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Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden

Feb 27, 2020
and it's okay, you're very professional, you know, people say how do you live and stuff like that, they're taking money from the Russians and of course the answer is no, but I do this for a living, how I talk, I don't have a channel from youtube where it is 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 filming now and setting up ooh, is it possible that you can make a YouTube channel? that job, yeah, I mean, if you were to introduce me to have a following, yeah, we could do that too.
joe rogan experience 1368   edward snowden
I totally agree with that, that could absolutely happen. Do you want to do that? Is it something you want to do? No, I mean this. It's a great question, so I came because I just wrote a book called Permanent Record, which is the story of my life because that's what publishers make you do when you write your first book, but it's more than that because they don't. I did. I don't just want to talk about myself, it's really about the change in technology and the change in government in this kind of post-9/11 era where, you know, our generation was growing up and I was in the CIA and the The NSA and all that, but the day the book came out, the government sued me and they sued the publisher of the books because they don't want books like this to be written, they especially don't want books like this to be written.
joe rogan experience 1368   edward snowden

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joe rogan experience 1368 edward snowden...

I didn't want books like this to be read, so the important thing was that you knew we didn't know where this was going, we didn't know what was going to happen, and my editor, of course, wanted me to let people know about this book. existed in case the government leaned more and more, we didn't know where that was going. I mean, the government is still pursuing that case pretty hard, they're more focused on the financial censorship side of things, basically taking all the money I made. From there it's kind of warning others and getting a legal judgment against the publishers saying you know you can't pay this guy for that kind of stuff other than to take the book off the shelves, but that's not because they agree with that the book is on the shelves is because luckily we have the first one and they can't, and that's a very strange and good thing, but anyway, in the context of that, they said, well, what about Joe Rogan and you know ?
joe rogan experience 1368   edward snowden
I heard about you right now, but you know, the only thing I had really seen and really understood that I was familiar with was like you were talking to Bernie Sanders, which, by the way, I really appreciated hearing them because a lot of people don't care. . the guy it's time to talk, yeah, to hear him in those sound bites, you don't really understand who he really is, and this is the other thing, like they're saying, well, you know you can get on with all this, you know, older . Network shows and I did a couple of them.
joe rogan experience 1368   edward snowden
I liked a morning show. I did it with Brian Williams, but generally speaking, the media, the more corporatized type of media, as we might say, is exactly what you just described, they want you to be able to do it. respond in about 8 15 seconds or less and when we're talking about big massive changes in society, we're talking about power, we're talking about technology and how it controls us and influences the future, you can't have a meaningful answer. We talked to them about those limitations and then I said that all these guys want to repeat this type of discredited criticism for a long time and you know, I'm sure you'll ask the same thing and that's fine, they're there for questions, but it's like we can't have the conversation if we can't have this space to think properly and breathe and have this type of discussion so anyway they mentioned you and I was like Joe Rogan Joe Rogan Joe Rogan where do I know this name?
Since before Bernie Sanders and I look back through my mentions on Twitter and the funny thing is that your fans have been harassing me to death because of the wonderful people of last year, wonderful people, but keep going Joe Rogan, keep going Joe Rogan and I remember like after I had just created a Twitter account, Neil deGrasse Tyson actually helped me get on Twitter, it gave me that little initial boost and they said Joe Rogan, so they like to link to you and you know, I hover over your name because I use a desktop computer for this because For security reasons, your avatar appears and appears, man, and I have to say your logo, it's the worst thing in the world for people who are trying to be politically serious and you know they're worried about the National Security Advisor. condemning because like this bald guy with this manic smile and like the third eye on his forehead and I'm like oh man that's show business but actually it's like you look at it you know you wouldn't do it when you look at what you do it's cool , man, it's cool, but that first impression like me, this almost didn't happen, but everyone who's talked to you knows everyone who watches your show.
I think they have a very different impression and then how you're paying for it and to me it's a wonderful thing. because no one understands that better than me, like the government ran an endless smear campaign against me for six months when I ran in June 2013. I know we got off topic here, oh I'll come back to that, okay, there's no such thing stuff. something off topic, we could do it, okay, talk about anything great, okay, first, for those people who have no idea who the hell I am. I'm the guy who was behind the global mass surveillance revelations in 2013.
I worked for the CIA. I worked for the NSA as a contractor in the NS, a staff officer at the CIA, I was working undercover in embassies, but I talked about the difference between this and a book, a contractor and a government official and how everything lost its meaning, but I saw that something was wrong and I saw that basically the government was violating the law and what I believe is the Constitution of the United States and, more generally, human rights for everyone in the United States and around the world, There were internal surveillance programs, there were mass surveillance programs. that worked internationally basically everything they could monitor led to them being monitored and this is actually like people going to war, it's not that obvious, that's not what they're supposed to do and this is strange, but the answer is actually no according to the framework. of our Constitution, the government is only supposed to monitor people who have an individualized and particularized suspicion of having committed a crime for the right thing.
This is what we think about when investing if it means the right thing, like all those TV shows where they say they go and get a court order. The reason they have to do that, like when we fought a revolution over this, you know, a couple hundred years ago, is the idea that when we had kings, when we had governments of absolute power, they could just come in to your house and leave. This pot-smoking guy gets his diary, you know whatever, and if you find evidence of a crime, you take them to prison and everything's fine, you've found evidence that they're criminals or you haven't found evidence, well, no harm done, No.
Disgusting, you're just doing what the government does. We were trying to build a better system where, if so, the government has extraordinary capabilities but only uses them if they are necessary just when they are proportional to the threat that this person presents. You know, we shouldn't be afraid of the person who has like a little bag of weed on their dresser or something like that that's not a threat to national security, it's not a threat to public safety, but what happened after 9/9 11 was a whole group of government officials meeting behind closed doors and this was actually led, interestingly enough, by the vice president of the United States, Cheney, everyone remembers that name or hopefully I can look up that name, Dick Cheney and his personal lawyer, something like that.
Dick Cheney's Giuliani, a guy named David Addington and this lawyer, David Addington, wrote a secret legal interpretation, but no one else was allowed to see that it was kept in the vice president's safe in the White House, they didn't give this or even when they said people and it was just a couple of people in Congress Nancy Pelosi was one of them in a couple of these other people when they talked to the heads of the agency, the NSA, the CIA and the FBI and all those things that they they told the White House. in the legal counsel's office and you know that the president's lawyers, all these guys had decided that this would be legal, but we can't tell you why we can't show you the legal authorization where you just took our word for it and so they did this and turned into a mass surveillance program called starwind that they said was supposed to monitor phone calls on internet communications emails and stuff like that from everyone in the United States and around the world that they could contact. access to Al Qaeda links because if you remember that after the 9/11 attacks they were singing, we thought that there might be sleeper cells about Qaeda that, as you know, were spread all over the country and that were going to emerge at any moment. of course, like weapons of mass destruction, they just didn't exist, it was all power grabbing, but on that basis they started doing this in secret and it was completely unconstitutional, it was completely illegal even under the very lax requirements of the Act Patriot, but they did it. for so long that they got comfortable with it and thought this is it, you know, this is a really powerful capability, what have we started using this for things other than terrorism?
Because it wasn't finding terrorists because there weren't any terrorists in this context we're looking for them and those of us there were terrorists, the program wasn't affected because they were guys in Pakistan who weren't using emails and phone calls that they were receiving. You know, he was depressed with his cousin, who was a messenger who brought a letter to his boy, you know who runs the food stall or whatever, but little by little over time this grew and grew and grew and there were scandals and If you want to go deeper into this later everyone was going to him, but what happened was that step by step our constitutional rights were changed and we were not allowed to know about it, we were never given a vote on it and even the many members of Congress of right 535 in the United States In the states they were prohibited from knowing this and instead told it only to a select few people.
Yes, in the original case there were only eight members of Congress called the gang of eight who knew about this and then there were the people on the intelligence committees and in the Senate. in the house who were informed about this, but they were only partially informed, they were not fully informed and now that they had been informed because they had security clearances and so they were not allowed to tell it. anyone else, even if he was opposed to it and we had a Senator Ron Wyden, I mean, another one, I think Tom Udall was named after him, who did oppose this and wanted something to happen, but since they couldn't tell him to anyone what was happening, we were doing these strange girl barks to the press, where they were saying we have serious concerns about the way these programs are being run, but no one knew what they were talking about, so the journalists were saying : "You know, they have concerns about what it is." That Lassie, what are you trying to say?
Timmy is fine, but they were making a mistake, they couldn't say what was going on, so what happened was that we, the American people, had lost our seat at the government table, we were gone. partner of the government, we had simply become subjects of the government and I think that everyone who is in the world today and is aware of what is happening, whether under this administration, the last administration or the one before that right, has seen a type of constant change where we have the public has less say and less influence over government policy, each year that passes a kind of new class is being created, a government class and then the public civil class that is held to different standards of behavior and when we start talking about leaks and whistleblowing this becomes even clearer, so what I did was I wanted to clear up that kind of lassie barking, right?
I just wanted everyone to know what was going on. I didn't mean that the government can't do this. I don't want to say that this is how they have to live because it's not my place to say it now, but I do believe that all people in the United States and in general in the world whose rights are violated by a government should have at least an understanding of how that is happening, what kind of policies and programs the authorities have that allow it or so that they can protest against them so that they can cast a vote on them so that they cannot say you know what they say this is fine, but I'm not I agree that this is not right, I am opposed and I want things to change, so I gathered evidence of what I believe is criminal or unconstitutional activity by the government and gave it to reporters right now. to the journalists under a very strict condition which was that they did not publish any stories in this archive ofinformation simply because it was interesting, there is no clickbait or anything simply because they thought it would be news if we got them awards, they would only publish stories that they were willing to make an institutional judgment and support and these were three different newspapers that it was in the public interest to know and then Beyond that, there was something additional because if you could see what I was doing here, what had happened, what led us to this pitfall was that the system of checks and balances that our government is supposed to self-regulate had failed. ;
The courts had abdicated their role in congressional oversight of the executive because terrorism was such a hot topic at the time that they were worried that they would be criticized and blamed if something went wrong, an attack occurred, and they did not have access to the information of that the programs were ineffective, so they were simply taking the government at its word. If they didn't want to wait on Congress, most of them didn't even know it, and those who did know it was the same thing, defense contractors were filling their pockets with money and they were getting rich building these systems. that they were violating the rights of every one of us, so they benefited by just not saying anything and then the executive itself, whether we're talking about Bush, whether we're talking about Obama or Trump, now all these guys They were OK. with an ever-growing surveillance state because they're the ones who had their hands on the lever at the time they had to aim, they had to use it if you had a little search box in front of you, they gave you the email history and You know every person in the United States, anyone you want, if you could open their text messages, anyone you want, if you could see anything they typed into the Google search box, right, Joe, do you?
What is the worst thing you have written in your life? that search box that lasts forever and they have a record that they can get it from Google and this was it, how do we correct it so that when there is someone who wants to inform the public about something and we We will talk about the arguments of the appropriate channels later , but you can't go through the institution to correct them because the institution knows it's wrong and is doing it right anyway. That's the origin of the program: they want to do something that they want to do.
You're not allowed to do what you do well, so I didn't want to say I'm the president of Secrets. I didn't want to just put these things on the Internet and I could have the right from the technologist I worked with. the journalists and then that to create a confrontational step, someone to argue against what I believed and, hopefully, what the journalists believe once they looked at the documents and basically authenticated them. Can we get the government to play that role correctly and so before journalists publish? any story, this is a controversial thing, people still criticize me for this, in fact they say I was too complacent.
The government thinks they might be right is that the journalist would go to the government and warn them, say we are about to publish this story about this. secret program that says you did X Y & Z, something bad, you are like that and the government always doesn't comment, is this going to cause harm? Will anyone get hurt? Is this program effective? Is there something we don't understand well? something that Snowden doesn't understand is that this guy just didn't get it right, these are fake documents, whatever you mean, we shouldn't publish this story in all cases. I'm aware that that process was followed and that's why it was correct because there are a lot of people. who doesn't like me, who criticizes me, who says this was unsafe, or that it caused harm to people, or whatever we are in in 2019.
Now I came forward and these stories were not the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism. Back in June 2013, we had six years to show bodies, we had six years to show damage and you know as well as I do that the government is happy to leak things when it is in their interest, no one has been hurt as a result of these disclosures because everyone those who were involved in them were so careful that we wanted to maximize the public benefit while mitigating the potential risks and I think we did a pretty good job, but just to get back to the main and original thing that put us on that path when I ran in June of 2013 and I did an interview with the people who were in the room with the documents Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, you and McCaskill, and I said who I was, I said why I was doing this.
I said this was about why it's important and we were building a turnkey system of tyranny and even if you trust Obama with that, you never know who's going to be the next hand in that turnkey and all I have to do is turn it and There is nothing we can do to stop it, the only thing that is really restricting these programs is politics, rather than the law and the president, and at any moment I can sign a napkin and those policies change a lot after that I went six months without giving any interview because I didn't want people to talk about me and I wanted them to talk about what really mattered and the government, of course, was trying very hard to change the conversation, as they always do, to focus on who this guy is , what they have done well and what is wrong. them, what their problems are, who is this crazy guy so they can have controversial eyes on the source of a story instead of having to confront the story itself and that's why I said it's me.
I really appreciate your opinion on the media and all that. That's because when you don't tell your story you know that other people will tell it for you, say a lot of things about you and have these wrong impressions like I had, because if something is as stupid as the avatar you were using on Twitter, well, I guess which is a certain type of show with a certain type of guy and it's crazy stuff, but when I really listen to you, when I really look at the facts properly and when I listen to you talk, I actually say, this is a thoughtful guy, actually, this is someone Who cares, who wants to look at these things in depth and at appearances, and our first impressions can be very deceptive.
I work hard at it, I try to fool people, it's good, it works in my favor, do a good job, man. Thank you, I want to go back to when you started with the NSA, you started as a contractor, what was your initial impression and when did you know that things were very complicated with the programs, that type of thing, so I'm not saying? This to put you on the spot. I know you've been a busy guy. I don't know you hadn't done it. I think it shows that you recently returned from vacation, right, but have you read the book because it will just help me?
Your boyfriend, if you don't have the opportunity, you know that no, I haven't read your book nor do I have a copy. Well, I'll send you a signed copy beautiful brother. I don't expect you to read it and I hope you enjoy it, but that's okay, I had a really strange history in the intelligence community. I grew up in a federal family in the shadow of Fort Meade, right in all these little suburban communities in Maryland, where basically the entire industry of the state is everyone's federal government. these different agencies and then all the subcontractors, all the defense industries that serve that government and that are really kind of our war machine, they are our control system for the country and the world in general, all of that spreads and You know, within a few hundred miles.
Outside of DC, my mom worked for the district courts instead of the federal courts and it's kind of funny because she still works there and those are the courts that are trying to put me in jail for the rest of my life. Now my father worked for Costa. The guard retired after 30 years. My grandfather was an admiral and later worked for the FBI. My family. My entire family line, even generations ago, worked for the government. So it was pretty normal. I was expected to do it. I went into the same kind of job now that I started and I didn't have much success in school because I felt and you know, this is the most ar

rogan

t thing in the world that nobody says that I had more to learn from computers than from the you know, the biology class, so I spent more and more time focusing on technology, and then I got mononucleosis and dropped out of high school and now it's like, okay, how do I get this back?
I dropped out of high school, but I actually go to Community College, right, they called it concurrent enrollment, where I'm not taking any high school classes. Instead, I go to Community College and I'm not doing very well, they don't say it's good either, you know, I'm enjoying it, but you know school is school. I want, I can't wait to grow, you're on board. And I think a lot of people have felt that, but I ran into someone at Community College who had his own home business doing web design. and they could see that I was a little technical and they said, hey, do you want to work for me?
And I was like the cool-sounding woman, so I started doing web design very, very early, this is like God, I probably don't know. a 1998 vintage during the big boom and then the crash that followed and the funny thing is she worked, she was married to an NSA analyst, a linguist, so she lived in Fort Meade and ran her business from her home in Fort Meade , that's right down the street from the NSA, so even before I work there, I walk by this building all the time and try to figure out what the next step is going to be and I enjoy it, it's a good thing for me and I like it which works well and I start training and getting certified, all these little industry seals that you have to get as a technologist to say oh, you know this program or whatever and I just start climbing the ladder, but then 9/11 happens and I'm at Fort Meade when 9/11 happens.
I was just going to work and I tell it in the book in some detail and I think it is very worth reading. Four people don't know this because it's a forgotten story, but how many years? Were you with this money? uh uh OSH I was born at 83 so I was probably 18 and yeah yeah I just turned 18 a couple months before and what people forget is who knew what was going on before anyone else. Wow, in September. 11. The intelligence community is right and what did they do right? They gave a public warning. Did they tell you to evacuate?
Did they say this viper doesn't know? No, not for everyone, not for a long time, but at the then director of the NSA. Michael Hayden, he was a general, then he became director of the CIA, he ordered the evacuation of the entire campus of thousands, tens of thousands of people, he really just said, "go home." The CIA did the same. They were using minimal equipment at the time when the country needed it. They were right more than ever and I get a call, well I didn't hear a call that's from my boss's wife, her husband to her, he's calling from the NSA, he's saying, hey, you know, I think I I go for the day because I am the only employee. of this business besides her because I think they're going to close the base and I think it's crazy, they've never closed us down, we don't know what's going on, so we start checking the news, which is through websites, right?
We're, we're doing all these things and all of a sudden it's the big story everywhere and you know, no one understands how big it is, but most of us think, oh, it's going to ruin our work day, oh, it's going to ruin our daily commute, but when I leave I hear car horns all over the base, it's the craziest thing because this is a military base right outside of the NSA and I went into this absolute state of chaos when I pass by the K9 road, which is the road going to the right and Pat. it's in front of NSA headquarters and from what you can see it's just a parking lot, they have military police under the traffic lights directing traffic because this is a mass evacuation and I still have no idea what's going on, the story is still developing.
But I will never forget that image of why these people had so much power and so much money and so much authority that if in the moments when we need them most they are the first in the country to come out of their buildings and you will know later. they said and this is covered in a book. I think I think it was James Bamford who interviewed the director of the NSA who gave that order about what was happening. It was going well, you know, he called his wife and asked her where his kids were. and all that and then he wanted to think about where these other planes that they knew were in the air that hadn't yet hit where they could go and this shows how self-centered the intelligence community is.
This is the DC metro area, right, they get hit in the White House, they get hit in Congress, they get hit in the Supreme Court, right? I think they're going to fly their planes to CIA headquarters. Oh, they're going to fly their planes to NSA headquarters. and of course it was never realistic that these were the goals, but on that basis they said, oh, let's get the bacon out of the frying pan, but why say this? I'm sorry, but just in the interest of knowing what wasn't possible that they could have attacked those places, I mean, they attacked the Pentagon, you know, they knew there was an attack.
Look, it's absolutely possible that your Denny's could have been attacked,Right? But it's a matter of risk assessment if you have planes in the air. you believe that there is an ongoing terrorist attack that is happening in the United States right now and if you have built the largest surveillance agencies in history, the most powerful intelligence forces in the history of the species, you will remove them from the board or at least the majority. of your staff off the board, then on the off chance that you don't have any kind of basis to substantiate that they could be targeting you to begin with simply because they could hit someone else with those, like you say the Pentagon will be, TRUE?
It will be the World Trade Center, there will be someone somewhere and the more minutes you are at that desk, the greater the chances, even if it is a very small possibility, even if it is someone who does not work in terrorism, maybe if it is It's about someone. who normally works in finance in North Korea, but you see, this is an emergency. Everyone understands that you don't need to explain this, just stop what you are doing, look at the financial transactions related to who bought these plane tickets and do this, just go full spectrum and do whatever you can do right now if the building got hit, we get hit, that's what we signed up for, no one wants that right, that's not the desired outcome, but if they had asked the staff If he did, everyone would have agreed that's what these people signed up for, and yet the director says no.
We know that we just know that we are not going to accept that order and this I think says a lot about the bureaucratic nature of how the government works. The people who get to the top of these governments are all about risk management for them. right, it's about never being criticized for something and this is, look, if we want to be really controversial, this is something that will haunt me because people will mention it over and over again and people ask about, you know, people still criticize me . In the book you know I talk about aliens and chemtrails and things like that.
There is no evidence of that. I went looking on the net, right? And I know Joey. I know you want there to be aliens. There will be aliens and they are probably right, but the idea that we are hiding them is. I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups. I couldn't find anything correct, so if it is hidden and it could be hidden it is very well hidden even from the people who are inside, but the main thing is conspiracy theories, everyone wants to believe in conspiracy theories because they help the life makes sense, it helps us believe that someone has control over it. control certain that someone is making the decisions that all these things happen for a reason to endure the other there are real conspiracies but they are not typical you know they have tens of thousands of people working on them unless you are talking about the existence of the community itself intelligence, which is basically based on the idea that you can get...
I think there are four million or 1.4 million people in the United States who have security clearances and you can get all of these people to never talk to journalists. in this or that, but when you look back at the 9/11 report and when you look back at the history of what really happened, what we can prove is correct, not what we can speculate, but what they are at least two commonly agreed upon facts. To me, as someone who worked in the intelligence community, it is very clear, not during this period of course, I was too young, but very soon after, that these attacks could have been prevented and, in fact, the government says this too , but the government says the reason these attacks happen, the reason they were not prevented, is what they call "stupepiping." There wasn't enough sharing, they needed to tear down the walls and restrictions that chained these poor patriots in the NSA, CIA and FBI. of everyone working on the same team and to some extent they are right about this, there were limits to how agencies were supposed to play with each other, but I worked there and I know how much of this is and how As much as this is not , they are procedural and policy limits, in some cases, legal limits on what can be shared without following the process, without doing this or that, basically without asking permission, without getting an approval or anything like that if the FBI wanted to . send absolutely everything they had to the CIA, they could have done it.
If the CIA wanted to send everything they had to the FBI, they could have done it and they didn't, and people died as a result. Now the government becomes bureaucratic procedural. The ISM was responsible and it's because we had too many restrictions on the intelligence community and this is what led to the world after 9/11 where all our rights evaporated if they went well, the restrictions on what these agencies can do are costing lives, so naturally we just have to unleash these guys and everything will be better, right? And if you think back to that moment after 9/11, you can understand how that could actually be so persuasive, how that could be a kind of thing to go, well, will it make sense? because everyone was terrified, there were people who quickly put their heads back on their shoulders in the right way, there were some of them who never lost their minds at all and protested against the Iraq war at the same time as Lion-o himself he enlisted go fight as a volunteer for the military and we'll get into that in a minute, but everything that has followed in the past decades is due to the fact that in a moment of fear we lost our minds and abandoned all the traditional constitutional restrictions that we put these agencies in and we abandoned all the traditional political restrictions and just social limitations, the ideological belief systems about the limitations that the secret police should have in a free and open society and we went to look at, you know, terrorists, we created programs like 24 and Jack.
Bauer, where he threatens to gouge out people's eyes with a knife if they don't tell him this, that the other and as a result we enter this era of increasingly unlimited government and now, in retrospect, we think we should have been surprised, but At that moment everyone panicked. I tried, but if we go back to saying that helped and now we know the answer is, in fact, no, it didn't make things worse. I don't think any historian will look at the Bush administration and say that this improved America's standing in the world, but if we go back we don't go back to that moment before 9/11, going back to those silos and those walls that, they said, They had to be taken down because that was restricting the government instead of the rules that said we can't share these things but there has to be a basis there has to be a justification you have to go why do we exchange people's information like baseball cards and all that? ?
It's super easy as an intelligence officer. to justify sharing information about a suspected terrorist who you believe is planning to kill people or even just happens to be in a country you shouldn't be in or a place you shouldn't be, or who is doing something you don't believe I should be with another agency. because no one is going to question that a judge is not going to question that any judge in the world will seal that order without even thinking about it and go to bed that night, you know, without a care in the world because you're not spying on a journalist, You know, spying on a human rights defender, right, this is not an extreme case, now it's about someone who you think is associated with Al Qaeda or whatever, now this is all a lot of preamble to say that a essential fact the government agrees, everyone agrees The attacks probably could have been prevented if the information had been shared, so why wasn't the information shared?
The government says that the information was not shared because of these restrictions and it is half true because every major lie has some criminal truth and there were these barriers, but the reality is: why were those barriers respected in the case of a plot? major terrorist? Why didn't the CIA share information with the FBI? Why didn't the FBI share information with the NSA? Why did Anastacia share information with the CIA in the case of Mary's senior terrorists and if you have worked in the government if you have worked in the intelligence community if you have worked in any large institution you know if you work at a company that sells batteries you know that each office is fighting the other office for the budget for the cloud for promotions and this is the sad reality of what really happened, each of those agencies wanted to be the guy who busted the plot, they wanted to be the one who got the credit for and they didn't realize how serious it was.
It was until it was too late because they were competing with each other instead of cooperating, that's exactly what I was going to ask you if that was the problem, the competition between these agencies because they are very proud that the CIA achieved something and the FBI achieved something. accomplished something. and they want to be the ones to take credit for that, yeah, and I mean, I think it's important in their defense because no one else here is going to give them a defense. That's actually darkly human again, this happens in every industry. in all kinds of important corporate matters because you want to get promoted and you know that everyone is making similar achievements at the end of the year for what they did, if you are the guy who does that you will go straight to the top, but the state of their solutions was the so we have a strange delay here for the people who are listening, they claim their solution instead of someone being responsible for closing the gap and providing that information to each individual agency, their solution was mass surveillance, well no, they are different things this is 9/11 this is what woke these ROM guys up basically and they did well we screwed it up and Americans died as a result we really don't want to take the hit from that and to be honest the government had no no interest in attacking them, to be honest, the public had no interest in attacking them at that time because everyone understood that terrorism is a real thing, there are bad people in the world and that is true, it will always be true.
There will always be criminals, there will always be terrorists, whether they are in your Church, whether they are across the ocean, there are people who are angry, they are disenfranchised, they are violent and they just want to damage something that they want. change something even in a negative way because that's what they feel, it's the only thing they have left, they are criminals, right, they are people we should not feel sorry for, but if we ever want to stop it, we must understand it and where. those things come from where the impulses come from in the first place, but basically everyone was fine, how can we stop this?
Because no one wants to feel unsafe, no one wants to feel like the building is going to collapse, the next time you walk into it, etc. everyone just went, I don't care who stops him, and they said this to Dick Cheney, which is a historic mistake, but because Dick Cheney knows how the government works, he was the person in that White House who was in the best position. position 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 weren't 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 split and then there was nothing we couldn't do anymore and you were there why was this happening this was this no, I was, I wasn't again this is 2001 I was I was 18 I was working in the base had passed by the building but that was it this is all in retrospect this is a biography this is documented history but this is not you know the gospel of Edward Snowden I don't know true this is public record this is Ken What we all know what we have, the reason I bring this up is this is a teachable moment because there are so many people right now in the Trump administration saying this guy has too much power, he's abusing it against immigrants, he's abusing he. against the national components, he is doing everything he can to try to hurt his political rivals in the next election, all of this and you know, we can address it later if you want in detail, but the bottom line is that they are going to say that this is a guy in the White House is elbowing, right, he doesn't really care, he wants to hurt people as long as he can convince Americans that those are the bad guys, right, that's the enemy, doesn't matter If they are far away, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if they are close at home, who he is against, he is going to do harm and the dark thing is that this is actually the reason why he was chosen in times of fear where the world begins to fall apart and this happens in country after country of Thornton, this is why you have Vladimir Putin in Russia, who's been there for 20 years, he's the right president, basically for 20 years. Think about that, you know he got caught in the middle because he had to get around the fact that presidents can onlyserve a certain number of consecutive terms, so a prime minister went down and then he came back as president, but think about how you get that kind of political longevity and it's because if you know anything about Russian history, which you do, not even I I know a lot about that in the 90s after the collapse. of the Soviet Union, we are an extraordinarily dark time if you look at Russian cinema, everything they had or the gangster movies, all they had was the disintegration of society, how things are dark and broken, no one trusts each other , pensions were no longer paid.
Security no longer exists as if there was nothing to buy there is nothing to do there is no job no one had a future and that is why they left if there is someone who can get us out of this if there is someone who can fix this find us an enemy and defeat us that enemy to restore prosperity we will put them in power we see it happening in Turkey with Iran true, we have seen it happen successively with bad governments even in Western democracies we see it happening sadly in places like Poland and Hungary, one can even argue it is happening in the United Kingdom and now there are many people arguing that this is exactly what we are seeing with Donald Trump's White House in the United States and this is the lesson we did not learn from 2001 is when we become Fearful, we become vulnerable to anyone who promise that you will make things better, even if you don't have the ability to make things better, even if you actively will.
Things will get worse even if they make things better for them and their friends by taking it away from you, but if they tell you they will make things better and you believe them a scary moment that usually leads to unfortunate results, sorry, let me leave it. I'll give you the word back because we digressed a lot, no, it's okay. I want to go back to the initial question, so you're working for the NSA, when do you realize there's a big problem and when do you feel this? responsibility to inform the American people about this issue, for example, when you contact these journalists and what was the thought process on this, for example, what steps did you take once you realized that this violated the Constitution and that even with the Patriot Act laws in the Patriot Act two things had changed so radically that you knew this was wrong and that you had to do something about it, you felt a responsibility to speak well, so since we gave so much historical preamble, let me give you The Cliff Notes version is fine to help us get there, so after 9/11 I'm a little lost.
I'm doing my technical stuff, but I really feel like it doesn't matter anymore, like I'm making more money. increasingly accomplished, but the world is on fire, right? If you remember, there was a crazy atmosphere of patriotism in the country because we were all trying to come together to get through it, remember like people were taping Dixie cups to the top of every chain link fence? on every overpass it was like being together, you know, never forget, mm-hmm, united, we put flags on every car exactly and you know I was a young man who is not particularly right-wing politically and I come from a federal family with a background military, all that.
And that means I'm very vulnerable to this kind of thing. I see it on the news and Bush and all his kind of cronies are going to look, it's Al Qaeda, it's terrorism, a terrorist organization, they have all these international connections, there's Iraq, you know, dictators, weapons. of mass destruction, are holding the world to ransom. You've got Colin Powell at the UN hanging little vials of fake anthrax, so I felt an obligation to do my part and that's why I volunteered to join the army, yeah you probably can. I don't know from looking at myself, 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 called the 18 X Ray program where they take you outside. on the street and they actually give you the opportunity to become a Special Forces soldier so you train harder and in the special platoons you go further and I ended up breaking my legs basically so I was discharged from your legs , yeah, it was basically what it was when it was shin splints that I was too dumb to shake off, so I kept marching on hold. For starters, I'm a pretty light guy. I had a 24 inch waist when I joined the military.
The girls are jealous in my way, yes. I think it weighed about one hundred and twenty-eight pounds. I was in really good shape, you know, in training camp because I came up so fast because it was a, you know, all I could do was win, but it was too much. my body because it wasn't as active and then when you keep running with a stress injury and you run with weight with backpacks and things like that, you run like boots and then you do exercises and The army is like a whole chapter in the book. You are right about your battle buddy because you are never allowed to be alone.
I was going to have someone watching you. They thought it was funny to make me the smallest guy in the platoon that the drill sergeants made. with the biggest guy in the pack it was like an amateur bodybuilder like, you know, 230 260 something like that, he's a big guy and you know he would do it, uh, when we were in the woods doing these marches and stuff like that. to practice, but he charges like the fireman and stuff, he throws me around his neck, you know, I'm like a towel, he just jumps down like it's nothing and then I have to put it on top of him and I'm just like, oh God . die and it was it was strangely fun I enjoyed it but it wasn't good for my body so in a land navigation move I get off a log because I was at the point and on the other side of the log because it's the forest in Georgia I'm on Sand Hill I see a snake and in my memory you know it's like time slows down because North Carolina you know where I grew up you think all snakes are poisonous I'm sorry there's a problem we know we're good it's completely fine no we're fine just something happened on the screen.
I wanted to make sure I was okay, no that's just joining the chat, that's what I was worried about. I opened here, yeah, so anyway I try to take a much longer step in the air I land badly and it's just one leg it's like fire I'm limping I'm limping and whipping but you know, everyone says don't go to the call for sick because you go on sick call and lose your spot you'll end up being general infantry, our regular infantry, so I come back, I just tough it out. The next morning I set up my rack, when I get off the rack, which is the top bunk, on the right, I jump down on my legs.
I just give up under me and try to get up and I just can't get up so I got a sick call and I ended up going to the hospital and they ended up getting me and an x-ray and they did an x-ray too. my battle buddy because I have to go, there was someone else and he has a broken hip and they had to take him to surgery and it's in the book that there are a lot more details about it, it was a dramatic moment, but for me they just said: "He had fractures bilateral tibials to the legs.
They said I had cobwebs and the next phase of the training was jump school right where you have to jump out of a plane and the doctor, you know, I was like a son if you jump on those legs. they are going to become into powder and he says, "I can stop you," you know, we can put you on for about six months, don't use them and then you can go through the whole cycle again, start from scratch, but you will lose your slot in the special forces channel because of the way these things are programmed and all that and then you will basically be reassigned to the needs of the army or which probably meant I would go back to IT, which is what I joined the army to escape or you can go out to this special type discharge that is called administrative discharge, normally you have honorable discharge, dishonorable discharge, things like that, this is something for people who have been in prison, I think, less than six months, where it is like reflecting on a marriage is as if it had never happened. happened, that is, if you never joined and at that moment I said, well, you know, that's very nice of them to do that and I accepted it, you know, they don't agree with me to sit, call or I'm sorry, the nursing where are you.
You're in medical platoon and you don't do anything for, I think, a month and then they let you out once all the paperwork is done, but in retrospect I realized that if you go on administrative leave it relieves the military of responsibility for your injuries. So actually what I thought was kind was that, you know, if I had leg problems in the future, they wouldn't have to cover it or health insurance for any of those things, anyway, it was kind of funny, but anyway I get out of the military and here I am on crutches for a long time and just trying to figure out what's next in life because I had gotten a basic security clearance just by signing up for the military process.
I applied for a security clearance. guard position at the University of Maryland because it said you had to get a top secret clearance which was a higher clearance than what I had at the time and I went well, that sounds good because I knew that if I combined my IT skills which now suddenly Much more relevant again to my future with the top secret security clearance because of the way it works, if you have a top secret security clearance and tech skills, you get paid a ridiculous amount of money to do very little work, like that I thought, "Okay." Well, you know, I can basically make twice what I would in the private sector working for the government at this level at this stage because what we talked about earlier about 9/11 and how it changed the intelligence community, they didn't care anymore.
I graduated from college and got the GED just by walking in and taking a test, so for government purposes it was the same as if I were a high school graduate, so now all of a sudden it was like These doors were now open at these University of Maryland facilities. It turned out to be an NSA facility, it was called Castle, the center for advanced language studies at the University of Maryland College Park and all I was was literally a security guy walking around with a walkie-talkie making sure no one would enter by force. night manning the electronic alarm system and things like that, but once I had my foot in the door I was able to start climbing the ladder step by step and I applied or went to a job fair actually that was only for people who had clearances security and I ended up going to the table at one of the technical companies, it was a small subcontractor that no one had heard of and they said, you know, we have tons of positions for someone like you, are you comfortable working at night?
And I said, yes, you. I know I wake up in the middle of the day anyway, that's fine for me, and I suddenly went from working for the NSA to a university in a weird way where it's like the NSA has the clearance but I'm a former employee of Maryland State at the university and this is the government guy, it's all these strange tricks and boondoggles about how people are employed there now all of a sudden I'm working at CIA headquarters right in the place where all the movies show you jump over the marble seal and everything like that I'm the king of the castle right I'm there in the middle of the night when there's no one else there the lights are on motion sensors it's the creepiest thing in the world there's like flags on the wall that are like Waving gently in the air conditioning like ghosts, the hallway lights up when you walk next to them 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 2:00 sharp. in the morning at the CIA and it's like not seeing a soul on the other side of the building, then coming back and this kind of thing was the end of me because they said, look, it's the night shift, nothing that bad is going to happen um but I was in a very high-level technical team that was basically in charge of systems administration for everyone in the Washington metropolitan area, so each server basically at the CIA is a computer system that, like the data, is stored in the reports , it's stored in that traffic it moves in all of these things, all of a sudden, this is around 2005, I think I'm in charge and it's just me and another guy on the graveyard shift and if you're interested in the book, there's a lot details about this, but I get a little bit of being scouted from this position because they realize that I actually know a lot about technology, they expected me to basically make sure the building doesn't burn down.
All of these systems don't go down overnight and then never work again, but they work fine. Are you willing to go overseas and to a young person of that age who actually says, hey, that sounds kind of exciting, you know, who doesn't want to go work overseas for the CIA and there are a lot of people listening to the podcast who say, Oh? I don't, wait, the bad guys at the CIA, right, yes, exactly, they say: what are you going to go overthrow a government somewhere? But you have to understand that I'm still a true believer that 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 in the world.
I had no skepticism, it's really what I'm trying to establish here, so I sign up and go through this. special training school like the one people hear about in the movies about the farm at Camp Peary in Virginia. They send me that it is actually a much more secret facility called Hill that is in Warrenton Virginia and this has been covered several times and in open source media. but I think this is one of the few extensive discussions in a book about what happens there on a 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?
TRUE? I think I'm my The formal title for the embassy is like something super like diplomatic attachΓ© and what I am is a forward deployed technician, they send you to this school to become some kind of MacGyver, right, yeah, you can handle all the computers , but it can also handle the connections for the Embassy's power systems, the actual electrical connections, it can handle the HVAC systems, it can handle locks, alarms and security systems, basically anything that has a power button at the Embassy Make it safe, now you are responsible. and I traveled from Geneva to other countries in Europe for some assignments and it was like it was an exciting time.
In fact, I still enjoyed it, but it was here that I started to work smart and started to have doubts and the story has been told many times. I won't go into details here, but the CIA mainly does it and it's not the only thing it does, which is called human intelligence. There are now many different types of intelligence for which the intelligence community is responsible. The main ones are human intelligence and signals. Intelligence: You want to think about signals intelligence like listening lines, computer hacking, all these kinds of things that provide electronic information, anything that is a digital or analog signal that can be intercepted and then converted into human information.
Intelligence It's, you know, all that funny stuff that we've heard from the IC for decades and decades, which is where they try to convert people, they basically say, look, we'll give you money if you sell your country, they don't, it's not even your country many times it is a similar organization, these guys could be working for a telecommunications provider and they want to sell customer records because they worked at a bank, which is what I saw and we wanted records of the bank's customers, so he wanted a guy inside, but that's how it works anyway and what I saw was that they were much more aggressive on the lower risks than was reasonable or responsible, they were totally willing to destroy someone's life just on the off chance that get some information. that wouldn't even be tremendously valuable and then you know ethically.
That seemed a little strange to me, but I let it go because what I have learned throughout my life, although it has been brief, you know, is that skepticism is something that needs to be developed over time it is a skill something that needs to be practiced or you can think of it as something you developed through exposure. I kind of like radiation poisoning, but in a positive way it's when you start to notice inconsistencies or hypocrisy that Ward is lying and you realize it and you know that you give someone the benefit of the doubt or you trust them or you believe which is fine, but then over time you see that it is not an isolated case, it is a pattern of behavior and over time that exposure to inconsistency accumulates and accumulates and accumulates until it is something that can no longer be ignored now , after the CIA, I went to the NSA in Japan, where I was working there in Tokyo and then a couple of years later, I went to the CIA again.
I was working as a private employee for Dell, but I was the senior technical officer on Dell's sales account, the CIA, you know the people, these big companies have accounts for the CIA, 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 from the heads of these huge divisions of the CIA. I'm sitting across from your chief technology officer for the entire agency or the smart boss, your chief information officer for the entire CIA, and these guys. Let's look, here's a problem, this is what we want to do and it's my job to present you with a correct system and I've partnered with this vendor and it's all about just knowing how much money we can get out of the government. right, that's the goal and we will build them, what we were launching was a private cloud system, right, everyone knows about cloud computing, now it's like why your Gmail account is available everywhere you go, That's why Facebook has this massive sign-up system for everyone everywhere.
The government wanted to have these types of capabilities so that Dell would end up being defeated by the Amazon people. Well, you know, some people aren't familiar with this, a lot of them are, but Amazon runs a secret cloud system for the government. I don't remember what they have. I renamed it now, but this is just that there is a massive industry-government connection in the classified space that keeps getting deeper, deeper and deeper, but at this point I already had doubts because of what I had seen on Japan about the 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 struggle with, not just in our country but around the world. every day right there they got a job, they got a family, they got bills they're just trying to get by and they know some of the things they're doing aren't good, they know some of the things they're doing are actively wrong, but they know what happens to people who put a dent in the ship.
Ultimately I changed my mind and when I went to Hawaii, which was the last position in my career in the intelligence community, due to an accident of history, I was here. He wasn't supposed to be in this position at all. I was supposed to be in a group called the National Threat Operations Center and talk, but because of the way hiring works, and again this is covered in the book, I ended up being reassigned to this rinky little- shit office of the one no one has ever heard of in the light is called the Information Exchange Office and I'm replacing this veteran who's about to retire, a really really nice guy, but he spent most of his days just reading novels doing nothing and letting people Be happy with the fact that they are letting people forget that his office existed because he was the only one in it.
There is a manager who is above him, but he is actually above a larger group and he just looks at it as some kind of favor, so now. I came in and now I'm the only employee in the clearinghouse, but I'm not close enough to retirement to agree to do nothing at all, so I get to work and come up with this idea for a new system called heartbeat of the heartbeat and what the heartbeat is going to do is connect to basically all the information repositories of the intelligence community both at the NSA and across the boundaries of the Net that normally can't be crossed, because I've worked so hard at the CIA as at the NSA I knew the network well enough on both sides that normal NSA workers would never have seen because you have to be on one or the other.
In fact, you could connect them together. You could build bridges across this kind of network space and then draw all of these or records into a new kind of system that was supposed to look at your digital ID, basically your kind of ID card that says "this is who I am ". I work for this agency. I work in this office. These are my tasks. These are my group affiliations and because of that the system could eventually add records that were relevant to your work and that were related to you and then you could provide them and basically you could access this site, it would be an update to what I used to call reading dashboards that were created manually there we go, look, you work in network defense, right, these are all the things that are happening in a network defense that you work in.
I don't know economic acquisitions in Guatemala, do you know if this is what is happening. I'm there for you, but in my free time I helped the team sitting next to me, which was a systems administration team for Windows networks because I had been a Microsoft certified systems engineer, which basically means I knew how to take care of the Windows networks. and this was all those guys did and they always had too much work, too much work and I basically didn't have any work that I needed to do because all I was supposed to do was share information, which wasn't something that was particularly in demand because most people already knew what they wanted, what they needed, so basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck unless I wanted to be ambitious, so I did some side jobs for these other guys and one of they were running. what used to be called dirty word searches now dirty word searches are let me let me flag this again because I know we're hard to track everything the NSA does is largely classified everything the CIA does is largely classified If I made plans to have lunch with other people in my office, it was classified, that was the policy, it's silly, this classification problem is one of the central flaws of the government right now, this is why we don't understand what they are doing this.
That's why they can get along badly, that's why they can get away with breaking the law or violating our rights for so long, you know, five years, ten years, fifteen, fifty years before they see, before we see what they were doing, and this is why. Routine classification is correct, but every computer system has a limit on the level of classified information that is supposed to be stored in it and we have all these complicated systems for keywords and warnings that establish a system of what is called compartmentalization and this It's the idea when you work at the CIA, when you work at the NSA, you're not supposed to know what's going on in the next office because you don't need to know that movie thing again and the reason why.
The thing about this is that they don't want one person to be able to go and know everything that Ryan tells everyone. They don't want anyone to know too much, especially when they're doing a lot of bad things, because then there's a risk that you'll realize that they're doing so many bad things that it's past the point that we can justify it and they might develop some kind of ideological objection to it. in the clearinghouse and, in fact, in basically every part of my previous career. access to everything, I had what was called a special warning on my accesses called protec, which means privileged access, what this means, you're kind of a super user, you know most people have all these controls and the type of information They can access it, but I'm in charge of the system, right, people who need information have to get it from somewhere they don't know, not even the director of the CIA, right, he says, I need to know everything about this, Well, he doesn't know where to get it. just a manager, someone has to be able to cross these thresholds and get those things, that guy was me, so the dirty word searches were these kind of automated queries that I set up to go through the entire network and look at all the different levels. of classification and compartmentalization and exceptionally controlled information.
You could consider it a top secret in these special compartments right where you're not even supposed to know what these compartments are, you just know the keyword unless you work. in them unless you have access to them unless you read them one day. I get a dirty word search result for a program I've never heard of called stellar wind. I came back because the little caveat that they're called warning handling, which is like you know, you can think of Burn After Reading or just for your eyes, but this one is called STL W, which stands for stellar wind, unless you know what wind is stellar, you don't know how to handle it, all I knew is it wasn't supposed to be in my system, you know, this is a little unusual and it turned out that this document was put in the system because one of the employees who had worked on this program Years before I 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 that is part of the inspector general's report, which is when the government is investigating itself about the operations and activities of this program, well, this was the national mass surveillance program that was no longer supposed to really be aoperation, as it had been revealed in a major scandal in December 2005 in the New York Times by journalist James Risin and me.
I'm not going to name him because I don't want to misunderstand him. Another journalist. You can look at the signature now if you want to see his involvement, but there's a lot of history here too, but what they found was. of course, the Bush White House had put together a warrantless wiretapping program, if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal that was affecting everyone in the United States. Well, the Bush White House really found itself in a difficult position because of this scandal, they would have lost the election because of this. scandal because the New York Times actually had this story in October 2004, which was the election year, they were ready to move on, but at this specific request from the White House talking to the New York Times burger editor, Saul's and Bill Keller. that the executive editor of the New York Times, the New York Times said we wouldn't publish the story because the president just said that if you publish this story a month before the election, that's a very tight margin, if you remember, you'll have blood on your hands and it was so close to 2001 that the New York Times simply said: "you know what good Americans don't need to know that the sushi guy is a big rapist, they don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think." It means that if the government says it's okay and it's a secret, you shouldn't know, that's okay now.
December 2005, why did that change? Why did the New York Times suddenly get this story right? It's because James Rison, the reporter who found this story. had written a book and was about to publish this book and the New York Times was about to find itself in the very awkward position of having to explain why they didn't publish this story and how their own journalists got hold of it and published it that way. . I finally did it, but it was too late. Bush had been reelected and was now sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights, so Congress, the Bush White House was very effective and, as I said before, I told a select few members of Congress that this program existed and They were told that this program existed in ways that they would not object to, but they were held guilty for hiding the existence of the program from the American people and that is why someone like Nancy Pelosi, who I don't exactly think would be George's buddy-buddy Bush, she was completely fine in defending this kind of program, in fact, and you know later, she said, well, she had objections to the program which she wrote in a letter to the White House, but she never showed us the letter, she she continued well, she was classified correctly and this is not to criticize her individually, it's just that she is a great example here, an anonymous example, everyone knows how this process works.
The White House will implicate certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity and so on, when the White House gets in trouble for it, Congress has to cover for the White House and what happened was Congress passed a law emergency in 2007 called the Protect America Now Act, which should have been our first indication. This is a very bad thing because they never named a law like that unless it was something terrible and what Lee did was he retroactively immunized all the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day by turning over their records to the government, which they were not allowed to do simply based on a letter from the president saying please do this and these companies went after us now that we have been discovered, now that we have been shown to be breaking or now that these journalists have shown that we have 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 that people you can't sue us for doing this and that's why we get the Patek tamerica Act which remains an emergency, yes this is all public history; yeah, you can look this up on Wikipedia, you know, and then they say it's an emergency law we have to pass it 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 will have some special level of oversight and this kind of thing eventually, but for now we just have to make sure that people are safe again, they are afraid, they say if we don't have this program, the terrorist attacks will continue, you know, the People will die, blood on your hands, blood on your hands, clumsy hands, think about the Protect America's Children Act.
The companies are freed, the Bush White House is freed, Congress is freed, which then shared criminal guilt for authorizing or rather letting these things happen without stopping them, then approves in 2008 the Amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008. This is called FAA 5 Minute Act of 2008 and instead of stopping all the illegal and unconstitutional type activities that the intelligence agency was doing, they continued it in different ways by just creating some legal centers so they could jump in now, this is Don't want to say that you know that these things are not useful at all, not that they are not useful at all, but it is important to understand that when the government's response to any scandal (this applies to any country) is to not do the person's activities . whoever is caught breaking the law follows the law but instead of making the activities of the person breaking the law legal, they make the law comply with what the agencies want to do instead of making the agencies comply with the law. law, that is a problem and that is What happened here now?
The powers of the intelligence community actually grew in response to this scandal in 2008 because Congress was in a bind and they just wanted to move on and get it over with. There were objections. There were people who knew this was a bad idea, but I didn't convey now what the public got out of this because one part of these laws was a requirement that the Inspector General of all these different elements of the intelligence community and the Director of National Intelligence will present a report saying this is what happened under that warrantless wiretapping program this is how it complied with the law or how it did not comply with the law and basically look back at how this program was formed, what it did, what were the impacts and effects and that was supposed to be some kind of Truth and the Council of Reconciliation right now why am I talking about all this ancient history?
Well, I'm sitting here in 2012 with a classified Inspector General report, a draft NSA report that names names that Dick Cheney says, David Addington says, this is Nancy Pelosi who says all these people who are involved in the program the tick-tock of how it happens says the director of the NSA that guy who is evacuating the building at the beginning of our podcast here the president of the United States asked that guy He says if he would continue with this program after the White House and the Department of Justice told him that these programs were not legal, that they were not constitutional and the president said: would you continue this program only with my permission, knowing that it is risky to know? which is illegal and he said yes sir I will do it if you think that's what's necessary to keep the country safe and in that moment I realize these guys don't care about the law, these guys don't care the Constitution, these guys don't care they care about the American people they care about the continuity of government they care about state law and this is something that people have lost we hear this phrase over and over again national security national security security national and we must interpret that in the sense of public security, but national security is something very different from public security.
National security is something 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 cover up the fact that we were raising a new type of secret police throughout the country and what does it mean when again in a democracy in the United States the public is not a partner of the government the public no longer has the government leash but are we subject to the government? They are subordinate to the government and we are not even allowed to know what happened. No, not in the book do I mention the fact that I had access to the unclassified version of this report in Japan and what is interesting is the unclassified version of a report. and we've all seen this today with things like the Muller report and all the intelligence reports that have happened in recent years when the government provides a classified report to the public it's usually the same document the unclassified version the classified version are the same , only the unclassified version has things crossed out or redacted that say, "Oh, you can't know this sentence for this paragraph or this page or whatever, the document that had been given to the public about the wiretapping program without court order was completely different." document was a document tailored to deceive and mislead Congress and the public of the United States and it was effective in doing so and in 2012 what I realized was that this is what real world conspiracies look like, right? be smoking men behind closed doors, right?
They are lawyers and politicians, they are ordinary people, from the work level to the management level, those who go, if we do not explain this in a certain way, we are all going to lose our jobs or the other way around. . We're going to get something out of this if we all work together. Civilization is the history of conspiracy. What is civilization? But a conspiracy so we can all do better by working together. But it's this kind of thing that I think too. We often forget it because it is so boring. I want all of your listeners to go to the Washington Post because this document that I discovered and 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 see the actual document that I saw, which was not redacted. I had no blacked out pages in mine and what I think it shows is that some of the highest officials in the United States, elected and unelected, worked together to actively undermine the rights of the American people to grant themselves expanded powers now in their defense they said that they were seeking these powers for a good, just and noble cause, true, they say they were trying to keep us safe, but that's what they always say, that's what every government does. says that's no different than what the Chinese government or the Russian government says and the question is if they're really keeping us safe, why don't they just tell us?
Why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress? Because? They put it up for a vote because if they were and they could convince us that they were, they would win the vote and particularly, we all know that the Patriot Act passed the worst laws in modern history, why didn't we do it? Get a vote and I think if you read the report we'll make the answer clear so sorry Joe I went on with several no's it's amazing it's an act don't apologize at all it's completely fascinating that the continuation of this policy . It came down to one man and the president having this discussion which is very well, it's a lot, it's a lot more, a lot more, but literally, the president at the center, yes, at the center, in every expression of executive power, right and by executive.
We're talking about the White House here, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, these guys exist as part of the executive branch of government in a real way, they work for the White House, now there are laws, regulations and policies that are supposed to say that they are supposed to do this and they are supposed to say that they are not supposed to do that, but when you look at the federal regulations, when you look at the policies as a government employee, when you violate these policies, The worst thing that happens for you is that you lose your job because there is no criminal sanction for violating these laws and therefore it is very easy for the people who exist in these structures, particularly the higher levels of these structures, look, we have a certain set of legal authorities and those are defined very broadly to give us leeway to do what we think is appropriate and proper and we just now take that as inappropriate and fair from the perspective of any given individual, Ryan, any president now crosses that with what's good for them politically and that's where problems are starting to arise now with the security measures that are supposed to protect us from this in the United States.
In a democracy broadly speaking, 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, prerogatives and powers, like what they are doing. both in our name and in what they do. are doing against us and since they are transparent to us, we, the people, can monitor theiractivities, we can go and disagree with this, we can protest, we can't campaign against it and write, we can try to become president, do whatever they want. We are public officials and we are private citizens, they are not supposed to know anything about us, because relatively speaking we have no power and they have all the power, so they have to be under the strictest restrictions that we need to be in order to be in the freest circumstances. and yet the rise of the state secrets doctrine corrected this whole classification system that goes back to the last century, in the middle of the last century, I think that's when it really started to be tested in the courts and I think you know more about This in many cases I do when you start talking about what happened in the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, it is a kind of old dirty work in the 20th century: they abused their powers repeatedly and continuously, they caused active damage to domestic politics in In the United States, the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and trying to make Martin Luther King commit suicide before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
In fact, after MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech, two days later, the FBI ranked him as the or I think was the biggest national security threat to the United States, and yet this is the FBI, this It's the group that everyone is applauding today saying all these wonderful patriots and heroes. Now I'm not saying everyone, the FBI is bad. I'm not saying that anyone, the CIA and the NSA, are bad. I'm saying that you don't become a patriot based on where you work. Patriotism is not about loyalty to the government. Patriotism, in fact, is not about loyalty to anything.
Patriotism is a constant effort to do good for your country, right, it's not about the government, it's not about the state and that's okay, we'll talk about loyalty later because you know, I think one of the big criticisms in against me it should be talked about. It's um, they're going to look, this guy is disloyal, he broke an oath, he did whatever. loyalty loyalty is a good thing when it is in the service of something good, but it is only good when it is in the service of something good if you are loyal to a bad person if you are loyal to a bad program if you are loyal to a bad government that loyalty is actively harmful and I think that's overlooked, but yeah, when you go back to this whole thing where it came from, why it happened how it could come from just this small group and then slowly they were able to poison by implication by complicity by bringing them into the conspiracy and then have them say nothing about it to a larger and larger group of people and then again.
You have enough people involved in this, it's much easier to convince other people that it's legit because they can go see. We have 30 people who know about this and none of them have objected. Why are you going to object to all this? from this it follows from that original sin which is in a democracy to create a system of government that is in fact a secret government a body of secret laws a body of secret policies that is far beyond what legitimate government secrets could be this It's not saying the government hasn't done it. There can't be any secrecy if the government wants to investigate someone without them responding well, we're talking about traditional law enforcement, sure you won't tell this gangster, hey, you know, We are going to start investigating you, we, the public, are not.
We don't need to know the names of all the terrorist suspects in the world, but we do need to know. Again, the powers and programs, the policies that a government is asserting, at least in its broad outlines, because otherwise, how can we control it? How do we know if the government is a government? The authorities that we're supposed to give you if you don't I don't know what they're doing, so this is the main thing and really the story behind the permanent registration title is look Joe, when you were a kid, you know, when I was a Kid, when you were a teenager, being irritating is the worst thing you've ever said, you know?
Did you say something you weren't proud of? Did you do something you weren't proud of? something that today in the land of Twitter you would get in trouble for Sure, and that's one of the horrible things about kids growing up today is that they have all this stuff on social media forever and they can be judged horribly for something what they did when they were 13 years old. It is exactly our worst mistakes, our deepest shames. They were forgotten, true, they were lost, they were ephemeral, even the things they caught us by were known for a while, perhaps they are still remembered by the people closest to us, whether we like them or not, but they were people connected to us.
Now we are forced to live truly naked before power, whether we are talking about Facebook, whether we are talking about Google, whether we are talking about the government of any country, they know everything about us or a lot about us, better said, and We know very little about them and cannot know more. Everything we do now lasts forever, not because we want to remember but because we cannot forget. Just carrying a phone in your pocket is enough for your movements to be memorialized because every cell tower you pass keeps a record of it and 18t keeps those records going back to 2008 under a program called Hemisphere.
If you search Hemisphere and AT&T, you'll get a story in The Daily Beast about it. keeps your phone records going back to 1983, if any year listeners were born after 1983, were they born after me or could it be 1987, excuse me, 1987 if they were born after 1987 and are 18 years old, are you a customer or do your calls cross the 18 day network? ATMs, it has all the phone calls that they made, rather than the record that happened, not necessarily the content of the phone call, um, so I mean, let me change this for you, Joe, because I feel like I just got given a speech. when you look at these things, when you look at what's happening with the government, when you look at what's happening with the Trump White House, the Obama White House, the Bush White House, you can see this trend 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 today you go to all the restaurants and you see people looking at their phones, you know you get on a bus, you get on the subway, you know you see someone sitting next to you in traffic.
I see people looking at phones, these devices are connected all the time now people are getting Alexa right now, people have Google, you know, Siri on their phones that are in their house, they always have these microphones connected, where do you think this? clues and what it is that gives you a kind of trust in the system faith in the system, for example, how to just, just, so we can start a conversation here, what surprises you about this, well, it's completely strange and it's Again, this is something that is unprecedented. We don't have a long human history of being completely connected through technology.
This is something we are navigating right now for the first time and is probably the most powerful thing the human race has ever seen in terms of information distribution. There is nothing. that's even close to that in all of human history and we're figuring it out as we go and what you laid out is that not only are we figuring it out as we go but to cover their asses these cell phone companies in cahoots with The government has made it legal for them to collect all of your phone calls, all of your text messages, all of your emails and store them somewhere so that Lee is retroactive if he ever says something they don't like or does something they don't like.
Like they could come back and 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 through technology is 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 that protect us from attacks see if they really are attacked protecting us from these attacks that's great, but there is no provision in the Constitution that allows any of this and this is where it gets really disturbing because they are making up the rules as it goes on and they are making up these rules the way you describe them.
This is step by step. This has happened to protect their asses and avoid being implicated in what has been a violation of our rights and privacy. the Fourth Amendment, yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things that everyone needs to understand when you look at these things and the reason why you know, we talked about earlier when I got this information and why I didn't put it on the Internet. and people criticize me for this, they say I didn't share enough information because the journalists are watching, they have a big file and they haven't published everything in it and I told them not to publish everything, why did you do that?
Why did you do that? Because, again, I return to legitimate secrets and illegitimate secrets. A little spying from my perspective. You know a career as a spy is fine, okay, if you've hacked into a terrorist's phone and are getting information about that useful deal. Yes, if you're spying on a Russian general in charge of a rocket division, you know, it's useful, but there are lines and degrees where it's not useful. The examples I just gave you are aimed at this is where you are. spying on an individual, there is no named person who is being monitored for a specific reason that is related, hopefully, to a warrant, people write well even for foreign intelligence and some hints that you don't strictly need a warrant, although I think they should have warrants for everyone. of these investigations because they set up a court precisely for this reason called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, right, yeah, and there isn't a judge in the world who wouldn't seal an order saying, hey, spy on Abu Jihad here, and if you want to spy about another guy, Boris Badenov, from the rocket division, right, okay, they're going to continue with that, but then you look at these extreme cases and in the file that I provided to the journalists that mean stories that they have reached where they have spied.
The journalists are right, they have spied on human rights groups and these kinds of things that I think people overlook. I'm going to show some slides here, so forgive me if this gets weird and I put in the wrong ones, but since I introduced this Foreign Intelligence. The Surveillance Court that the government says authorized these programs 15 different times was overturned by the first open courts to examine the program. These are the federal courts that said no, actually these programs are illegal. They are probably unconstitutional when you start to analyze the facts. You see that even in the context of the very lax restrictions and laws that apply to the NSA and surveillance, they say that they violated their own laws, you know, two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six times in a single year and then you asked about that which motivates I like why I ran, we had been trying as a country before I ran to prove the existence of these programs legally because this is our last kind of recourse in our system, right, we have the executive, we have the legislature.
We did the right thing, so Congress makes the laws, the executives are supposed to implement them, the courts are supposed to act as arbiters, the executive had broken the laws, Congress was turning a blind eye to the laws and the courts, and this was just a few months before I showed up. If it goes well, it seems like the ACLU and Amnesty International, like all these human rights groups and non-governmental organizations, had established that you know these programs are probably illegal, they probably exist, they're just classified, but the government responded with This argument that you just saw say that well, it's a state secret if they exist.
The plaintiffs have no concrete evidence that they exist and the government is saying they legally have no right to uncover government evidence. The right documents demand documents or demand a response from the government as to whether these things exist or not because the government is just going to give their standard what they called Glomar response, we can't confirm or deny that these things exist which leaves you out in the cold. cold, which leaves the courts out in the cold the courts go, look, the government could be breaking down 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 and the government says yes If we were doing this it would be legal and it would be necessary for national security or whatever, the court cannot presume to know national security better than the executive because the courts are not elected and this leads to this fundamentally broken system where it is okay if The only way to have courts review the legality of programs is to establish that the programs exist, but the programsThey are classified, so you can't establish that they exist unless you have evidence, but providing that evidence to courts, journalists, and anyone is a felony right that is punishable. for 10 years by count the Espionage Act and the government has accused every source of Public Interest journalism that has really made a significant difference in these types of cases since Daniel Ellsberg really going back to that under the same Espionage Act it is always the same law and This means that there is no distinction for the government between whether you have sold information to a foreign government for private benefit or whether you provide information only to journalists for the public interest and that is something fundamentally harmful, I think, when you look at the things that have arisen as a result of this, we are talking about the court rulings after 2013 that determined that what the government was doing was illegal.
You see the courts actually saying that elopements or air date elopements can actually be beneficial. Leakage is used in the government and this you know this is from a federal court these are not exactly my biggest supporters they are recognizing that although leakage implies damage it implies something that is broken it is actually useful it is a leak that lets in the light of the day in this context which is the only thing that allows the system to operate in a context where a year before I presented the NSA saying that this type of thing did not happen, we had posted this famous exchange that more than anything made me realize that 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, maybe I'm a superficial guy.
Whoever one of those senators I told you was who opposed this thing he was doing to Lassie barks. All those years, Ron Wyden took on the highest ranking spy in the United States, a 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 intelligence, he is testifying under oath. of Congress, but more generally, in front of the public, this is televised and Ron Wyden asked him a very specific question about a program that Ron Wyden knows exists because he has security clearance, he is on the Intelligence Committee and he knows that there are national mass. surveillance and this is how it works, this is how the top spy answers 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 some type of data on millions or hundreds? of millions of Americans, no sir, no, it's not like that, unintentionally, there are cases where without realizing it, maybe they could get paid, but not unintentionally, so that was a lie.
Wyden knew it was a lie. The clapper knew it was a lie. In fact, he admitted that it was a lie after I came forward, you know, three months later, but he said it was the least lying thing he could think of to say in the context of being in the dock there, but what does it mean for a democracy when you can lie under oath before Congress and Congress? The congressman even knows you're lying to them, but they're afraid to correct you and they expanded on how it was no surprise that Wyden asked them those questions twenty-four hours in advance and then wrote a letter asking clapper to make amends. his testimony right now not even in a press conference, but just to say that this was wrong so he could go through the legal process and show his fellow congressmen that there was a problem and they had to do it, but all of that told us was denied. everything was denied to us and here I am, sitting in the NSA next to my friends who I talked to about these programs, you know, I went to see this and they are laughing about it, you know, I'm laughing. in that and it's not like let's go oh ha ha ha he's getting away with it it's like what are you going to do these guys do you know they're liars that the system is built online that even a lot of people, a lot of experts?
Those who have studied this know that they are lies, but if you can't prove them. It's how do you get 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 what it is that makes you jump, so this is covered broadly. in the book because it took a long time.
I imagine that the people you know, yes, of course. Exactly people like to think that it's like a movie moment where I find this golden document like this stellar wind report and that's the closest thing to smoking gun there is, but look, if you find it, you can read it later , look at that and I like it. Imagine saying, "Oh, I'm going to go out on the courthouse steps and wave this thing around, burn my life to the ground, burn my family to the ground, never work again, go to jail for the rest of my life." . my life the question is what would it take you to light a match and burn your life for a long time the answer was nothing and I'm ashamed that it took me so long to get over that house because I was waiting for someone else to do it when I saw people like Ron Wyden in This, when I saw people like the court case that I showed before, where people were actively challenging these programs, right, journalists picked up on it and you know there are a lot of people who will be on what you know from YouTube comments or whatever, oh I knew this was happening, no you didn't, Bill Bimini, you had Bill Binney, he built, excuse me, Bill Binney, initially he was the one that came out and spoke. on this topic and yes, Bill Benny is part of, let's say, the group of early NSA whistleblowers that came with Thomas Drake Bill Benny Kirk Wiebe I believe in Edie Loomis and all these guys had their doors kicked in and you know they were harassed by the FBI Tom Drake, who was a top NSA executive, this is a guy who had a lot to lose, he was charged under the same law, the Espionage Act, and these guys were doing it previously during the Bush administration, some of them were talking to the journalists who, you know, maybe I'm not supposed to want to put them on the spot, maybe they deny it, maybe they don't leave it to them, but someone somewhere was informing this journalistic right that came to the New York Times about Bush. it was a warrantless wiretapping program and eventually journalists published this, people knew these capabilities existed, but yeah, then there's the person in the YouTube comments, so it's like, oh, we knew all about this , it's nothing new and the thing is you may know about some programs and not know about others you may have a suspicion you may know for sure that this is capable or there may be capability you may know that the government has done this in the past you may know that he's likely to do it again.
You can have all these clues, like the jewel case against the NSA that's run by the FF, which is about 18 years old, or it's about AT&T setting up secret rooms in their telecommunications facilities where they basically drag all the fibers for their national Internet communications and like telephone communications in a room designed specifically for the NSA and then they take it out into the open, but AT&T Nuys is the NSA, the NSA denies that these things happen or that they are done correctly, so this is the context. and you know, let's put it another way maybe you know it well maybe you're an academic researcher maybe your tech specialist maybe you're just someone who reads all the reports and you really know you can't prove it but you know this is happening but that's what happens in a democracy the distance between speculation and facts the distance between what you know and what you can prove to everyone 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 know is if someone can prove it, if you can prove it and if you don't have evidence, you can't prove it and of course when we talk about the above things, right? like this or more corporate media they have a thousand incentives not to get involved in these things they need access to the White House they need these officials to sit down with them and give them interviews that is the constant content they need that is the access they need they need to be taken into account seriously, they need to be admitted to informants, it is a codependent relationship, and yet the only way to make sure that people understand this in general terms is if we all work together, if we can collectively establish a body of evidence, a set of facts that is so large and so persuasive that it surpasses the natural and understandable resistance of these more corporatized media groups, it surpasses the political and partisan loyalties that all of these political factions have in the country.
They say, you know, he'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 proven, you know, in HD on video. you know, sign the order to do this or that because otherwise there's a chance my man won't get re-elected and that's the only way this kind of thing can happen and the sad thing is the opportunities we have to demonstrate this as the The moments in history where we prove something beyond a reasonable doubt are so few and so rare that they almost always come only from whistleblowers and I think that's one of the problems we have, particularly in the sense that the climate movement did seek to move forward.
Sorry, did it comfort you to know that Obama, when he ran for office and on his Hope and Change website, had provisions to protect whistleblowers and provisions to reward people? I mean, do you remember all that? I mean, was he eventually redacted or eventually removed from the website, yes, but that was a big part of his program or what he was running was that when people exposed illegal activities, he was going to protect those people, is that? Did it calm you down? Obama campaigned well also during his campaign he said he actively campaigned against warrantless wiretapping in the Bush administration because remember Bush was in the scandal at the height of this in 2007 you know the election is coming right after and he's going to bomb Assange, uh, you know, that's not who we are, not what we do, and yet, a hundred days after becoming president, he's now sitting in that chair instead of extinguishing these programs, he embraces them and expands them.
Why do you think that is more ingrained? I think that's actually again what we talked about. about before, the first thing they do every time a new president comes to the White House is they get their clearances right, they get all this material read to them during the campaign, they get clearance is not to get rid of that stuff, but when they find the president in this moment, They're the only people who can sign what are called covert action findings and things like that, which are basically, you know, the intelligence community wants to assassinate someone, they want to run this illegal program here, there or everywhere, and they can't do it. because their executive agencies without that high-level executive approval are fine, so they had to open their vest properly, they had to get these guys on their side and basically every president since Kennedy has been successful in what they call fearing where as soon as they come in, they walk you through, you read Horrible's litany and say, these are all the threats we face and let's face it, it's a dangerous world, it's not all made up nonsense, some of it is right where it's inflated.
It's not that it's completely false, but they make it seem more serious than it really is, but there are really bad people who are trying to do really bad things and you just went through one hell of an election because our electoral politics are so sick. and now, having dragged yourself through the fire, you're already thinking four years ahead, you know how can I stay in this seat and these guys are basically saying that if you don't do X, Y and Z, this will fall into your lap and The implication, which I don't think they actually say, but which all presidents know, is that these guys can undermine you to death if you have ISEE against you, they can block you, they can publish stories that will be problematic for you every time. day of your presidency and it's not that it's necessarily going to get you out of the White House, but it's a problem that as president you don't want, so in the most charitable interpretation of this, you have a new guy coming in.
The case of Obama, this is a pretty young guy who didn't focus on these kinds of national security foreign policy issues his entire previous career. He is more interested in domestic politics and always has been. Actually, that's one of the positive things I can say about Barack Obama. He's just trying. to make things better at home and now all of a sudden, look, you need to care about this country, you need to care about this group you've never heard of, you need to worry, you know this technology, you need to do all these things and The only reason why What can we tell you these?things and the only thing that divides America and the chasm are these terrible, terrible, terrible terrorist programs, which are actually wonderful things because they keep the darkness at bay, and here is the real problem that every president hears that and First of all , all the presidents you know have a lot of other things to do: they just nod and walk away.
I will deal with this later in my administration and this is one of the ironies when I run. As of 2013, this is now Barack Obama's second term as president. One of the responses they had to the mass surveillance of the scandal was: Yes, we think they went too far. This is after the initial, where they went. Nobody listens to your phone calls. You know, I just made a data right, nobody, nobody can have perfect privacy and also have perfect security, so we have to divide a line here between the Constitution and you know what the government wants to do, but they said that We were going to get to that.
We knew these programs were problematic, but if they had given us more time we would have fixed them, maybe that's true, it seems very convenient in retrospect that, in its entirety, the first time, well, it seems like what you would say if you got caught. but look, we're being the most generous of us here, the president receives information about real and legitimate threats and they scare the hell out of them, I'm sure and we can all imagine being there, right? For those who remember what the world was like after 9/11, fear is a powerful thing, but the kids who are giving that briefing are no longer afraid of it because they've been dealing with this for years.
This is the oldest thing they've ever had. given these briefings before you know, when we talk about people talk about the deep state, right, they talk about it like it's a conspiracy of lizard people, not that it's anything much simpler, the deep state is simply the government of career, it's the people who are in the same positions that survive and outlast presidents you're right you've seen republicans you've seen democrats they really don't care and they give the same report over and over again and they get good at it they know what They want to know what this person saying where the president is, they don't know who these people are, these people who were there before the president, they will be there after the president, so they give this very effective fear-inducing speech and then they continued with your questions what are really demands politely provided and anyone in that position who is not an expert in these things, who is not prepared for this type of exchange and who has to understand that he is a career politician, is completely used to the game horse trading Rango and I will 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 because it is classified, obviously it is the easy answer and Perhaps Barack Obama honestly wanted to address this issue later, but what we can say today is that, despite all the good that could have been done in that White House, this is an issue that the president went through. two full terms and it didn't solve the problem, but In fact, it made things worse, it seems like the president has a job, it is absolutely impossible and if you meet someone who has been in the job, like you know someone who is the boss of an intelligence agency for a long time and is very persuasive and has some legitimate credentials that show that he is very good at his job, but he tells her that this is important for national security.
We need to keep these things in their place. It doesn't seem like one person can run the country and keep tabs on everyone. The one program that each agency is implementing seems completely unrealistic and the job itself just doesn't seem like any one person can do it properly and when it comes to something like this mass surveillance state, you could see a president being persuaded by someone who comes close to him and says that's why we have to do this, yeah, I mean one of the things that I think is the underlying problem and everything that you just described as the president having too much power, right? and because he has 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 traveled or studied extensively how.
The exceptional thing about the American presidency is that most countries do not have a single individual with this level of power, it's really just the super states and that may be by design, maybe that's why they are super states, but when we look at the type 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 stems simply from the size of the government, as you said, you know the president is responsible for basically all of the executive branch. and the executive branch is basically every agency that doesn't really function and so how do you correct 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?
In general, you know, 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 kind of scary and prohibitive. , and then when you move to this idea that we have a president who has these extraordinary powers, it's okay because the government is so small, the federal government, especially, is seen as kind of a small, toothless, weak thing. pause for a second in Spain, pause for a second because my headphones are about to die and I'm going to switch to another pair.
These suckers are good for a couple of hours, but we're at two hours and 15 minutes here. We'll have a bit of a weird audio issue with the last half, but. Jamie Jamie, I'll take care of that. I wanted to talk about you, where you are now in your life and how you're in your grip because you've been in exile for how many years now it's been over six years, six, six years. 2013, yeah, I mean, I actually left May, so what's life like? I mean, are you constantly hiding? I mean, what are the problems at the beginning?
My level of operational security, as we would call it, was very high. I was worried. After they recognized me, I was worried that they would follow me. I was really worried that very bad things would happen to me because the government made it very clear that from their position I was the most wanted man in the world. The president of Bolivia literally had his plane shot down and they didn't let him leave. because he was trying to cross European airspace, not even the United States, they didn't let him leave until they confirmed he wasn't on board, so yeah, that made me a little nervous, but you can't live. like that forever and even though I was as careful as I could, I still lived quite happily because I was an indoor cat to begin with.
I have always been a technologist. I've always been pretty nerdy, so as long as I have a screen. an Internet connection I was quite happy, but in recent years my life has become more and more open, you know, now I speak openly, I live openly, I go out, I ride the Metro, I go to restaurants, as you know, how often I recognize him, so this is The funny thing is that they almost never recognize me. One of those things is that I don't do interviews in Russian because I don't want my face to be all over the news, which is good because it allows people to forget about my face and I can get on with my life, but it's one of those things It's rare that they recognize me a couple of times a year, even when I'm not wearing my glasses in a museum or a grocery store or something or just on the street. by someone who, I swear, like these people are, you may have read a story about them being super recognizers, people just have a great memory for faces, yeah, because I can say ooh, oh, wearing a hoodie and, like a jacket, you can have a scarf around it.
My face is like winter and it's like you can barely see my face and they come up to me and say, are you Snowden? and I'm like, wait, that's what he uses pretty awesome. I would say yes, it's nice. to meet you and yes, I have never had a negative interaction for being recognized, but for me none because I am a defender of privacy, I would prefer not to be recognized, like I don't want to be a celebrity, but the Another thing is that they will recognize me in computer stores and I think there's a mental association where people are like your brain when you scroll through faces that you recognize are passing as the nerdiest subset of people or something like that when I'm in a computer store because for some reason I get recognized much more frequently when there is some kind of technology like locusts hmm, so you live freely.
Did you have to learn Russian? Did you learn it? Yes, my Russian is still pretty bad. to speak with my great shame because all my life, all my work has as its main objective, true, true, no, you have talked about returning home, if you could get a fair trial, it is something feasible, a fair trial for someone like you , is that. so well is that yes, even that possible question, I mean, look, if we're being Frank III, I think your entire audience knows that the possibility of him getting a good shake in the Eastern District of Virginia, a couple of miles from CIA headquarters, it's probably pretty sparse because that's where they draw the jury pool from, but my objection here is in larger print.
What happens to me is less important. If I spend the rest of my life in prison, that is less important than what I do. In fact, I'm demanding that the government agree, which is only one thing, right, they say, "face the music, face the music," and I say, "cool," let's pick the song. The thing is the law that I have been charged under which all these whistleblowers have been charged under the owner 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 What I would be facing is your lawyer 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 the laws a government is violating human rights that these programs are immoral that they are 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, you know, to this whistleblower's argument by basically saying that we demand the court to prohibit this guy from saying the word complainant in court, he can't talk about what motivated him he can't talk about what was revealed why it was revealed what the impacts and effects were if he can't talk about whether the public benefited or was harmed because now it does not matter this could surprise many because for many of us we think that this is a jury trial, we believe that this is a fair trial, but the Espionage Act that the government uses against whistleblowers, That is to say, generally speaking, here the sources of journalism is quite unique in the legal system in the sense that it is what is called a strict liability crime a strict liability crime is what the government basically considers a crime worse than murder because if you murdered someone like you just didn't know how to hit Jamie with the microphone stand right now you would be able to go to court and say it was self defense right yeah you felt threatened you were in danger because of your life, even if you weren't right, even if you obviously weren't right, even if you were recorded, you could still argue.
That and the jury could fill you with nonsense and they could convict you, but if you were actually acting in self-defense, if the jury really believed you, they could take that into consideration when setting their verdict, right? so the jury cannot consider why you committed a crime, they can only consider whether you committed a crime, they cannot consider whether the murder was justified, they can only consider whether the murder took place and was funny. The important thing in this case is that the murder we are talking about tells the truth. The Espionage Act in all cases is a law that the government uses exclusively against people who told the truth like that, that is what it is about in the context of journalism. don't introduce 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, telling an important truth to the American people through a journalist is a crime . worse than assassination and I think most Americans would agree that this is fundamentally wrong from a defensive standpoint, so my whole discussion with the United States government from the beginning was, "I'll be back for a jury trial tomorrow, but you have to agree.” allow complainants to commit a crime of public interest, no matter if they are complainants or not, they simply argued that it is the jury that decides whether they are always complainants or not, whether they have to be able to consider the motivations of why someone did what they did. they did, the government says we refuse to allow that because thatIt puts the government on trial and we don't trust the jury to consider those questions.
Wow, so they've had these conversations, so this has been discussed. No, this is from Obama. administration there has been no contact since the Trump administration because the government basically when it got to this point left, we have no good arguments against this and we will never allow this to happen and again I just want to make it clear that this is not speculation. I'm not thinking this is actively happening in the Daniel Hale case right now? I hope you can see a graphic of this story, just the newspapers from two or three weeks ago said that the government prohibits this guy from making this argument. so you're sitting in a state of limbo, so they're not actively chasing you, it seems like if you're able to move around freely, they haven't figured out where you are, you're just free to live your life, well yeah, it's one of those things where Do you know if they know where I am or if 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?
We should focus on that because I think people listen to Russia particularly in the context of today's news and you see what people say about Tulsi Gabbard and things like yeah, any type of association, at any time, your name is on the same sentence in paragraphs. The same story is the word Russia, it is now considered something negative, yes, and don't get me wrong. I have been a critic of the Russian government for a long time. In fact, they wrote a big story about me in a Russian state news outlet called RIA Novosti. They probably could, it's only in Russian, although that's saying something because I spoke favorably about a member of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, and I wasn't even speaking positively about this guy.
I was saying look, I think people have the right to express their opposition in a country and they should be able to do so without fear of retaliation in the future because the background here is that this opposition figure has long been on the side of the Russian administration and suddenly they have been magically accused of being foreign agents. or something like that and everyone who is connected to this, which is like a large civil society organization, had their doors opened simultaneously throughout the country and are being investigated for some type of corruption or something like that, in fact, they don't even matter and you I know I said I opposed that just as I was tweeting, you know, pictures of ballot stuffing in the Russian elections, just as I criticized the Russian president, my name.
I've criticized Russian surveillance laws so many things over and over and over and over again, but yeah, look, it doesn't make my life any easier to be stuck in a country I didn't choose and people don't remember this. I was actually on my way to Latin America when the US government canceled my passport, trapping me in Russia. and for those who are interested again, I wrote a whole book that has a lot of detail about this, but yes, it is difficult to be basically involved in civil opposition to the policies of the United States government at the same time as the Russian government and It's a It's difficult, you know, it's not a happy thing, but I feel like it's a necessary thing.
The problem is that nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to get involved in that kind of nuance. Nobody wants to consider it. Those types of conversations in today's world. believe and this sexy were the worst things that the Western media does in the context of the discussion about Russia: they create this aura of invincibility around the Russian president, they say, you know, this guy is making all the decisions, he is pulling all the strings, You know, this guy is in charge of the world and that's very useful to the Russian government in general because they can take that and play it on their national media and see how strong we are, you know, the Americans are afraid of us, the Chinese are afraid of him, everyone is afraid.
The French were afraid of us, we are strong, true, there is no doubt that Russia is going to interfere in the elections, there is no doubt that the United States is going to interfere in the Russian elections, true, and no one likes to talk about this, and again I need to corroborate Now that I said that, I have an old note that I signed a billion times. The New York Times published a story in the wake of the 2016 election by the contestants where they discussed the history of election interference. in Russia and the Soviet Union and they found in approximately 50 years 36 different cases of electoral interference by Russia or the Soviets, right, this is not something new, it is something that always happens because that is what the intelligence services do that is what they think they get paid for, which is kind of sad, but it's a reality because we're not wise enough to separate covert action from intelligence gathering, but in that same study they found 36 different cases by the Russians in the Soviets they found 81 different cases by the US and this was published by a Scott chain in the New York Times and also in the Washington Post, but this is the thing like there is a way to criticize the Russian government. 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 well and every time people go all over Russia, Russia, Russia, every time people go wrong to Russia, they always go Russia doing this they go Russia doing that Russians who have nothing to do with the government feel implicated by that Do you feel like you are in charge of Donald Trump?
Do you want to have Donald Trump's legacy around your neck? and then people say, "Oh, well, you know you could overthrow Donald Trump, you know you could overthrow Putin, do you really like the way that works?" I will be here and I have made it very clear. I would love to come home. Are there any concerns that your visa will be denied? I mean, how do you stay there? It's a good question, so I have a permanent residence. People think that I'm on our side is no longer like a green card, it now has to be renewed every three years, so yes, I'm sure they might kick me out and this was the story I told them before in the Russian media: they said : I know that the Russian government should take some action against me or I should not be welcome here or I should go home because why criticize the Russian government just when they are the people?
It's just that, like the Russian version of Fox News, I don't do it. I know enough about the Russian media to tell you that I think it's supposed to be more like Reuters or Associated Press, but hell if I know, but the question is what is the alternative, right, yes, the Russian government could screw me, but they could screw me. even if I didn't say anything then I should shut up and be silent about the things that I think are in the judges because it makes me safer, well a lot of pragmatic people will say yes, they say you've done enough. saying you've done your part you know they say whatever it's safe to live a long time be happy but I didn't come here to be safe if I wanted to be safe I'd still be sitting in Hawaii making tons of money spying on all of you right? and no one would have known about this, the system would have gotten worse, but the system, the world, the future gets worse every day that we do not do something about it, every day, that we remain silent about all the injustices.
As we see the world get worse, things get worse and yes, it's risky, yes, it's uncomfortable, but that's why we do it, because if we don't do it, no one else will do it all those years. I sat there waiting for someone else to show up and no one did. right, that's because I was waiting for a hero but there are no heroes right, there are only heroic decisions you are never further from a decision to make a difference no matter where there is a big difference it doesn't matter if it was a small difference because you don't have to save the world by yourself, in fact, you can't, all you have to do is lay a brick, all you have to do is make things a little better, in some small way, so that other people can lay it. its brick on top of that or next to it and together step by step day by day year after year we build the foundations of something better, but yes, it will not be safe, but it does not matter because individually it is not, you know me, whoever you are. that's the Ironman, well I don't care if you're the biggest doomsday prepper with cans full of beans, if the world ends it will affect you, we make things better, we become safe together, collectively, that's our strength, that is the power of civilization it is the power that shapes the future because even if you make life great for yourself, someday you will die, someday you will be forgotten, your cans of beans will rot, someday you can make things safe or you can be more careful.
True, you can be smarter and there's nothing wrong with that, but at the end of the day you have to recognize that if you're trying to eliminate all risks from your life, what you're really doing is eliminating all possibilities from your life. . You are trying to collapse the universe of results in such a way that what you have lost is freedom. You have lost the ability to act because you were afraid. current state of surveillance and if anything has changed since your revelations, yes, I mean, the biggest thing that has changed since I was in 2013 is that it is now mobile first, everything mobile was still a big problem and the intelligence community was struggling a lot to get their hands on it and deal with it, but now people are much less likely to use a laptop and then a desktop computer than to then use, you know, any kind of corded phone, so they have to use a smartphone and, unfortunately, both Apple and Android devices are not.
Especially good for protecting your privacy. Think right now that you have a smartphone. You might be listening to this on a train somewhere and in traffic right now. Or you, Joe, have a phone somewhere in the room right now. The phone is off or at least the screen is off, it's there, it's on and if someone sends you a message the screen flashes and comes to life, how does that happen? But how is it possible that if someone from any corner of the earth dials a number, your phone rings and no one else? it sounds like you can dial anyone else's number and only their phone rings correctly every smartphone every phone is constantly connected to the nearest cell tower every phone even when the screen is off you think it's not doing anything you can't see it because The radio frequency emissions are invisible, it is shouting in the air saying Here I am Here I am here is my IMEI I think it is an individual manufacturer device identity and an individual manufacturer subscriber identity IMEI I could be wrong on the break, but the The acronyms are IMEI and IMSI and you can search for these things.
There are two globally unique identifiers that only exist anywhere in the world in one place. This makes your phone different from all my other phones. The IMEI is engraved on the side of your phone. No. No matter which SIM card you have changed to, it will always be the same and it will always tell the telephone network that it is this physical phone, the IME if it is on your SIM card and this is what keeps your phone number correct, it is basically the key. You have the right to use that phone number, so your phone is sitting there doing nothing you think, but it's constantly screaming and saying, I'm here, who's closest to me?
That's a cell phone tower and every cell phone tower with their big ears is listening to these little cries for help and everything's fine I see Joe Rogan's phone, I see Jaime's phone I see all these phones, they're here right now and Compare notes with the other network towers and your smartphone compares notes with them to know who I'm listening to. the loudest and who you listen to the loudest is a proximity proxy for closeness distance, right, they go to whoever listens louder than anyone else that's close to me, so you'll be tied to this cell tower and that cell tower. cell phone is going to take note of a permanent record that says that this phone, this phone with this phone number at this time was connected to me correctly and based on your phone and your phone number, they can get your identity correctly because you pay for these things with your credit card. and all that, and even if you don't do it right, it's still active in your house at night, it's still active, you know, on your nightstand, when you sleep, it's still any movement of your phone, your movements as a person and those. they often identify themselves quite uniquely, you go home, you go to your workplace, other people don't have it, I'm sorry and anyway, you constantly shout this and then compare notes with the other parties and the network and when someone tries to reach a phone compare notes network compare notes to go where is this phone with this phone number in the world right now and the cell phone tower closest to that phone sends a signal saying we have a call for you?
Your phones start ringing so their owner can answer and then you plug it through all this way, but what this means is that every time you carry a phone, whenever the phone is on, there is arecord of your presence in that place that is being made and created by companies, there is no need to keep it forever and in fact there is no good argument for keeping it forever, but these companies see that it is valuable information, Ryan, this is all this big data problem we're running into and all this information that used to be ephemeral where you were when you were 8 you know we're worried where you went after a bad breakup you know who you'd spend the night with and who you'd call after all this Information used to be ephemeral, meaning it disappeared like the morning dew, it would disappear, no one would remember it, but now these things are stored, now these things are stored, it doesn't matter if you're doing something wrong, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if you're the most common person in the world because that's how mass collection is done, which is the government's euphemism for mass surveillance works, they just collected everything in advance in the hope that one day it will be useful and that was just talking about how connected phone network that doesn't talk about all those apps on your phone that communicate with the network even more frequently. How do you receive a text message notification? How do you receive an email notification? How does Facebook know where you are? All of these things, these analytics, are trying to track through the location services on your phone to the GPS, even through what wireless access points you're connected to because there's a constantly updated global map;
Actually, there are many of them wireless access points in the world because, just as we talked, every phone has a unique identifier that is globally unique, every wireless access point in the world, from the cable modem in your home, whether it's on your laptop, every device that has a radio modem has a globally unique identifier and this is a standard term, you can look it up and these things can be mapped when they're broadcast over the air because again, like your phone tells the cell tower, I have this identifier, the cell tower responds and says I have this identifier and any. who's listening can type this stuff in and all the Google Street View cars that come and go, take notes on who has active Wi-Fi on this block and then build a giant new map, so even if you have GPS it's fine off as long as you connect to Wi-Fi, those apps may work fine.
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 here and the other one in the apartment here and I should only be able to hear those four single Wi-Fi access points globally from these points in physical space right at the intersection between the extensions, the domes of all those wireless access points, it's a location proxy and it goes on and on and on, we could talk about this for four more hours, no We have that kind of time. I can ask you? Is there a way to mitigate all of this personally?
I mean, it's turning off your phone. It doesn't even work well, so it does it in a way that is nothing. The thing is that turning off the phone is a risk. How do you know if any phone is really turned off? I used to be when I was in Geneva, for example, working for the CIA that we would all carry around like drug dealer phones, you know, the old smart phones, sorry, dumb old phones, they're not smart phones and the reason was simply because they had removable battery bags where you could take the battery out properly and the beautiful thing about the technology is that if there's no electricity in it, if there's no power available, if there's no battery attached, it doesn't send anything because you have to get power from somewhere, you must have power to be able to work, but Now all their phones are well sealed, they can't remove the batteries, so there are potential ways to hack a phone that appears to be off but actually isn't, just pretend be off when you are actually still listening. and do all these things, but for the average person that doesn't apply correctly and I have to tell you that they have been chasing me everywhere, I don't worry about those things and it's because if they are applying that With my level of effort, they will probably get the same information through other routes.
I'm as careful as I can be and use things like Faraday cages. I turn off the devices, but if they're actually manipulating the way the devices are displayed, that's too good a task. level of effort, even for someone like me, to maintain that consistently, plus if I get caught, I only trust the phones so much, so there's a lot they can derive from the compromise and that's how operational security works. Think about what are the realistic threats that you're facing that you're trying to mitigate and with the mitigation that you're trying to do is what would be the loss, what would be the damage that would be done to you if these things were exploited.
It's a lot more realistic than worrying about these things that I call voodoo tricks, which are next level stuff and actually just a shout out to those of your readers who are interested in this fun stuff. I wrote an article about this specific problem. How do you know when a phone is really off? How do you know when he's not actually spying on you with a shiny, shiny guy? His name is Andrew Bunny Huang, he's a PhD from MIT and I think electrical engineering is called introspection engine and it was published in the Journal of Hope and Engineering.
You can find it online and it will go so deep into the weeds. I promise you however you want. We took an iPhone 6, this was when it was fairly new, and modified it so that we couldn't actually rely on the device to report its own status, but rather physically monitor its status to see if it was being spied on, but for the average person, this academic It's like that. it's not your main thread your main threats are these mass collection programs your main threat is the fact that your phone is constantly squawking at these cell towers it's doing all these things because we leave our phones a bug that's constantly on your right constantly connected Airplane mode doesn't even turn off Wi-Fi anymore, it just turns off the cellular modem, but the idea is that we need to identify the problem and the central problem with using smartphones today is that you have no idea what the heck is doing. at any given time, like if the phone has the screen off, you don't know what it's connected to, you don't know how often it does it.
Unfortunately, Apple and iOS make it impossible to see what kind of network connections are constantly being made on the device. and to mediate them, I don't want Facebook to be able to speak right now. You know, I don't want Google to be able to talk right now. I just want my secure messaging app to do the talking. I just want my weather. app so I can talk, but I just checked my weather and I'm done, so I don't want it to be able to talk anymore and we need to be able to make these smart decisions not just on an app app, but connection by connection, right?
Let's say you use Facebook because you know, by whatever criteria we have, a lot of people could do it. You want it to be able to connect to Facebook's content servers. You want to be able to send messages. a friend, you want to be able to download a photo or whatever, but you don't want them to be able to talk to an ad server, you don't want them to talk to an analytics server that's monitoring your behavior, right? I don't want to talk to all this third party stuff because Facebook fills their garbage and almost every app you download and you don't even know what's going on because you can't see it properly and this is the problem with the data collection used.
There is an industry today that is based on keeping this invisible and what we need to do is make the activities of our devices, whether it is a phone, a computer or anything else, more visible and understandable to the average person and then give them control over it, like you can look at your phone right now and in the center there's a little green icon that's your phone or it's a picture of your face, whatever and then you see all these little spokes coming out of it, that that's all. app your phone is talking to right now or every app that's active on your phone right now and all the hosts you're connecting to and you can see right now what's happening every three seconds that your phone is logging into Facebook and I could just tap on that. app and then BOOM, it doesn't talk to Facebook anymore, Facebook doesn't allow talking privileges on Facebook have been revoked, right?
You'd do that, we'd all do that if there was a button on your phone that said do what I want but Don't spy on me, you would. press that button, that button doesn't exist right now and unfortunately Google and Apple are much 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 measure of security. risk and from a particular perspective, they're actually not wrong about that, but it's not enough to just go, you know, we have to block that ability from people because we don't trust that they would make the right decisions.
We think it's too complicated for people. Do this, we think there are too many connections being made, that is actually a confession of the problem, if you think people can't understand it, if you think there is too much communication, if you think there is too much complexity, it is needed. it should be simplified just like the president can't control everything so 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 simpler process. be obvious and the fact that it's not and the fact that we read story after story year after year saying that your entire date has been breached here these companies are spying on you here these companies are manipulating your purchases or your search results or they are hiding these things from your timeline or are influencing you, you are manipulating it in all these different ways that happens as a result of a single problem and that problem is in whatever quality of information is available, they can see everything about you, they can see everything about what your device is running and they can do whatever they want with your device, you on the other hand own the device instead of paying for it, but more and more these corporations are becoming more and more owned by these governments and each We increasingly live in a world where we do all the work well, we pay all the taxes, we pay all the costs, but we own less and less and no one understands this better than the younger generation.
Well, it seems like our data became a commodity before we understood what it was, it became this thing that is incredibly valuable to Google and Facebook and all these social media platforms before we understood what we were giving up, they were making thousands. of millions of dollars and then once that money is made and once everyone gets used to this situation, it is very difficult to pull the reins. It's very difficult to turn that horse precisely because money then becomes law, information becomes influence, which also seems to be the same type of situation that would happen with these mass surveillance dates, once they have access, it will be incredibly difficult. so that they give up that right, yes, no, you are right and this is the theme of the book.
I mean, this is the permanent record and this is where it came from this is how the story came about. of our lives is how intentionally by design a number of institutions, both government and corporate, realized that it was in their mutual interest to hide their data collection activities in order to increase the breadth and depth of their sensor networks that were somehow spread throughout society. In the past, intelligence gathering in the United States, even in Sigyn, used to mean sending an FBI agent to plant crocodile clips in an embassy building or sending someone disguised as a worker and bug a building or built a satellite listening site. right, we called them foreigners, we said they were collecting foreign satellites, we're in the desert somewhere, they built a big satellite dish and it only listens to the satellite broadcasts, right, but these satellite broadcasts, these satellite links were owned by military, were exclusive to governments, true, it was.
It does not affect everyone in general, all the surveillance was directed because it had to be that way. What's changed with technology is that surveillance could now become indiscriminate, it could become a tracking network, it could become mass collection, which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language, if we have any kind. of decency, but we did it intentionally, this was intentionally hidden from us, right, the government did it, they used grading companies, they did it, they intentionally didn't talk about it, they denied that these things were going to happen, they said you agreed withthis and didn't say hello at all.
So, I'm sorry, okay, we put up that Terms of Service page and you clicked on 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 a 600 page legal form that even if you read it you wouldn't understand and it doesn't matter even if you did understand it because one of the first paragraphs and I said this agreement can be changed in at any time unilaterally without the consent of the company.
They have constructed a legal paradigm that assumes that records collected about us do not belong to us. This is one of the basic principles on which mass surveillance by the company is based. The perspective of the government in the United States is legal and you have to understand that all the things that we talk about today, the government says that everything they do is legal and correct, so that's fine, our perspectives, the public should be fine. , that's actually the problem because this is not the case. It's not right, the scandal is not how they are breaking the law, the scandal is that they don't have to break the law and the way they say they are not breaking the law is something called the third party doctrine.
It's a legal principle and it stems from a case and I think it was the 1970s called Smith v. Maryland and Smith was this idiot who harassed this lady who made phone calls to her house and when was she going to pick you up, but I don't know is that its breathing hard, whatever, like a classic creeper and you know it was scary for this poor lady so she calls the police and says one day I got one of these phone calls and then I saw this car sneaking past my house on the street and she got a license. -badge number then she goes to the police and she says: "this is the guy and the cops again are trying to do something good here they look up his badge number and find out where this guy is and then they say what the phone number is registered in that house and they go to the telephone company and say can you give us this registration?
The telephone company says yes, of course, and it's the guy. The cops got their man right, so they arrested this guy and then he They took them to court. Their lawyer brings all this up and says, "You did this without a warrant, I'm sorry, that was the problem was they went to the phone company, they got the records without a warrant, they just asked for them or they cited them." certain lower standard of legal review and the company gave it to them and they got the guy they ran amok in jail and they could have gotten a proper warrant, but it was just a convenience, they just didn't want to take the time with a small town. police officers, you can understand how it happens, they know the guy is a scoundrel or they just want to take him to jail and that's why they forced him, I said, but the government doesn't want to let him go, they fight for this and say that's how it happened.
In reality, they were not his records and since they did not belong to him he had no Fourth Amendment right to demand that a warrant be issued for them, they were company records and the company provided them voluntarily and therefore, there was no court order. It was required because you can give whatever you want without a court order, as long as it is yours. Now here's the problem: the government extrapolated a principle on a single case of a single known criminal suspect who had good reason to suspect the suspect was their man and used that to go to a company and obtain records from them and set the precedent these Records don't belong to the person, they belong to the company and then they said well, if a person doesn't have a Fourth Amendment interest in the records held by a no one does, so the company has absolute ownership of all of these records. about all of our lives and remember this was the 1970s, you know the internet barely exists in these types of contexts, smartphones you know don't exist. society modern communications do not exist, this is the beginning of the technological age and a 40 year advance and they are still based on this precedent about this, you know, perverted, no one has the right to privacy of anything that is in the hands of a company and as long as they do that, companies will be extraordinarily powerful and they will be extraordinarily abusive and this is something that people don't understand, well, it's data collection, they're exploiting data. data about human lives error about people these records are about you it is not data that is being exploited it is the people that are being exploited it is not the data that is being manipulated it is you that is being manipulated and this this is something What I think a lot of people are starting to understand is that the government companies are still pretending they don't understand and don't agree with this and this reminds me of something one of my old friends, John Perry Barlow, who worked with me on the press freedom foundation.
I'm the chairman of the board, he used to tell me that you can't wake up someone who's pretending to be asleep. He said it's an old Native American saying. It's a great expression. It's a good way. I think it's a good way. In closing, thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Please tell everyone the title of your book. It's available right now. For sure yes. It's on shelves everywhere, at least until the government finds another way to ban it. called permanentrecord and I hope you read it. I'll read it and I think what you've done is incredibly brave and I think you're a very important part of the story.
I think, at the end of the day, what you did and what you did. exposed is going to change the way we view mass surveillance will change the way we view government oversight and changed 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, thank you, it was my pleasure thank you very much for taking care of you man, stay safe no, no, no, don't stay safe, stay safe, space open, days off, open to possibilities, take care, thank you.

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