and goodness and light, you know, the shining
city on the hill. So I want to do my part to
spread that to the world. I didn't have skepticism
is really what I'm trying to establish here.
And so I sign up and I go through this special
training school like people here in movies about
The Farm, which is down at Camp Peary in Virginia.
I'm sent to this actually much more secret facility
called The Hill, which is in Warrant in Virginia.
And 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. 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? I think my formal title
for the embassy is something super bland, like
diplomatic attaché. And what I am is I'm a forward
-deployed tech guy. They send you through this
school to make you into kind of a MacGyver, right?
Yes, you can handle all the computers, but you
can also handle the connections for the embassy's
power systems, right? The actual electrical connections.
Handle the HVAC systems, right? You can handle
locks and alarms and security systems. Basically
anything that's got an on button on it at the
embassy that's secure, now you're responsible
for. And I traveled from Geneva to other countries
in Europe for sort of assignments. And it was
like, it was an exciting time. I actually...
Still enjoyed it, but this was where I first,
working with intelligence, started to get doubts.
And the story's been told many times, so I won't
go over it in full detail here. But the CIA does
primarily, and it's not the only thing they do,
what's called human intelligence. Now, there
are many different types of intelligence that
the intelligence community is responsible for.
The primary ones are human intelligence and signals
intelligence. You want to think of signals intelligence,
right, as tapping lines, hacking computers, all
of these sort of things that provide electronic
information, anything that's a digital or analog
signal that can be intercepted and then turned
into information. Human intelligence is all that
fun stuff we've heard the CIA doing for decades
and decades, which is where they try to turn
people. Basically, they say, look, we'll give
you money if you sell out your country. It's
not even your country a lot of times. It's your
organization. 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, and we wanted
records on the bank's customers, so we wanted
a guy on the inside. But anyway, that's sort
of how it works. the lowest stakes than was reasonable
or responsible. 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. And so, you know,
ethically that struck me as a bit off, but I
let it pass because what I've learned over my
life, short though it's been, you know, It's
that skepticism is something that needs to build
up over time. It's a skill, something that needs
to be practiced. Or you can think of it as something
that you develop through exposure. Kind of like
radiation poisoning, but in a positive way. It's
when you start to realize inconsistencies or
hypocrisies or lies. And you notice them, and
you give somebody the benefit of the doubt, or
you trust them, or you think it's all right.
But then over time, you see it's not an isolated
instance. It's a pattern behavior. And over time,
that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds
and builds until it's something that you can
no longer ignore. Now, after the CIA, I went
to the NSA in Japan, where I was working there
in Tokyo. And then from there, a couple years
later, I went to the CIA again. Now I was working
as 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, but I'm sitting across
the table from chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions.
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, here's what
we want to do, and it's my job. To pitch them
a system, right, and I'm paired up with this
sales guy, and the whole thing is just go, how
much money can we get out of the government,
right? That's the whole goal, and we'll build
them what we were pitching was a private cloud
system, right? Everybody knows about cloud computing
now. It's like why your Gmail account is available
wherever you go. It's why Facebook has this massive
system of records for everyone everywhere. The
government wanted to have these kind of capabilities
too. Dell ended up getting beat out. by Amazon.
People, you know, some people aren't familiar
with this. Many of them are. But Amazon runs
a secret cloud system for the government. I forget
what they've rebranded it now. 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.
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 get by. I was trying
to ignore the conflicts. I was trying to ignore
the inconsistencies. 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,
I struggle with every day. They've got a job.
They've got a family. They've got bills. They're
just trying to get by. And they know that some
of the things they're doing are not good things.
They know some of the things they're doing are
actively wrong. But they know what happens to
people who rock the boat. Eventually, I changed
my mind. 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, I wasn't supposed to
be in this position at all. I was supposed to
be at a group called the National Threat Operations
Center, NTAC. 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. And
I'm replacing this old -timer who's about to
retire. Really, really nice guy. 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. 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. 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.
So I get ambitious. And I come up with this idea
for a new system called the heartbeat. And what
the heartbeat is going to do 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, 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. I could actually connect these
together. I could build bridges across this kind
of network space. 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. I work
for this agency. I work in this office. These
are my assignments. These are my group affiliations.
And 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. And basically, you could
hit this site. It would be an update of what
we used to call read boards, which were manually
created. Then we go, look, you work in network
defense, right? These are all the things that
are happening on network defense. You work on,
I don't know, economic takeovers in Guatemala.
You know, this is what's going on for you there.
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. 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. 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. Dirty word
searches are... Let me dial this back because
I know we're sort of... This is hard to track.
Everything that the NSA does, in large part,
is classified. Everything the CIA does, in large
part, is classified. If I made lunch plans with
other people in my office, it was classified.
That was the policy. It's dumb. This over -classification
problem is one of the central flaws in government
right now. This is the reason we don't understand
what they're doing. 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.
And it's because of this routine classification,
right? But every system... computer system has
a limit on what level of classified information
is supposed to be stored on it. And we've got
all these complicated systems for code words
and caveats that establish a system of what's
called compartmentation. And this is the idea
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? because you
don't have need to know, right? Again, that thing
from the movies. 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. 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. Well in the office of information
sharing and actually in basically every part
of my career before that I had access to everything
I had what was called a special caveat on my
accesses called privac, which means privileged
access. What this means is you're a kind of super
user. Most people have all of these controls
and the kind of information they can access,
but I'm in charge of the system. People who need
information, they have to get it from somewhere.
Even the director of the CIA, he says, I need
to know everything about this. Well, he doesn't
know where to get it. He's just a manager. Somebody
has to be able to actually cross these thresholds
and get those things. That guy was me. 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, 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. You only know the code word unless you
work in them, unless you have access to them,
unless you read into them. One day I got a hit
on the Dirty Word Search for a program that I'd
never heard of called Stellar Wind. It came back
because the little... caveat for it. They're
called handling caveats, which is like, you know,
you can think of like burn after reading or for
your eyes only. But this one's called STLW, which
means stellar wind. And unless you know what
stellar wind is, you don't know how to handle
it. All I knew was it wasn't supposed to be on
my system. And this is a little bit unusual.
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. And this person was a lawyer. I believe.
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
the operations and activities of this program.
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. Stellar Wind was no longer supposed
to be really in operation. It had been unveiled
in a big scandal in December 2005 in the New
York Times by journalist James Risen. And I'm
not going to name him because I don't want to
get it wrong. Another journalist, you can look
at the byline if you want to see their involvement.
But there's a lot of history here, too. 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. Well, the Bush White House was really
put in a difficult position by this scandal.
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, they were ready to go 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. 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. And
it was so close to 2001, the New York Times just
went, you know what, fine. Americans don't need
to know that the Constitution is being violated.
They don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment
doesn't mean what they think it means. If the
government says it's all right and it's a secret
and you shouldn't know about it, that's fine.
Now, December 2005, why did that change? Why
did the New York Times suddenly run this story?
Well, it's because James Risen, the reporter
who found this story, had written a book. And
he was about to publish this book. 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 and how they got scooped by their
own journalists. And so they finally did it,
but it was too late. Bush had been reelected.
And now it was sweeping up the broken glass of
our lost rights. 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. And they told them
this program existed in ways that they wouldn't
object to, but made them culpable for hiding
the existence of the program from the American
people. 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. And
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. She went, oh, well, that was classified,
right? 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.
The White House will implicate certain very powerful
members of Congress in their own criminal activity.
And so then when the White House gets in trouble
for it, the Congress has to run cover for the
White House. And so what happened? was Congress
passed an emergency law in 2007 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. 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, which they weren't
allowed to do, simply on the basis of a letter
from the president saying, please do this. And
these companies went, look, now that we've been
uncovered, now that we've been shown that we're
breaking, or now that 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. We will no longer cooperate
with you unless you pass a law that says people
can't sue us for having done this. And so we
get the Protect America Act, which they say is
an emergency. This is all public history, too.
You can look this up on Wikipedia, you know.
And so then they. They go, it's an emergency
law. We have to pass this now. We have to keep
this program active. 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. But for now, we just
have to make sure people are safe. Again, they
go to fear. They say, if we don't have this program,
terrorist attacks will continue. People will
die. Blood on your hands, blood on your hands,
blood on your hands. Think of the children. Protect
America Act passes. The companies get off the
hook. The Bush White House gets off the hook.
The Congress that was then sharing 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,
FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And rather than
stopping all of the unlawful and sort of 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.
Now, this is not to say, you know, these things
aren't helpful at all. It's not to say they're
not useful at all. 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 is caught breaking
the law comply with the law, but instead make
the activities of the person who is breaking
the law legal, right? They make the law comply
with what the agencies want to do rather than
make the agencies comply with the law. That's
a problem, and that's what happened here. 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. There were
objections. There were people who knew this was
a bad idea, but it passed on. Now, what the public
took away from this, because a part of these
laws, 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. This
is how it complied with the law or how it didn't
comply with the law. And basically look back
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? Now, why am I talking about all
this ancient history? Well, I'm sitting here
in 2012 with a classified inspector general's
report, 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,
the TikTok of how it happens. 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,
that they were not constitutional. And the President
said, would you continue this program? On my
say -so alone, knowing that it's risky, knowing
that it's unlawful, and he said, yes, sir, I
will, if you think that's what's necessary to
keep the country safe. And at that moment, I
realized, these guys don't care about the law.
These guys don't care about the Constitution.
These guys don't care about the American people.
They care about the continuity of government.
They care about the state, right? And this is
something that people have lost. 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.
But national security is a very different thing
from public safety. National security is a thing
that in previous generations we referred to as
state security. 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.
And what does it mean when, again, in a democracy,
in the United States, the public is not partner
to government? The public does not hold the leash
of government anymore, but we are subject to
government, right? We are subordinate to government.
And we're not even allowed to know that it happened.
Now, in the book, I tell the fact that I had
access to the unclassified version of this report
back in Japan. 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.
The unclassified version and the classified version
are the same thing. It's 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.
had been given about the warrantless wiretapping
program was a completely different document.
It was a document tailor -made to deceive and
mislead the Congress and the public of the United
States. And it was effective in doing that. And
in 2012, what I realized was this is what real
-world conspiracies look like, right? It doesn't
have to be smoking men behind closed doors, right?
It's lawyers and politicians. 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. Or the
other way, they go, we're going to get something
out of this if we all work together. So civilization
is the history of conspiracy, right? What is
civilization but a conspiracy for all of us to
do better by working together, right? But it's
this kind of thing that I think too often we
forget because it's boring as hell. I want all
your listeners, right, to go to the Washington
Post because this document that I discovered
that really changed me has been published courtesy
of the Washington Post. It's called the Inspector
General's Report on Stellar Wind. And you can
look at the actual document that I saw that was
unredacted. I had no blacked out pages on mine.
And what I believe it shows is that 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. Now, in their defense, they
said they were seeking these powers for a good
and just and noble cause, right? They say they
were trying to keep us safe. But that's what
they always say. That's what every government
says. That's no different than what the Chinese
government says or the Russian government says.
And the question is, if they are truly keeping
us safe, why wouldn't they simply just tell us
that? Why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress?
Why wouldn't they put that to a vote? Because
if they were, and they could convince us that
they were, they'd win the vote. And particularly,
we all know, like the Patriot Act passed, one
of the worst pieces of legislation in modern
history passed. Why didn't we get a vote? And
I think if you read the report, the answer will
be clear. So I'm sorry, Joe, I went on for a
very long time. No, it was amazing. Don't apologize
at all. It's just, completely fascinating that
the continuation of this policy came down to
one man and the president having this discussion
that is so well it it's it's much it's much more
much more but right right literally the president
at the heart of it yes at the heart of it in
every expression of executive power right and
by executive we mean the white house here the
cia The NSA, the FBI, the DOJ, right? These guys
exist as a part of the executive branch of government.
In a real way, they work for the White House.
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. 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. 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. And these
are defined very broadly to give us leeway to
do whatever it is we think is proper and appropriate
and just. Take that proper, inappropriate, and
just from the perspective of any given individual,
right, any given president. Now, intersect that
with what's good for them politically. And that's
where problems begin to arise. Now, the safety
measure that's supposed to protect us from this
in the U .S. system and any democracy broadly
is these people are supposed to be what are called
public officials. That means we know their decisions.
That means we know their policies. 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. And because they
are transparent to us, we the people can then
police their activities. We can go, I disagree
with this. We can protest it. We can campaign
against it, right? We can try to become the president,
do whatever. They are public officials. And we
are private citizens. They're not supposed to
know anything about us, right? Because we, in
relative terms, hold no power. And they hold
all the power. So they have to be under the tightest
constraints. We need to be in the freest circumstances.
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.
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.
They abused their powers repeatedly and continuously.
They did active harm to domestic politics in
the United States. 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. 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. And again, this is the
FBI. This is the group that everybody's applauding
today, saying, oh, these wonderful patriots and
heroes. Now, I'm not saying everybody at the
FBI is bad. I'm not saying everybody at the CIA
and the NSA is bad. I'm saying that you don't
become a patriot based on where you work. Patriotism
is not about loyalty to government. Patriotism,
in fact, is not about loyalty to anything. Patriotism
is a constant effort to do good for the people
of your country, right? It's not about the government.
It's not about the state. And this is, we'll
get into loyalty later because, you know, I think
one of the big criticisms against me that should
be talked about is they go, look, this guy is
disloyal, he broke an oath, he did whatever.
Loyalty, loyalty is a good thing when it's in
the service of something good. But it is only
good when it's in the service of something good.
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. And I think
that's overlooked. 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, 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. 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. Why are you going to object to this? All
of this derives from the 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. This is not to say government can have
no secrecy at all. If the government wants to
investigate someone, without having them respond,
right? We're talking traditional law enforcement.
Sure, you're not going to tell this mobster,
hey, you know, we're going to start investigating
you. We, the public, don't need to know the names
of every terrorist suspect out in the world,
right? 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?
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. And so this is the main thing,
and really the story behind the title, Permanent
Record, is, look, Joe, when you were a kid, you
know, when I was a kid, when you were a teenager,
right, like, what's the worst thing you ever
said? You know, did you say anything you weren't
proud of? Did you do anything that you weren't
proud of? Something that today in like the wokest
of Twitter land you would get in trouble for.
I'm sure. 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.
Our worst mistakes, our deepest shames, were
forgotten. They were lost. They were ephemeral.
Even the things we did get caught for, they were
known for a time. Maybe they're still remembered
by people who are closest to us, whether we like
them or dislike them. But they were people connected
to us. Now, we're forced to live in a real way
naked before power. 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. And we know very little
about them, and we're not allowed to know more.
Everything that we do now lasts forever, not
because we want to remember, but because we're
not allowed to forget. 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.
And AT &T keeps those records going back to 2008
under a program called Hemisphere. If you search
for Hemisphere and AT &T, you'll get a story
in the Daily Beast about it. 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, or their calls cross AT &T's network,
AT &T has every phone call they ever made. Rather,
the record that it happened, not necessarily
the content that's on the phone call. And so,
I mean, let me turn this around for you, Joe,
because I feel like I've just been given a speech.
When you look at this stuff, right, 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. 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
know, you get on a bus, you get on a subway,
you know, you see somebody sitting next to you
in traffic, you see people looking at phones.
These devices are connected all the time. Now
people are getting Alexa, right? Now people have
OK Google. They have, you know, Siri on their
phones. They're in their house. They've always
got these connected microphones. Where do you
think this leads, and what is it that gives you
sort of trust in the system, faith in the system?
Just so we can start a conversation here, what
strikes you about this? Well, it's completely
alien, and it's new. This is something that's
unprecedented. We don't have a long human history
of being completely connected via technology.
This is something we're navigating right now
for the first time. And it's probably the most
powerful thing that the human race has ever seen
in terms of the distribution of information.
There's nothing that even comes close to it in
all of human history. And we're figuring it out
as we go along. 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 and cahoots with the government have
made it legal for them to gather up all of your
phone calls, all of your text messages, all of
your emails, 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.
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. 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,
track your phone calls, track everything. And
under the guise of protecting us from terrorists
and protecting us from sleeper cells, protecting
us from attacks. Look, they really are protecting
us from these attacks. That's great. But there's
no... provision in the constitution that allows
any of this 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 this is step
by step 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 yeah i
mean i i think i think one of the things that
that 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. Right. They've got a big archive
and they haven't published everything from it.
And I told them not to publish everything. Why?
Why did you do that? Why did you do that? Because,
so again, it gets back to legitimate secrets
and illegitimate secrets. Some spying from my
perspective, you know, career spy is okay, right?
Agreed. If you have hacked a terrorist's phone,
right, and you're getting some information about
that, useful. Agreed, yeah. If you're spying
on a Russian general in charge of a, you know,
rocket division. useful, right? But there are
lines and degrees in that where it's not useful.
Now, the examples that I just gave you, these
are targeted. 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... Right.
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, right? And there's
not a judge in the world who wouldn't stamp a
warrant saying, hey, spy on Abu Jihad over here,
right? And if you want to spy on another guy,
Boris Badenov of the Rocket Division, that's
okay. They're going to go with that. But then
you look at these edge cases. In the archive
that I provided to journalists, there have been
stories that have come out where they've spied
on journalists. They've spied on human rights
groups. And these kind of things, I think...
People miss. I'm going to throw up some slides
here, so forgive me if this gets weird and I
put up the wrong ones. 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. These are
federal courts here, right, that said, no, actually,
these programs are unlawful. They're likely unconstitutional.
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 2 ,776 times
in a single year. And then you asked about that
thing that motivates me, like why I came forward.
We had been trying as a country before I came
forward to prove the existence of these programs
legally. Because this is our means of last sort
of recourse in our system, right? We got the
executive, we got the legislature, we got the
judiciary, right? So Congress makes the laws,
the executive is supposed to carry them out,
the courts are supposed to play referee. The
executive had broken the laws. Congress was turning
a blind eye to the laws. 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, you know, these programs
are likely unlawful. They likely exist. They're
simply classified. But the government responded
with this argument that you just saw, saying
that, well, it's a state secret if they do exist.
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, because the government's just going to
give its standard, what they call, Glomar response.
We can neither confirm nor deny that these things
exist. Which leaves you out in the cold. which
leaves the courts out in the cold. The courts
go, look, the government could be breaking the
law here. Look, they could be violating the Constitution
here. 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. The court can't
presume to know national security better than
the executive because the courts aren't elected.
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. But the programs
are classified, so you can't establish they exist
unless you have evidence. 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. 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. And there's no
distinction to government between whether you've
sold information to a foreign government for
private benefit, right, or whether you provided
information only to journalists for the public
interest. And that's a fundamentally harmful
thing, I think. When you look at things that
have come in the wake of this, we're talking
about the post -2013 court rulings that found
what the government was doing was unlawful. You
see the courts saying actually that leaks, or
air quotes leaks, can actually be beneficial.
Leak is used in the governance, and this is from
a federal court. These are not exactly my biggest
supporters. They're recognizing that although
leak implies harm, it implies something that's
broken, it's actually helpful. It's a leak that's
letting in daylight in this context. That is
the only thing that allows 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. We had, hang on, this famous exchange,
which more than anything made me realize this
was a point of no return. Because I've told you
this, you've heard this, but if you haven't seen
it, you might not believe me, right? Maybe I'm
a sketchy guy, whatever. One of those senators
I told you that objected to this stuff, that
was doing the Lassie barks for all those years,
Ron Wyden. was confronting the most senior spy
in the United States, General James Clapper,
who was then the Director of National Intelligence,
right? There's no guy higher than him. The buck
stops with him when it comes to intelligence.
He's testifying under oath in front of Congress,
right? But more broadly, in front of the public.
This is televised. And Ron Wyden asked him a
very specific question. about a program, mind
you, that Ron Wyden knows exists. Because he
has security clearance, he sits on the Intelligence
Committee. And he knows there's domestic mass
surveillance. And this is how it goes. This is
how the top spy responds under oath. 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? No, sir. It does not?
Not wittingly. There are cases where they could
inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.
So that was a lie. Wyden knew it was a lie. Clapper
knew it was a lie. He actually admitted it was
a lie after I came forward, you know, three months
later. 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. 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? And Wyden... By the way, it wasn't a surprise.
Wyden gave him those questions 24 hours in advance,
and he wrote a letter afterwards asking for Clapper
to amend his testimony, 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 congressmen. that there was a problem
and that they needed to do it. But all of that
was refused to us. All of it was denied to us.
And here I am sitting at the NSA next to my buddies
who I've talked to about these programs. You
know, I've gone, look at this. And they're laughing
at it. You know, I'm laughing at it. And it's
not that we go, oh, ha, ha, ha, he's getting
away with it. It's like, what are you going to
do? These guys are, you know, they're bullshitters.
The system is built on lies. That even many people,
many experts who have studied this know are lies.
But if you can't prove they are lies, how do
you move beyond that? And that's really a question
that has never been more relevant than I think
it is today under the current White House. 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. What makes you
take the leap? So this is covered extensively
in the book because it took a long time. I would
imagine. People, you know, yeah, right, exactly.
People like to think it's like a cinematic moment.
where I find this golden document, like this
Stellar Wind Report, and that's the closest thing
to a smoking gun, right, that exists. But look,
if you found that, you can read that later, look
at that, and like 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, I'm
never going to be at work again, I'm going to
jail for the rest of my life. The question is,
what would it take for you to light a match and
burn your life to the ground? And for a long
time, too long, the answer was nothing. And I'm
ashamed of that. It took me so long to get over
that hump because I was waiting for somebody
else to do it. When I saw people like Ron Wyden,
When I saw people like the court case that I
showed before where people were actively challenging
these programs, right? Journalists had the scent
of it. 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. No, you didn't. Well, Bill Bimini.
You had. Bill Binney. Excuse me, Bill Binney.
He initially was the one that came out and spoke
about this issue. Yeah, 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. And these guys
all got their doors kicked in. They got harassed
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. 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. But somebody somewhere was informing
this reporting, right, that got into the New
York Times about the Bush -era warrantless wiretapping
program. And eventually journalists put this
out there. People knew these capabilities existed.
But yeah, then there's the person in the YouTube
comments who's like, oh, we knew all about this.
It's nothing new. And the thing is, you can know
about some programs and not know about others.
You can have a suspicion. You can know with certainty
that this stuff is capable or is possible, the
capability exists. You can know that the government
has done this stuff in the past. You can know
they are likely to do it again. You can have
all these indications. 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. But AT &T denies it's
the NSA. The NSA denies that these things happen
or that are done at all. And so this is the context.
You say you know, and let's put it the other
way. Maybe you do know. Maybe you are an academic
researcher. Maybe you're a technological specialist.
Maybe you're just somebody who reads all the
reporting and you actually know. You can't prove
it, but you know this is going on. But that's
the thing in a democracy. The distance. Between
speculation and fact. The distance between what
you know and what you can prove to everybody
else in the country is everything in our model
of government. Because what you know doesn't
matter. What matters is what we all know. And
the only way we can all know it is if somebody
can prove it. If you can prove it. And if you
don't have the evidence, you can't prove it.
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. They need access to the
White House. They need these officials to sit
down with them and give interviews, right? That's
constant content that they need. That's access
that they need. They need to be taken seriously.
They need to be, you know, admitted to briefers.
It is a codependent relationship. And yet, rather,
and so, the only way to make sure people understand
this broadly, Is if we all work together, right?
If we collectively can establish a corpus of
evidence, right? A body of facts that is so large
and so persuasive, it overcomes the natural and
understandable resistance of these more corporatized
media groups. 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. 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. 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, because otherwise there's a chance
my guy might not get reelected. And that's the
only way this kind of stuff can happen. 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. And I
think that's one of the problems that we have,
particularly in the climate movement. Go ahead.
I'm sorry. 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? Right. I mean, do you remember all that?
I mean, it was eventually redacted or eventually
deleted it from the website. Disappeared it from.
Yes. But that was a big part of his program or
what he was running on was that when people were
exposing unlawful activity, he was going to protect
those people. Did that did you take any comfort
in that? Well, Obama also during his campaign
said he campaigned actively against the warrantless
wiretapping, the Bush administration. Because
remember, Bush is in the scandal, the height
of this, in 2007. You know, the election's coming
up right after. And he's going, Obama's saying,
you know, that's not who we are. That's not what
we do. And yet within 100 days of him becoming
president. Now he's sitting in that chair. Rather
than extinguishing these programs, he embraces
them and expands them. Why do you think that
is? I think it's actually, again, what we talked
about earlier. First thing, every time a new
president comes into the White House, they get
their clearances, right? They get read into all
this stuff. During the campaign, they get clearances
and they get read into stuff. 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,
which are basically, you know, the intelligence
community wants to assassinate somebody. They
want to run this illegal program here, there,
or everywhere. And they can't do it because they're
executive agencies without that top -level executive
sign -off. So they've got to open the vest, right?
They've got to get these guys on side. 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. These are all the threats that
we're facing. And let's be real, it is a dangerous
world. It's not just all made -up BS. Some of
it is, right, where it's inflated. It's not that
it's completely false, but they make it sound
more serious than it actually is. But there are
real bad people out there who are trying to do
real bad things. And you have just gone through
a hellish election because our electoral politics
are so diseased. And now, after you've crawled
through fire, you're already thinking four years
ahead. You know, how do I stay in this seat?
And these guys are basically saying, if you don't
do X, Y, and Z, This is going to fall on your
lap. And the implication, which I don't think
they actually say, but every president knows,
is these guys can undermine you to death. If
you've got the IC against you, right, they can
stonewall you. They can put out stories that
are going to be problematic for you every day
of your presidency. 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. So in the most charitable interpretation
of this, you've got a new guy coming in. In Obama's
case, this is a pretty young guy. Doesn't focus
in this kind of national security foreign policy
stuff throughout his earlier career. He's more
interested in domestic policy and always has
been. That's actually one of the positive things
to say about Barack Obama. He's just trying to
make things better at home. And now suddenly
they go, look. You need to worry about this country.
You need to worry about this group that you've
never heard of. You need to worry about, you
know, this technology. You need to do all this
stuff. 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? That are in fact wonderful
things because they keep back the darkness. And
so here's the real problem. Every president hears
that and every president, you know, first off,
they've got so many other things to do. They
just kind of nod their head and they'll go, I'll
deal with this later in my administration. And
this is one of the ironies. When I came forward
in 2013, this is now Barack Obama's second term
president. One of the responses that they had
to the mass surveillance scandal was, yes, we
think they went a little too far. This is after
the initial thing where they went, nobody's listening
to your phone calls. Just made a data. Right,
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. But they said, we
were going to get to it. We knew these programs
were problematic, but if they just gave us more
time, we would have fixed them. Maybe it's true,
right? Seems awful convenient in hindsight that
throughout the entirety of the first term. Well,
it seems like what you would say if you got caught.
Right, right, right, right. But look, if we're
being the most generous that we are here, the
president is briefed on real and legitimate threats.
And they scare the hell out of him. I'm sure.
And we can all imagine being there, right? Those
of us who remember what the world was like post
9 -11, fear is a powerful thing. But the guys
who are doing that briefing, they're no longer
scared of it because they've been dealing with
this for years. This is the oldest thing. They've
given this briefing times before. You know, when
we talk about, people talk about the deep state.
Right. They talk about it like some conspiracy
of lizard people. It's not that. It's something
much simpler. The deep state is simply the career
government. It's the people who are in the same
offices who outlive and outlast presidencies.
Right. They've seen Republicans. They've seen
Democrats. They don't really care. And they give
that same briefing again and again and they get
good at it. They know what they want. They know
what this person's saying. Whereas the president,
they don't know who these people are. These people
have been there before the president, they're
going to be there after the president. And so
they give this very effective, very fear -inducing
speech, and then they follow it up with their
asks, which are really demands, just politely
provided. 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, right? And going,
I'll deal with this later or not now, or what
is the cost benefit here? 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. And maybe Barack
Obama honestly did want to get to this later.
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. Well, it seems like...
The president has a job that's absolutely impossible.
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,
we need to keep these things in place. 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. It seems completely
unrealistic. And the job itself, it just it doesn't
seem like any person can do it adequately. 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. 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. And because they
have too much power, that means they have too
much responsibility. 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, most countries don't
have a single individual with this level of power.
It's really only the super states. And that may
be by design, perhaps that's why they're... they're
super states. 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.
And a lot of this derives from just the size
of the government. 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 doesn't
work. And so how do you 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? You know,
back in 1776, the federal government, you know,
was pretty much a dream. We weren't even interested
in having standing armies. The idea of an army
that existed from year to year was a terrifying,
forbidding thing. And then when you move to this
idea that we have a president, that they have
these extraordinary powers, it's OK because the
government is very small. The federal government
especially is seen as sort of this small and
toothless and weak thing. Can you pause for one
second? Pause for one second because my AirPods
are about to die and I'm going to swap over to
another pair. These suckers are good for a couple
of hours, but we're two hours and 15 minutes
here. We'll have a little bit of a weird. audio
issue with the last half of it but jamie jamie
will take care of it um i wanted to talk about
you like where you are right now in your life
and how you're handling this because you've been
in exile for how many years now uh it's been
more than six years six six years of 2013 yeah
i mean well actually i i left uh may so what
is life like i mean Are you in constant hiding?
I mean, what are the issues like? In the beginning,
my operational security level, as we would call
it, was very high. I was concerned about being
recognized. I was concerned about being followed.
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. 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.
They wouldn't let it leave until they confirmed
I was not on board. So, yeah, that made me a
little bit nervous. But you can't live like that
forever. And although I was as careful as I could
be, I still lived pretty happily because I was
an indoor cat to begin with. I've always been
a technologist. I've always been pretty nerdy.
So as long as I have a screen and an Internet
connection, I was pretty happy. But in the years
past, my life has become more and more open.
Now I speak openly. I live openly. I go out.
I ride the metro. I go to restaurants. How often
are you recognized? So this is a funny thing
is I'm almost never recognized. One of those
things is I don't give Russian interviews because
I don't want my face all over the news, which
is nice because it just allows people to sort
of forget about my face and I can go about my
life. But it's one of the weird things that I'm
recognized a couple times a year, 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 because I can be like
wearing a hood and like a jacket can have a scarf
around my face like in the winter and like you
can barely see my face and they'll come up to
me and they're like are you Snowden? And I'm
like, whoa. That's pretty impressive. I'd say,
yeah. It's nice to meet you. And yeah, I've never
had a negative interaction from being recognized.
But for me, because I'm a privacy advocate, I
would much rather go unrecognized. I don't want
to be a celebrity. But the other thing is, I'll
get recognized. In computer stores. And I think
there's just like a mental association where
people are like their brain, 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. Because for whatever reason, I'm recognized
much more frequently when there's some kind of
technological like locus. So you're living freely.
You had to learn Russian? Did you learn it? 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. Now, you've
talked about returning home if you could get
a fair trial. Is that a feasible thing, a fair
trial for someone like you? Is that such a— Well—
Is that even possible? It's a good question.
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 because that's where
they draw the jury pool from. But my objection
here is on a larger principle. What happens to
me is less important. 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. They say, face the
music, face the music, and I'm saying, great,
let's pick the song. 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,
his lawyer is asking the court or telling the
court that we want to tell the jury why he did
what he did. that the government is violating
laws, the government is violating human rights,
that these programs are immoral, that they're
unethical. 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. And
the government has responded to this whistleblower
argument, basically, saying, We demand the court
forbid this guy from breathing the word whistleblower
in court. He cannot talk about what motivated
him. He cannot talk about what was revealed,
why it was revealed, what the impacts and effects
were. He can't talk about whether the public
benefited from it or was harmed by it because
it doesn't matter. Now, this might surprise a
lot of people because to a lot of us, we think
that's what a jury trial is. We think that's
what a fair trial is. 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. A strict liability
crime is what the government considers to be
basically a crime worse than murder. Because
if you murdered somebody, like if you just, I
don't know, beat Jamie with the microphone stand
right now, you would be able to go to the court
and say it was self -defense, right? Like, you
felt threatened. You were in danger for your
life. Even if you weren't, right? Even if you
obviously weren't. Even if you were on tape,
you could still argue that. And the jury could
go, you're full of crap, right? And they could
convict you. 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, right? strict
liability crimes forbid that. The jury is not
allowed to consider why you committed a crime.
They're only allowed to consider if you committed
a crime. They're not allowed to consider if the
murder was justified. They're only allowed to
consider if the murder took place. And the funny
thing in this case is that the murder that we're
talking about is telling the truth. The Espionage
Act, in every case, is a law the government exclusively
uses against people who told the truth. That's
what it's about in the context of journalism.
They don't bring the Espionage Act against people
who lied, then they would use fraud or some other
statute. They say, 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.
And I believe, and I think most Americans would
agree, this is fundamentally, indefensibly wrong.
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. A whistleblower is a
public interest offense. It doesn't matter whether
they are a whistleblower or not. It's just they
argued. It's the jury that decides whether they
are a whistleblower or not. They have to be able
to consider the motivations of why someone did
what they did. The government says we refuse
to allow that because that puts the government
on trial. And we don't trust the jury to consider
those questions. Wow. So you have had these conversations
then. So this has been discussed. No, this is
this is from the Obama administration. There's
been no contact since since the Trump administration,
because the government basically when they got
to this point, they went, we have no good argument
against this and we will never permit this to
happen. And again, I just want to make clear
this is not. This is not speculation. This is
not me thinking. This is actively happening in
the case of Daniel Hale right now. 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. So you're seemingly
in a state of limbo then. They're not actively
pursuing you. It seems that if you're able to
move around freely, they haven't discovered where
you are. You're just free to live your life.
Well, yeah. I mean, 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. I'm in Russia, right? 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. 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. And don't get me wrong, I've been
a longtime critic of the Russian government.
I just actually had a major story written about
me in a Russian state news outlet called RIA
Novosti. You guys could probably pull it. It's
only in Russian, though. 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. I was saying,
look, I think people have a right 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 opposition figure has been a longtime thorn
in the Russian administration's side. And they've
just suddenly, magically been accused of being
foreign agents or something like that. And so
everyone connected to this, which is like a big
civil society body, had their doors like simultaneously
kicked in across the country and they're being
investigated for some kind of corruption or something.
It doesn't even matter. 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. But yeah, so look,
it does not make my life easier to be trapped
in a country that I did not choose. People don't
remember this. I was actually en route to Latin
America when the U .S. government canceled my
passport, which trapped me in Russia. And for
those who are interested, again, I wrote an entire
book that has a lot of detail on this. 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. And
it's a hard thing. It's not a happy thing, but
I feel like it's a necessary thing. The problem
is nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants
to engage in that kind of nuance. Nobody wants
to consider those kind of conversations. in the
current world. 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. 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.
And that's very useful for the Russian government
broadly. Because they can then take that and
replay that on their domestic media and they
can go, look how strong we are. 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. We are strong, right? There's no
question that Russia's going to be interfering
in elections. There's no question that America's
going to be interfering in Russian elections,
right? Nobody likes to talk about this. And again,
I need to substantiate that now that I've said
that. I've got an old note that I've signed a
billion times. 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.
And they found in roughly 50 years 36 different
cases of election interference by Russia or the
Soviets. This is not a new thing. This is something
that always happens. That's what intelligence
services do. 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. 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 in the New York Times and both
the Washington Post as well. But this is the
thing. Like, there is a way to criticize the
Russian government's policies without criticizing
the Russian people, who are ordinary people who
just want to have a happy life. They just want
to do better. They want the same things that
you do, right? And every time people go, oh,
Russia, Russia, Russia. Every time people go,
Russia bad. Every time they go, Russia's doing
this. They go, Russia's doing that. Russian people...
who have nothing to do with the government feel
implicated by that? Like, do you feel like you're
in charge of Donald Trump? Like, do you want
to have Donald Trump's legacy around your neck?
And then people go, oh, well, you know, you could
overthrow Donald Trump. You know, you could overthrow
Putin. Can you? Really? Like, is that how it
works? So, yeah, I mean, look, I have no affiliation.
I have no love for the Russian government. It's
not my choice to be here. And I've made it very
clear I would be happy to return home. Is there
any concern that they would deny you visa? I
mean, how are you staying there? It's a good
question. So I have a permanent residence. People
think I'm under asylum, but I'm no longer under
it. It's like a green card now. It's got to be
renewed every three years. So, yeah, sure, it's
possible they could kick me out. And this was
what the story I was telling you about before
in Russian media was. 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 because why is he criticizing
the Russian government, right, when they're the
people who are keeping Americans away? Is that
like the Russian version of Fox News? Is that
what they have over there? I don't know enough
about Russian media to tell you. I think it's
supposed to be more like a Reuters or Associated
Press, but the hell if I know. But the thing
is this. What's the alternative? Yes, the Russian
government could screw me. But they could screw
me even if I didn't say anything. And so should
I shut up and be quiet? in the face of things
that I think are injustices, because it makes
me safer. Well, a lot of pragmatic people will
say, yeah. They say, you've done enough. They
say, you've done your part. You know, they say,
whatever. Be safe, live long, be happy. But I
didn't come forward to be safe. 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? And nobody ever would have known about
this. The system would have gotten worse. The
world, the future gets worse every day that we
don't do something about it. Every day that we
stay silent about all the injustices we see,
the world gets worse. Things get worse. And yeah,
it's risky. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. But that's
why we do it. Because if we don't, no one else
will. All those years I was sitting. hoping for
someone else to come forward, and no one did,
right? That's because I was waiting for a hero.
But there are no heroes, right? There's only
heroic decisions. You are never further than
one decision away from making a difference. It
doesn't matter whether it's a big difference.
It doesn't matter if it was a small difference
because you don't have to save the world by yourself.
And in fact, you can't. All you have to do is
lay down one brick. 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. And together, step by
step, day by day, year by year, we build the
foundation of something better. But yeah, it's
not going to be safe, but it doesn't matter.
Because individually, it's not, you know, me,
whoever you are, that's the Iron Man. I don't
care if you're the biggest doomsday prepper with
cans full of beans. If the world ends, it's going
to affect you. We make things better. We become
safe together, right? Collectively, that is our
strength. That is the power of civilization.
That is the power that shapes the future. Because
even if you make life great for you, you're going
to die someday. You're going to be forgotten
someday. Your cans of beans are going to rot
someday. You can make things safe. You can be
more careful, right? You can be more clever,
and there's nothing wrong with that. 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. You're trying to
collapse the universe of outcomes. such that
what you've lost is freedom. You've lost the
ability to act because you were afraid. That's
a beautiful way to put it. And that's what got
us into this mess. That's a beautiful way to
put it. Are you aware at all of the current state
of surveillance and what, if anything, has changed
since your revelations? Yeah, I mean, the big
thing that's changed since I was in 2013 is now
it's mobile first everything. Mobile was still
a big deal, right? And the intelligence community
was very much grappling to get its hands around
it and to deal with it. 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. And both Apple
and Android devices, unfortunately. are not especially
good in protecting your privacy. Think right
now. You got a smartphone, right? You might be
listening to this on a train somewhere in traffic
right now. Or you, Joe, right now. You got a
phone somewhere in the room, right? The phone
is turned off, or at least the screen is turned
off. It's sitting there. It's powered on. And
if somebody sends you a message, The screen blinks
to life. How does that happen? How is it that
if someone from any corner of the earth dials
a number, your phone rings and nobody else's
rings? How is it that you can dial anybody else's
number and only their phone rings, right? Every
smartphone, every phone at all, is constantly
connected to the nearest cellular tower. 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. It's
screaming in the air, saying, here I am, here
I am. Here is my IMEI. I think it's individual
manufacturer's equipment identity. And IMEI,
individual manufacturer's subscriber identity.
I could be wrong on the breakout there, but the
acronyms are... The IMEI and the IMSI, and you
can search for these things. They're two globally
unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in
the world in one place, right? This makes your
phone different than all the other phones. The
IMEI is burned into the handset of your phone.
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. The IMSI. is in your SIM card, right?
And this is what holds your phone number, right?
It's basically the key, the right to use that
phone number. And so your phone is sitting there
doing nothing, you think, but it's constantly
shouting and saying, I'm here. Who is closest
to me? That's the cell phone tower. 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. I see Jamie's
phone. I see all these phones that are here right
now. 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 going to be bound to this
cell phone tower, and that cell phone tower is
going to make a note, a permanent record, saying
this phone handset with this phone number at
this time was connected to me, right? And based
on your phone handset and your phone number,
they can get your identity, right? Because you
pay for this stuff with your credit card and
everything like that. And even if you don't,
it's still active at your house overnight. It's
still active on your nightstand when you're sleeping.
It's still whatever. The movements of your phone
are the movements of you as a person, and those
are often quite uniquely identifying. It goes
to your home. It goes to your workplace. Other
people don't have it. Sorry. And anyway, it's
constantly shouting this out, and then it compares
notes with the other parts of the network. And
when somebody is trying to get to a phone, It
compares notes, the network compares notes to
go, where is this phone with this phone number
in the world right now? And to that cell phone
tower that is closest to that phone, it sends
out a signal saying, we have a call for you.
Make your phone start ringing so your owner can
answer it. And then it connects it across this
whole path. But what this means is that whenever
you're carrying a phone, whenever the phone is
turned on, There is a record of your presence
at that place that is being made and created
by companies. It does not need to be kept forever.
And in fact, there's no good argument for it
to be kept forever. But these companies see that
as valuable information, right? This is the whole
big data problem that we're running into. And
all this information that used to be ephemeral,
right? Where were you when you were eight years
old, you know? Where'd you go after you had a
bad breakup? Who'd you spend the night with?
Who'd you call after? All this information used
to be ephemeral, meaning it disappeared, right?
Like the morning dew, it would be gone. No one
would remember it. But now these things are stored.
Now these things are saved. It doesn't matter
whether you're doing anything wrong. It doesn't
matter whether you're the most ordinary person
on earth, because that's how bulk collection,
which is the government's euphemism for mass
surveillance, They simply collect it all in advance
in hopes that one day it will become useful.
And that was just talking about how you connect
to the phone network. That's not talking about
all those apps on your phone that are contacting
the network even more frequently, right? How
do you get a text message notification? How do
you get an email notification? How is it that
Facebook knows where you're at? 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. 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. Every wireless access point in the world,
right? 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.
And this is standard term. You can look it up.
And these things can be mapped when they're broadcasting
in the air. Because again, like your phone says
to the cell phone tower, I have this identifier.
The cell phone tower responds and says, I have
this identifier. And anybody who's listening,
they can write these things down. And all those
Google Street View cars that go back and forth,
right? They're keeping notes on whose Wi -Fi
is active on this block. And then they build
a new giant map. So even if you have GPS turned
off, as long as you're connected to Wi -Fi, those
apps can go, well, I'm connected to Joe's Wi
-Fi, but I can also see his neighbor's Wi -Fi
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, right? The intersection
in between the spreads, the domes of all those
wireless access points. And it's a proxy for
location. And it just goes on and on and on.
We could talk about this for four more hours.
We don't have that kind of time. Can I ask you
this? Is there a way to mitigate any of this
personally? I mean, shutting your phone off doesn't
even work, right? Well, so it does in a way.
It's yes and no. The thing with shutting your
phone off that is a risk is... How do you know
your phone's actually turned off? It used to
be, when I was in Geneva, for example, working
for the CIA, we would all carry, like, drug dealer
phones. You know, the old smartphones, or sorry,
old dumb phones, they're not smartphones. And
the reason why was just because they had removable
backs where you could take the battery out, right?
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. You have
to have power in order to do work. But now your
phones are all sealed, right? You can't take
the batteries out. There are potential ways that
you can hack a phone where it appears to be off,
but it's not actually off. It's just pretending
to be off, whereas in fact, it's still listening
in and doing all this stuff. But for the average
person, that doesn't apply, right? And I got
to tell you guys, they've been chasing me all
over the place. I don't worry about that stuff,
right? And it's because if they're applying that
level of effort to me, they'll probably get the
same information through other routes. I am as
careful as I can, and I use things like Faraday
cages. I turn devices off. 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.
Also, if they get me, I only trust phones so
much. So there's only so much they can derive
from the compromise. And this is how operational
security works. You think about what are the
realistic threats that you're facing that you're
trying to mitigate. And the mitigation that you're
trying to do is what would be the loss, what
would be the damage done to you if this stuff
was exploited. Much more realistic than worrying
about these things that I call voodoo hacks,
right, which are like next level stuff. And actually,
just a shout out for those of your readers who
are interested in this stuff. I wrote a paper.
On this specific problem, how do you know when
a phone is actually off? How do you know when
it's actually not spying on you? With a brilliant,
brilliant guy named Andrew Bunny Huang. He's
an MIT PhD in, I think, electrical engineering.
Called the Introspection Engine. It was published
in the Journal of Open Engineering. You can find
it online. And it'll go as deep down in the weeds,
I promise you, as you want. 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. But for average people, right, this academic...
That's not your primary threat. Your primary
threats are these bulk collection programs. Your
primary threat is the fact that your phone is
constantly squawking to these cell phone towers.
It's doing all of these things because we leave
our phones in a state that is constantly on.
You're constantly connected, right? Airplane
mode doesn't even turn off Wi -Fi really anymore.
It just turns off the cellular modem. But the
whole idea is... We need to identify the problem.
And the central problem with smartphone use today
is you have no idea what the hell it's doing
at any given time. Like, the phone has the screen
off. You don't know what it's connected to. You
don't know how frequently it's doing it. Apple
and iOS, unfortunately, makes it impossible to
see what kind of network connections are constantly
made on the device and to intermediate them,
going, I don't want Facebook to be able to talk
right now. I don't want Google to be able to
talk right now. I just want my secure messenger
app to be able to talk. I just want my weather
app to be able to talk. But I just checked my
weather, and now I'm done with it, so I don't
want that to be able to talk anymore. 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? You want, let's
say you use Facebook, because, you know, for
whatever judgment we have, a lot of people might
do it. You want it to be able to connect to Facebook's
content servers. You want to be able to message
a friend. You want to be able to download a photograph
or whatever. But you don't want it to be able
to talk to an ad server. You don't want it to
talk to an analytics server that's monitoring
your behavior. 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. And this is the problem
with the data collection used today. is there
is an industry that is built on keeping this
invisible. 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. So,
like, if you could see your phone right now,
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, and then you
see all these little spokes. coming off of it.
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. And you can see right now, once
every three seconds, your phone is checking into
Facebook, and you can just poke that app, and
then boom, it's not talking to Facebook anymore.
Facebook's not allowed. Facebook's speaking privileges
have been revoked, right? You would do that.
We would all do that. 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?
That button does not exist right now. And both
Google and Apple, unfortunately, Apple's a lot
better at this than Google. But neither of them
allow that button to exist. In fact, they actively
interfere with it because they say it's a security
risk. And from a particular perspective, they
actually aren't wrong there. 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. We think it's too complicated
for people to do this. We think there's too many
connections being made. Well, that is actually
a confession of the problem right there. 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. 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. This should be a much
more simple process. It should be obvious. 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's
spying on you here, this company's 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. That happens as a result
of a single problem. And that problem is an inequality
of available information. 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. You, on the other
hand, owned the device. Well, rather, you paid
for the device. But increasingly these corporations
own it. Increasingly these governments own it.
And increasingly we are living in a world where
we do all the work, right? We pay all the taxes.
We pay all the costs. But we own less and less.
And nobody understands this better than the youngest
generation. Well, it seems like our data became
a commodity before we understood what it was.
It became this thing that's insanely valuable
to Google and Facebook and all these social media
platforms. Before we understood what we were
giving up, they were making billions of dollars.
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. It's
very difficult to turn that horse around. Precisely
because the money then becomes power. The information
then becomes influence. That also seems to be
the same sort of situation that would happen
with these mass surveillance states. Once they
have the access, it's going to be incredibly
difficult for them to relinquish that. Right,
yeah, no, you're exactly correct. And this is
the subject of the book. I mean, this is the
permanent record, and this is where it came from.
This is how it came to exist. 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.
to increase the breadth and depth of their sensor
networks that were sort of spread out through
society. Remember, back in the day, intelligence
collection in the United States, even at 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, and
they put a bug in a building, or they built a
satellite listening site, right? We called these
foreign satellite collection. We're out in the
desert somewhere. They built a big parabolic
collector, and it's just listening to satellite
emissions, right? But these satellite emissions,
these satellite links, were owned by militaries.
They were exclusive to governments, right? It
wasn't affecting everybody broadly. All surveillance
was targeted because it had to be. What changed
with technology is that surveillance could now
become indiscriminate. It could become dragnet.
It could become bulk collection, which should
become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language,
if we have any kind of decency. But we were intentionally,
this was intentionally concealed from us, right?
The government did it. They used classification.
Companies did it. They intentionally didn't talk
about it. They denied these things were going.
They said, you agreed to this, and you didn't
agree to nothing like this. I'm sorry, right?
They go, we put that terms of service page up,
and you clicked that. You clicked a button that
said, I agree. because you were trying to open
an account so you could talk to your friends.
You were trying to get driving directions. You
were trying to get an email account. You weren't
trying to agree to some 600 -page legal form
that even if you read, you wouldn't understand.
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? They have built a legal paradigm that
presumes records collected about us do not belong
to us. This is sort of one of the core principles
on which mass surveillance, from the government's
perspective in the United States, is legal. And
you have to understand that all the stuff we
talked about today, the government says everything
they do is legal, right? And they go, so it's
fine. Our perspective as a public should be...
Well, that's actually the problem, because this
isn't okay. The scandal isn't how they're breaking
the law. The scandal is that they don't have
to break the law. And the way they say they're
not breaking the law is something called the
third -party doctrine. The third -party doctrine
is a legal principle derived from a case in,
I believe, the 1970s called Smith v. Maryland.
And Smith was this knucklehead who was harassing
this lady, making phone calls to her house. And
when she would pick up, he'd just, I don't know,
sit there heavy breathing, whatever, like a classic
creeper. And, you know, it was terrifying, this
poor lady. 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. So
she goes to the cops and she goes, is this the
guy? And the cops, again, they're trying to do
a good thing here. 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? And they go to the phone company
and they say, can you give us this record? And
the phone company says, yeah, sure. And it's
the guy. The cops got their man, right? So they
go arrest this guy, and then in court, his lawyer
brings all this stuff up, and they go, you did
this without a warrant. Sorry, that was the problem.
They went to the phone company and they got the
records without a warrant. They just asked for
it, or they subpoenaed it, some lower standard
of legal review. And the company gave it to him
and got the guy, and they marched him off to
jail. They could have gotten a warrant, right?
But it was just expedience. They just didn't
want to take the time, the small -town cops.
You can understand how it happens. They know
the guy's a creeper. They just want to get him
off to jail. And so they made a mistake, but
the government doesn't want to let it go. They
fight on this. And they go, it wasn't actually,
they weren't his records. 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. 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. Now here's the problem. 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. 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. They belong
to the company. And then they said, well, if
one person doesn't have a Fourth Amendment interest
in records held by a company, no one does. And
so the company then has absolute proprietary
ownership of all of these records about all of
our lives. And remember, this is back in the
1970s. You know, the Internet. hardly exists
in these kind of contexts. Smartphones don't
exist. Modern society, modern communications
don't exist. This is the very beginning of the
technological era. And flash forward now 40 years,
and they are still relying on this precedent
about this one pervy creeper to go, nobody has
a privacy right for anything that's held by a
company. And so long as they do that, companies
are going to be extraordinarily powerful and
they're going to be extraordinarily abusive.
And this is something that people don't get.
They go, oh, well, it's data collection, right?
They're exploiting data. This is data about human
lives. It is data about people. These records
are about you. It's not data that's being exploited.
It's people that are being exploited. It's not
data. that's being manipulated. It's you that's
being manipulated. And this is something that
I think a lot of people are beginning to understand.
Now, the problem is the companies and the governments
are still pretending they don't understand or
disagreeing with this. 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 um which is uh you can't
awaken someone who's pretending to be asleep
he said it's an old native american saying that's
a great expression it's a good way to i think
that's a good way to end this um ed thank you
very much for doing this i really appreciate
it please tell everybody the title of your book
and it's it's available right now Sure, yes,
it is. It's on shelves everywhere, at least until
the government finds some other way to ban it.
It is called a permanent record. And I hope you
will read it. I will read it. And I think what
you've done is incredibly brave, and I think
you're a very important part of history. I think
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. I really think it's very, very
important. And it was an honor to talk to you,
man. Thank you. Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank
you so much for having me on. Take care of yourself,
man. Stay safe. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No,
don't stay safe. Don't stay safe. Stay free.
Open to possibilities. Take care. Take care.