EVERY SPOKEN WORD
160 min read · 32,407 words- 0:00 – 15:00
And, uh... Okay, that'll…
- ESEdward Snowden
And, uh... Okay, that'll just be-
- JRJoe Rogan
Dude, you're very professional.
- ESEdward Snowden
... be rolling. (laughs) You know, people are like, uh, "H- how do you live?" And, and things like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ESEdward Snowden
They're like, "You taking money from the Russians?" And, of course, the answer's no. But, uh, I, I do this for a living, like I, I speak. Um, I don't have a YouTube channel where it's, you know, I'm, I'm Joe Rogan, but, uh, I give speeches at universities and things like that. I do a lot of interviews. And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
We're recording now, right?
- ESEdward Snowden
I've got my, my own setup.
- JRJoe Rogan
C- is it possible that you could do a YouTube channel? Would that work?
- ESEdward Snowden
(laughs) I mean, if... Yeah. Like I, I mean, if you introduced me so like I get followers, yeah, we could do that. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Dude, I'm all in. W- that, that could absolutely happen. Do you wanna do that? Is that something you wanna do?
- ESEdward Snowden
Uh, no. I mean, this is a big question. So I, I came on, um, because I had just, uh, written a book, uh, called Permanent Record, um, which is the, the story of my life because that's what publishers make you do when, when you're writing your first book. Um, but it, it's more than that because I didn't just wanna talk about me. It, it's actually about the changing of technology, uh, and the changing of government in this sort of post-9/11 era, which, you know, our, our generation just sort of happened, uh, to be growing up during. Uh, and I was at the CIA and the NSA and all this stuff, but the day that the book came out, uh, the government hit me with a lawsuit, um, and they hit the publisher of the books, uh, with a, with a lawsuit, um, because they don't wanna see books like this get written. They especially don't wanna see books like this, uh, get read. Um, and so the big thing was, you know, we, we didn't know where this was going. We didn't know what was gonna happen. Um, and my publisher, of course, wanted me, uh, very badly to let people know this book existed, uh, in case the government leaned hard and hard and hard, and we didn't know where, where that's going. (laughs) Um, the government is still, uh, pursuing that case quite strongly. Um, they're more focused on the, the financial censorship side of it, uh, basically taking any money that I made from it, uh, kind of as a warning to the others, um, and getting a, uh, legal judgment against the publishers saying, you know, "You can't pay this guy," that kind of thing, more so than taking the book off the shelves. But that's not because, uh, they're okay with the book being on the shelves. It's because thankfully we, we've got the First Amendment, and so they can't. Uh, and that's a very rare and, and, and good thing. Uh, but anyway, i- in the context of that, um, uh, they were like, "Well, what about Joe Rogan?" And, you know, I, I, I'd heard about you, uh, at this point, but, you know, uh, the only thing that I had really seen that I really understood, um, had familiarity with was, like, you talking to Bernie Sanders, which, by the way, I very much appreciated, uh, hearing that, because, uh, a lot of people don't give the guy time to talk. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. To, to hear him in those sound bites, you don't really get an understanding of who he actually is.
- ESEdward Snowden
Right. And this is the other thing. Like, they're like, "Well, you know, you can go on all these (laughs) you know, major network shows," and I, I did a couple of them. I did, like, uh, a morning show. I did, uh, Brian Williams. Um, but broadly, the media, uh, the, the, the sort of more corporatized media, uh, as we might say, um, is exactly what you just described, right? They, they want you to be able to answer in, like, 8, 15 seconds or less. Um, and when we're talking about big, massive shifts in society, when we're talking about, uh, power, when we're talking about, uh, technology and how it controls and influences us, uh, in, in the future, um, you, you can't have a meaningful conversation within those constraints. Uh, and so instead, these guys all wanna, say, uh, repeat these long-discredited sort of criticisms. "And, you know, I'm sure you'll, you'll, you'll ask the same thing," and that's okay. Um, they're, they're fair questions. But it's like, we can't have the conversation if we can't have the space to think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ESEdward Snowden
... a- and breathe, and have thi- this sort of discussion. Um, so anyway, they, they mentioned you, uh, and I was like, "Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan." Where do I know this name from, uh, before Bernie Sanders? Um, and I look back through my, my Twitter mentions, um, and the funny thing is your fans have been, uh, harassing me to death-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ESEdward Snowden
... for, like, the last years. Wonderful people. Wonderful people. Uh, but, like, "Go on Joe Rogan, go on Joe Rogan." And I remember, like, after I had just made a Twitter account, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually, uh, helped me get on Twitter, um, gave me that little initial boost. And, uh, they said Joe Rogan-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ESEdward Snowden
... and so I... They, like, linked you, and, you know, I, I mouse over your name 'cause I use a desktop and not mobile for this 'cause of security reasons. Uh, and it pops up, and I get your avatar, man. And, like, I have to say, your logo is the worst thing in the world for people who are, like, trying to be, like, politically serious and, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ESEdward Snowden
... they're worried about the national security, advisor condemning me. 'Cause, like, this bald guy with this maniacal grin and, like, the third eye on his forehead, and I'm like, "Oh, man. That's Joe." You know? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ESEdward Snowden
That, that doesn't look good. But it's actually, like, when you watch, you know, when, when you watch what you're doing, it's, it's great stuff, man. It's great. But that first impression, like, I... (laughs) This almost didn't happen, but everybody-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ESEdward Snowden
... who has talked to you, you know, everybody who watches your show, I think they get a very different impression than how you're painting it. And for me, it's a wonderful thing because nobody understands that better than I do, right? Like, the government ran a smear campaign against me endlessly for six months, uh, when I came forward in June of 2013. I know we got way off topic here. I'll, I'll get back to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Fine.
- ESEdward Snowden
Um, but when-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's no such thing as off topic. We could do-
- ESEdward Snowden
(laughs) Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
... talk about whatever.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Uh, I work hard…
- ESEdward Snowden
whether we're talking about Trump now, uh, all these guys were okay with a constantly growing surveillance state because they're the ones whose hands were on the lever at the time. They got to aim it. They got to use it. Uh, if you had a little search box in front of you that would give you the email history and, you know, of everybody in the United States, anybody you want, if you could pull up their text messages, anybody you want, if you could see anything they've ever typed into that Google search box, right? Joe, what is the worst thing you've ever typed into that search box? That lasts forever, right? And they have a record of that. They can get that from Google. A- and so this was, this was the whole thing. Um, how do we correct for that? So when you have somebody, uh, who wants to inform the public of something, uh, and we'll get into the proper channels arguments later, um, but you can't go through the institution to get these corrected because the institution knows it's wrong and is doing it anyway, right? That's the whole, uh, origin of the program, is they want to do something that they're not allowed to do. Uh, what do you do, right? And- and so I didn't want to say, "I'm the president of secrets." I didn't want to just put this stuff on the internet, and I could have. I'm a technologist, right? Um, I worked with the journalists, and then, uh, to create an adversarial step, right? Uh, someone who would argue against what I believed, and hopefully what the journalists believed once they consulted the documents and, uh, basically authenticated them. Um, can we get the government to play that role, right? Um, and so before the journalists published any story, this is, uh, a controversial thing. People still criticize me for this, actually. They say I was too accommodating to the government. They- they could be right. Um, is that the journalist would go to the government and give them warning. Say, "We're about to run this story about this secret program that says you did X, Y, and Z bad thing. One, is that right?" And the government will always go, "Oh, no comment," right? Uh, "Two, is this gonna cause harm? Is anybody gonna get hurt? Is this program effective? Is there something we don't understand," right? Uh, "Is there something Snowden doesn't understand? Is this guy just not get it?" Right? "Are these documents fake? Whatever you want, say we shouldn't run this story." A- a- and every case I'm aware of, that process was followed, and that's why, right? Because there's a lot of people out there who don't like me, who- who criticize me, who go, "This was unsafe. This caused, uh, harm to people," or whatever. We're in 2019 now. Uh, I came forward, uh, and these stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism, uh, starting way back in June of 2013. Uh, we've had six years to show bodies. We've had six years to show harm. And you know as well as I do, the government's happy to leak things when it's in- in their interest. Uh, nobody has been hurt as a result of these disclosures because everyone who was involved in them was so careful. We wanted to maximize the public benefit while mitigating the po- potential risks. Uh, and I think we did a pretty good job of it. But just to get back to the- the- the main thing, the original thing that got us off, uh, on that trail, when I came forward in June of 2013, I- I gave one interview to the people who were in the room, uh, with the documents, uh, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewan MacAskill.And I said who I was, I said why I was doing this, I said what this was about, and why it matters. Um, and that we were constructing a system of turnkey tyranny. Uh, and even if you trust that to Obama, you never know whose hand is going to be on that key next. And all they have to do is turn it, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Uh, the only thing that's restraining these programs really is, is policy more so than law. And the president, at any time, can sign a napkin and those policies change. Uh, well, after that, I went six months, uh, without giving any interviews, um, because I didn't want people to talk about me, I wanted them to talk about what actually mattered. And the government, of course, was trying very hard to change the conversation, as they always do, to be about, "Who is this guy? What have they done?" Right? "What's wrong with them? What are their problems? Who is this, this loony guy?" Uh, so they can controversialize the source of a story rather than having to confront the, the story itself. Uh, a- and th- that's why I said it's... I- I really kind of appreciate (laughs) , uh, your, your take on the media and everything like that. Because, uh, when you don't tell your story, you know, other people will tell it for you. Uh, they'll say so many things about you and they'll have these misimpressions, like I did, because of something as stupid as, as the avatar that you were using on Twitter, right? Where I think it's a certain kind of show with a certain kind of guy, and it's this crazy stuff. But when I actually listen to you, when I actually look at the facts, right? A- a- and when I hear you just speak, I go, "Actually, this is a thoughtful guy. Uh, actually, this is somebody who does care, who does want to look at these things deeply." Uh, and appearances, uh, and our first impressions, uh, can be very misleading.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, I work hard on that. I try to mislead people. It's good. (laughs)
- ESEdward Snowden
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Works to my advantage.
- ESEdward Snowden
You're doing a good job, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thank you. Um, uh, I want to bring it back to when you first started with the NSA. You started as a contractor, right? Uh, what was your initial impression and when did you know that things were really squirrelly with the programs they were implementing?
- ESEdward Snowden
Okay. Uh, so I'm... I'm not saying this to put, put you on the spot. I know you've been a busy guy. I know you hadn't done, uh, (laughs) uh, I, I think shows recently. You're coming back from break, right? Um, but have you read the book? Because it'll just help me, uh, put things in frame.
- JRJoe Rogan
Your book?
- ESEdward Snowden
If you haven't got a chance to read... You have my book.
- JRJoe Rogan
No. No, I have not read your book or got a copy of it.
- ESEdward Snowden
(laughs) Okay. Well, I will send you a signed copy, brother.
- JRJoe Rogan
Beautiful. Thank you.
- ESEdward Snowden
And, uh, I hope you'll read it and I hope you (laughs) enjoy it. But all right. So, uh, I had a really weird, um, history in the intelligence community. Uh, I grew up in a federal family, um, in the, the shadow of Fort Meade, right? All these little suburban communities in Maryland where basically the, the entire industry of the state is the federal government of all these different agencies, and then all the subcontractors, all the defense industries, uh, that serve that government and really are kind of our, our war-making machine, our, our system of control, uh, for the country and the world broadly. All that stuff spreads, uh, and you know, a couple hundred mile radius out of DC. Uh, my mother, uh, worked for the district courts, um, rather, the federal courts. And, uh, it's kind of funny because she still works there. And those are the courts that are trying to throw me in jail for the rest of my life now. Um, my father worked for the Coast Guard, uh, retired after 30 years. My grandfather was an admiral, and then he worked for the FBI. Um, a- as, as far back as it goes, my, my family, uh, my, my whole line of family, even generations back, uh, was working for the government. Um, so it was pretty ordinary, pretty expected for me to, to, to go into the same kind of work. Now, I started, I wasn't super successful in school, um, because, uh, it... I felt, and you know, this is the most arrogant thing in the world that anybody says, um, uh, that I had more to learn from computers than I did from, you know, biology class. Um, and so I spent more and more time focusing on technology. Then I got mono, uh, and I drop out of high school. Um, and now it's like, "All right. How do I make this up?" Uh, I, I say drop out of co- uh, high school, but I'm actually going to community college, right? They, they called it concurrent enrollment where I'm not taking any classes at high school. Uh, I'm going to community college instead. Um, and I'm not doing that great there either. Like it, it's fine. You know, I'm enjoying it, but, uh, you know, school is school. I, I want... I, I can't wait to be grown.
- JRJoe Rogan
You were bored.
- ESEdward Snowden
Um, and... (laughs) Yeah, I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ESEdward Snowden
... I, I think a lot of people, um, have, have felt that, but I ran into somebody at the community college who ran their own home-based business, uh, doing web design. And they could see I was kind of technical and they went, "Hey, do you want to work for me?" And I was like, "Well, that sounds great." Uh, and so I started doing web design really, really early on. This is like, uh, gosh, I don't know, probably, uh, 1998, uh, vintage, um, during the big boom and then, uh, the collapse that followed. And the funny thing is, she worked, uh... She was married, uh, to an NSA analyst, a linguist, right? Um, and so she lived on Fort Meade and she ran, uh, her business out of their home on Fort Meade. That's right up the street from the NSA. So, before I'm even working there, uh, I'm driving past this building all of the time, uh, and trying to figure out, you know, what the next step is going to be. And I, I enjoy this. It's, it's a good thing for me and like it, it works well. And I start, uh, getting trained and certified, all these little industry stamps you've got to get as a technologist to say, "Oh, you know this program," or whatever, and just start climbing the ladder. But then 9/11 happens-... uh, and I'm on Fort Meade, uh, when 9/11 happens, I'm, I'm just going into work. And I tell this, uh, in the book, uh, in some detail, uh, and I, I think it's very much worth reading for people who don't know this because this is forgotten history that, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
How old were you at the time?
- ESEdward Snowden
... nobody... Uh, gosh, I was, uh, I was born in '83, uh, so I was probably 18 years old. Um, and, uh, yeah, uh, yeah, I had (laughs) I had just turned 18 a couple months before. Um, and what people forget, um, is who knew what was going on before anybody else, uh, on September 11th? The intelligence community, right? Um, and what did they do, right? Did they, uh, give out a public warning? Did they tell you guys to evacuate? Did they say do this, that, or the other? No, no, um, not for everybody, not for a long time. Uh, but at the NSA, uh, then director, uh, Michael Hayden, he was a general, he later became a director of the CIA, ordered the entire campus evacuated of thousands, tens of thousands of people, actually, and just said, "Go home." Right? Uh, the CIA did the same thing. They were running on skeleton crews. Uh, at the moment, the country needed them more than they ever had, right? Uh, and I get a call, um, well, and I hear a call, uh, that's from my boss's wife, uh, her husband to her. He's calling from the NSA and he's saying, "Hey, you know, I think Ed should leave for the day because I'm, I'm the only employee of this business besides her, uh, because I think they're gonna close the base down." And I'm like, "This is crazy. It never closes down," I-... and we don't know what's happening, then we start checking the news, uh, which is through websites, right? Because we're, we're doing all this stuff, and suddenly it's the big story everywhere. Uh, and, uh, you know, nobody understands how big it is yet. Uh, most of us are like, "Oh, it's gonna mess with our workday. Oh, it's gonna mess with our commute." Uh, but when I'm leaving, I hear car horns all over the base, it's the craziest thing, because this is a military base, right? It's right outside the NSA. Uh, and I enter just this absolute state of pandemonium as I go past Canine Road, which, uh, is the road that travels right in pa-... uh, in front, uh, of, uh, the NSA's headquarters, and it's just a parking lot as far as you can see. They have, uh, military police out under the stoplights directing traffic, uh, because there's this mass evacuation, and I, I still have no idea what's happening, like the, the story is still developing. Um, but I will never forget that image. Uh... Why did these people have so much power and so much money and so much authority at... that... if at the moments we need them the most, they're the first ones in the country that are leaving their buildings? Uh, and, you know, later on, um, they said, uh, and this is, uh, covered in, uh, a, a book, I believe, um, I think it's James Bamford, uh, who interviewed that director of NSA who gave that order about what was happening. He was going, "Well, you know," he, he, uh, called his wife and he was asking where their kids were and everything like that, and then after that, um, he wanted to, uh, think about well, where could these other planes that they knew were in the air that hadn't struck yet, where could they be headed? And this, this sort of shows how, um, self-centric the intelligence community is. Uh, this is the DC metro area, right? They could hit the White House, they could hit Congress, they could hit the Supreme Court, right? And they go, "Oh, they're gonna fly their planes into the CIA headquarters," or, "They're gonna fly their planes into the NSA headquarters." Uh, and of course, it was never realistic, uh, that these would be the targets. Um, but on that basis, they were like, "Ooh, let's get our bacon, uh, out of the pan."
- JRJoe Rogan
But what-
- ESEdward Snowden
Now, I don't say this-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I'm sorry, but-
- ESEdward Snowden
Go ahead.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in, in... just in the interest of, uh, what... wasn't it possible that they could've attacked those places? I mean, they attacked the Pentagon. They, y- you know, they knew that there was attacks.
- ESEdward Snowden
Because, you know, I-... Uh, look, it's, it's absolutely possible they could've attacked your Denny's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ESEdward Snowden
... you know? Um, but it's a question of, uh, risk assessment. If you have planes in the air, uh, if you believe there's an ongoing terrorist attack that's happening in the United States right now, and if you have built history's greatest surveillance agencies, right? The, the, the most powerful, uh, intelligence forces in, in the history of the species, you are gonna take those off the board, or at least the majority of their personnel off the board then, in a chance that you have no, uh, sort of grounds for substantiating them that they could be targeting you, uh, to begin with, simply because they could? Well, somebody else will get hit with those. As you say, it's gonna be the Pentagon, right? I- it's gonna be, uh, the World Trade Center. It's gonna be someone somewhere. And the more minutes you're in front of that desk, the higher the chance is, even if it's a very small chance, even if it's somebody who doesn't work on terrorism, right? Maybe if it's somebody who normally works finance in North Korea, right? But they go, "Look, this is an emergency." Everybody understands. You don't need to explain this. You just go, "Stop what you're doing, uh, look at financial transactions related to who purchased these plane tickets. Do this." You just go full spectrum and go,
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm. …
- ESEdward Snowden
"Anything you can do right now. If the building gets hit, we get hit. That's what we signed up for." Nobody wants that, right? That, that's not, uh, the desired outcome. But if they had asked the staff to do that, they all would've agreed, that's what these people signed up to do. And yet the director goes, "No," you know, "we're, we're just, uh... just no. Like, we're not gonna take that risk." And this is... I think it says so much.... about the bureaucratic character of how government works, right? The people who rise to the top of, of these governments. Um, it's about risk management for them, right? It's about never being criticized for something. And this is-
- NANarrator
Mm.
- ESEdward Snowden
... and look, if we wanna get really controversial, and this is something that'll, that'll haunt me, um, because people will bring it up, uh, a- again and again and again. People ask about, you know, uh, people still criticize me. (laughs) In the book, you know, I, I talk about aliens and chem trails and things like that, and the fact that they're, uh, there's no evidence for that. I went looking on the network, right? Um, and I, I, I know, Joe, I, (laughs) I know, uh, you want there to be aliens. Uh-
- NANarrator
I do.
- ESEdward Snowden
I know Neil deGrasse Tyson badly wants there to be aliens. Uh, and there probably are, right? Uh, but the idea that, that we're hiding them? If we are hiding them, I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups. Um, I couldn't find anything, right? So if it's hidden, and it could be hidden, it's hidden really damn well.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- ESEdward Snowden
Uh, even from people who are on the inside. Um, but the main thing is conspiracy theories, right? Everybody wants to believe in conspiracy theories because it, it helps life make sense. It, it helps us believe that somebody is control, in control, right? That somebody is calling the shots.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- ESEdward Snowden
That these things all happen for a reason, this, that, and the other. Uh, there are real conspiracies. Uh, but they're not typically, you know, that, that they've got tens of thousands of people working on them, unless you're talking about the existence of the intelligence community itself, uh, which is basically, uh, constructed on the idea that you can get, uh, I, I think there's, uh, four million or 1.4 million people in the United States who hold, uh, security clearances. Uh, and you can get all of these people to, to not talk ever, to journalists or this, that, or the other. Um, but when you look back at the 9/11 report, and when you look back at the history of what actually happened, what we can prove, right? Not what we can speculate on, but what are at least the commonly agreed facts? Uh, it's very clear to me, as someone who worked in the intelligence community, not during this period, of course, I was too young, uh, but very shortly thereafter, um, that these attacks could've been prevented. Uh, and in fact, the government says this too. Uh, but the government goes, the, the reason that they, uh, these attacks happened, the reason that they weren't prevented, uh, is, uh, what they call stove piping, right? There was, there was not enough, uh, sharing. They needed to break down the walls and the restrictions that were chaining these poor patriots, uh, at the NSA and the CIA and the FBI from all working on the same team. And to some extent, they're, they're correct o- on this, right? There, there were limits on the way agencies were supposed to play ball, uh, with each other. Uh, but I worked there, and I know how much of this is bullshit and how much of this is not. Um, those are, uh, procedural and policy limits, in some cases, legal limits on what can be shared, uh, without following a process, without doing this, that, or the other, without, uh, basically asking for permission, without getting a sign-off, uh, or anything like that. If the FBI wanted to send absolutely everything they had to the CIA, they could've done so. If the CIA wanted to send everything they had to the FBI, they could've done so. They didn't, and people died as a result. Now, government goes, bureaucratic proceduralism, uh, was responsible, and it's because we had too many restrictions on the intelligence community. And this is what led to the world post-9/11, where all of our rights sort of evaporated, was they went, "Well, restrictions on what these agencies can do are costing lives. Therefore, naturally, we just have to unchain these guys and everything will be better," right? And if you remember that post-9/11 moment, you can understand how that actually could come off as persuasive, h- how, how that might be a kind of thing to go, you go, "All right, well, well, that makes sense," because everybody was terrified, right? Um, there were people q- quite quickly who got their heads back on their shoulders the right way. There were some of them who never lost their heads at all, uh, and who, uh, protested the Iraq War at the same time my darn self was signing up to go fight it, uh, volunteering for the army. And we'll, we'll get into that in a minute. Um, but everything that has followed in the decades past came from the fact that in a moment of fear, we lost our heads, and we abandoned all the traditional constitutional restraints that we had put on these agencies, and we abandoned all of the traditional, uh, political restraints and just social constraints, ideological, uh, systems of belief about the limitations that the secret police should have in a free and open society. And we went, "Look, you know, uh, terrorists," uh, we created shows like 24 and Jack Bauer where he's, like, threatening to knife people's eyeballs out if they won't tell him this, that, or the other. Uh, and we entered this era of increasingly unlimited government as a result. And, uh, now in hindsight, we go, "Oh, well, we shouldn't have been surprised." Uh, but at the time, uh, everyone, everyone panicked, right? But if you go back to, uh, w- did that help? A- and we know the answer now is, in fact, no, it did not. It made things worse. Uh, I don't think any historian is gonna look at the Bush administration and go, "This improved the position of the United States in the world." Um, but if you go back, r- you know, wind back the tape to that pre-9/11 moment, uh, wind back the tape to those silos and those walls that they said needed to come down because that was restraining government, instead of the rules that said, "Well, you can share these things, but there's gotta be a basis, there's gotta be a justification." You've gotta go, "Why are we trading people's information like baseball cards and all of this stuff?"It's super easy as an intelligence officer to justify sharing information about a suspected terrorist who you think is planning to kill people, uh, or is even just in a country they shouldn't be, or a place they shouldn't be, or doing something you don't think they should be, uh, with another agency, uh, because no one's gonna question that. A judge isn't gonna question that. Any judge in the world will stamp that warrant without even thinking about it and then go to bed that night, um, uh, you know, without a care in the world, uh, because it's, you're not spying on a journalist. You're not spying on a human rights defender, right? This is not an edge case. Uh, this is someone that you believe to be associated with Al-Qaeda or whatever. Now, uh, this is all a lot of preamble to say that essential fact: um, government agrees, everyone agrees the attacks probably could've been prevented, uh, if information had been shared. So, why wasn't the information shared? Government says, uh, information wasn't shared, um, because of these restrictions and it's half true, because every important lie has, has some kernel of truth to it. Uh, and, and there were these barriers. But the reality is, why were those barriers respected in the case of a major terrorist plot? Why wasn't the CIA sharing information with the FBI? Why wasn't the FBI sharing information with the NSA? Why wasn't the NSA sharing information with the CIA in the case of a mar- a major terrorist plot? And if you've worked in government, if you've worked in the intelligence community, if you've worked in any large institution, you know, if you work at a company that sells batteries, you know that every office is fighting the other office for budget, for clout, for promotions, and this is the sad reality of what actually happened. Um, every one of those agencies wanted to be the guy who busted the plot. They wanted to be the one who got credit for it, and they didn't realize how serious it was until it was too late because they were competing with each other rather than cooperating with each other. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's exactly what I was gonna ask you, if that was the issue, the competition between these agencies, because they, they are very proud of the CIA accomplishing something, or the FBI accomplishing something, and they, they want to be the one to take credit for that.
- ESEdward Snowden
Yeah, and I mean, I think it's important, uh, like, in their defense, (laughs) because nobody else here, uh, is gonna provide a defense for them, um, is that that's actually, uh, darkly, uh, human. Uh, uh, again, this happens in every industry. This happens in every, uh, sort of big corporate thing because you wanna get promoted and, you know, everybody's putting in their, like, achievements at the end of the year for what they did. And if you're the guy who does that, you're going straight to the top.
- JRJoe Rogan
But their solution instead of-
- ESEdward Snowden
Um, so this was, this was the, the-
- JRJoe Rogan
So we, we have a weird delay here-
- ESEdward Snowden
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... for folks that are listening.
- ESEdward Snowden
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Their, their, so their solution instead of having someone be responsible for bridging the gap and providing that information to each individual agency, their solution was mass surveillance?
- ESEdward Snowden
(laughs) Well, no. They, they're, they're, they're different things. This is, uh, 9/11 is what woke these guys up-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ESEdward Snowden
... um, basically. And they, they went, "Well, we screwed up and Americans died as a result. Um, we really don't wanna take the hit on that." Um, and to be honest, the government had no interest in putting the hit on them. Uh, to be honest, the public had no interest in putting the hit on them, uh, at the time, um, because everybody understood terrorism is a real thing. There are bad people in the world, and that's true, right? That will always be true. There's always gonna be criminals, there's always gonna be terrorists. Uh, whether they're at your church, whether they're across the ocean, uh, there are people out there who are angry, they're disenfranchised, they're violent, and they just want to harm something. They want to change something, even in a negative way, uh, because that's what they feel is all they have left, which these are criminals, right? These are people that we don't need to pity. Uh, but if we ever wanna stop it, we do need to understand it, and, and where those things come from, where those, those drives come from in the first place. But, uh, uh, basically everybody went, "All right. How do we stop this?" Because nobody wants to feel unsafe. Nobody wants to feel like the building's gonna come down the next time you go in it. Uh, and so everybody just went, um, "I don't care who does it. Stop it." And they said this to Dick Cheney, which is a historic mistake, because they, Dick Cheney knows how government works. Uh, he was, uh, the person in that White House who was best placed, uh, to know all the levers of government, all the inter-agency cooperation, where we were strong, where we were weak, what we could do, what we were not allowed to do. And what he did was he took that little dial on what we're not allowed to do and he changed it all the way until it broke and snapped off, and then there was nothing that we couldn't do anymore. Um, and this, this-
- JRJoe Rogan
And you were there while this was happening. This was, this was-
- ESEdward Snowden
No, I was, I, (laughs) I was not. Uh, again, this is, uh, 2001. Um, I was, uh, I was 18 years old. I was working on the base. I, I drove past the building, but that was it. This is all hindsight. This is biography. This is documented history. But this is not, you know, uh, the Gospel of Edward Snowden. I, I don't know this, right? This is public record. This is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ESEdward Snowden
... what we all know. Um, what we have, though, uh, the, the reason that I bring this up is this is a teachable moment, because there are so many people right now I- in the Trump administration, uh, who go, "Look, uh, this guy has too much power. Uh, he's abusing it against immigrants. He's abusing it against domestic opponents. He's doing whatever. He's, uh, trying to hurt political rivals in the, the next election." All of this stuff, and, you know, we can get into this stuff later if you want, uh, in, in detail. But the bottom line is they're going, "This is a guy, uh, who's in the White House who's throwing elbows, right? He, he doesn't really care. He wants to hurt people, uh, as long as he can convince the Americans that those are the bad guys, right? That's the enemy. Doesn't matter if they're far away. It doesn't matter if they're close a- at home. Um, whoever he's against, he's gonna harm." And the dark thing is-This is actually why he was elected. Um, in moments of fear, where the world starts falling apart, uh, and this happens in authoritarian country after country, uh, this is why you have Vladimir Putin, uh, in Russia, who's been there for 20 years, right? President for, l- basically 20 years. Think about that. Uh, you know, he, he sort of skipped i- in the middle there, uh, because w- he had to dodge the fact that presidents can only serve so many consecutive terms, so he dropped down to prime minister and then came back as president. But, think about that. How do you get that kind of political longevity? Um, and it's because if you know anything about Russian history, which, you know, even I don't know that much about it, the '90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were an extraordinarily dark time. If you look at Russian cinema, all they had were gangster movies, right? All they had were the disintegration of society, how things are dark and broken, no one trusts each other. Pensions were no longer being paid. Social security's not there anymore. Like, there's nothing to buy, there's nothing to do, there's no job. No one had a future. And so they went, "If there's somebody who can lead us out of this, if there's somebody who will fix this, who will find us an enemy and defeat that enemy to restore prosperity, we'll put them in office." We see it happen in Turkey with Erdoğan, right? Uh, we've seen it happen, uh, successively with bad governments even in Western, uh, democracies. We see it happening, sadly, um, in places like, uh, Poland and Hungary. Uh, you can even argue it's happening, uh, in the United Kingdom, right? And now, there are a lot of people arguing that's exactly what we're seeing with Donald Trump's White House, uh, in the United States. And this is the lesson that we didn't learn from 2001, is when we become fearful, uh, we become vulnerable, right, uh, to anyone who promises they will make things better, even if they have no ability to make things better, even if they will actively make things worse, even if they will make things better for themselves and their buddies by taking from you. But if they tell you that they'll make things better, uh, and you believe them in a moment of fear, uh, that, that typically leads to unfortunate outcomes. So, sorry, let me, let me turn this back over to you 'cause we got way off track there.
- JRJoe Rogan
No, that's all right. Uh, I, I wanna bring it back to the initial question. So, you're working for the NSA. When do you realize there's a huge issue-
- ESEdward Snowden
Right. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... and when do you feel this responsibility to let the American people know about this issue? Like, when, when do you-
- ESEdward Snowden
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
... contact these journalists and what was the thought process
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah. …
- JRJoe Rogan
regarding this? Like, what, what steps did you go through once you realized that this was in violation of the Constitution and that even with the laws, the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act Two, things had changed so radically that you knew this was wrong, and you had to do-
- ESEdward Snowden
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... something about it, or you felt a responsibility to speak out?
- ESEdward Snowden
Okay. So since we gave so much historical preamble, let me just give the, the CliffsNotes version-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ESEdward Snowden
... to, to get us up to that. Um, so after September 11th, I'm a, a little bit lost. I'm doing-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ESEdward Snowden
... my technical stuff but it doesn't really feel like it matters anymore. Like, I'm making more money, I'm becoming more accomplished, but the world's on fire, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ESEdward Snowden
Eh, you remember there was a crazy mood of patriotism in the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ESEdward Snowden
... country, uh, because we were all trying to come together to get through it. Uh, you remember, like, people were sticking Dixie cups on the top of every chain-link fence, on every, uh, overpass. There was, like, "Stand together," you know, "Never forget."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ESEdward Snowden
Um, "United we stand" and all that stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Flags on every car.
- ESEdward Snowden
Exactly. And you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ESEdward Snowden
... I was a young m- a young guy who was not especially political, right? Um, and I come from a military background. I, u- uh, federal family, all that stuff, and so that means I'm very vulnerable, uh, to this kind of stuff. I see it on the news and, uh, Bush and all his sort of cronies are going, "Look, uh, it's Al-Qaeda, it's terrorism, terrorist organization. They have all these international connections. Uh, there's Iraq, you know, dictators, weapons of mass destruction, they're holding the world at ransom." You got Colin Powell at the UN dangling little vials of, like, fake anthrax. Um, and so I felt an obligation to do my part, and so I volunteered to join the army. Uh, y- you, you probably can't tell from, from looking at me, but I'm not gonna be, uh, at the top of the MMA circuit anytime, (laughs) uh, soon. Uh, so it, it didn't work out. I, I joined a special program, uh, that was called the 18X-ray program where they take you in off the street and they actually give you a shot at becoming a Special Forces solider. Uh, so you train harder in special platoons, you go further, and I ended up breaking my legs, uh, basically. So they put me out under-
- JRJoe Rogan
Both your legs?
- ESEdward Snowden
... special discharge. Uh, yeah. It was basically what it was, well, they were shin splints, uh, that I was too dumb to get off of, right? Uh, so I kept marching underweight, and I'm a pretty light guy to begin with. I had a 24-inch waist, uh, when I, uh, when I joined the army. For-
- JRJoe Rogan
Girls are jealous.
- ESEdward Snowden
Um, I weigh, yeah, (laughs) I, I think I weighed, like, 128 pounds. Uh, I, I got, I was in great shape, you know, in, in boot camp 'cause I, I came up really quick because it was, uh, you know, (laughs) all I could do was gain, um, but, uh, it was, it was just too much on my frame because I wasn't that, that active. Um, and so, uh, when you keep running on a stress injury, right, and you're running underweight with, like, rucksacks and things like that, you're running in, like, boots, um, and then you're doing, uh, exercise... And the army's, like, a whole chapter in the book. Uh, you, you got your battle buddy, right, 'cause they never allow you to be alone. You always gotta have somebody watching you. Uh, ih- they thought it was funny to put me, the smallest guy in the platoon, the, the drill sergeants did, uh, with the biggest dude in the platoon who was, like, an amateur bodybuilder who was, like, you know, 230 or 260, something like that. He was a big fella. Uh, and so, you know, he would, uh, when we're off in the woods doing these, these marches and things like that and we have to practice buddy carries, like the fireman's carry and things like that, he throws me around, uh, his neck, you know. I'm like a towel and he's just skipping down like it's nothing. Uh, and then I gotta put him on me and I'm just like, "Oh, God," dying, and it was, it was, ih- it was, eh, weirdly fun. I, I enjoyed it, uh, but it was no good for my body. And so in a land navigation move, when I step off a log-... uh, 'cause I was on point. Uh, and on the other side of the log, because it's the woods in Georgia-
- JRJoe Rogan
Just popped up.
- ESEdward Snowden
... at Sandhill, um, I see a snake, uh (laughs) . And so in my, my memory, you know, it's like time, uh, slows down, 'cause in North Carolina, you know, where I grew up-
- JRJoe Rogan
It just popped up.
- ESEdward Snowden
... you think all snakes are poisonous.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's, that's mid mic. That's fine. Sorry, there's an issue.
- ESEdward Snowden
Do we, do we need to take a break?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, we're good, we're good. We're good.
- ESEdward Snowden
It, it's completely fine. All right.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Section 5
- ESEdward Snowden
country a lot of times. It's your, uh, like, organization. These guys could be working for a telecommunications provider, um, and they wanna sell customer records, or they work at a bank, which was the, the thing that I saw, and we wanted records on the bank's customers, so we wanted a guy on the inside. Um, but anyway, uh, that, that's sort of how it works, and, and what I saw was they were way more aggressive, uh, for the lowest stakes than was reasonable or responsible. They were totally willing, uh, to destroy somebody's life, uh, just on the off chance they would get some information that w- that wouldn't even be, uh, tremendously valuable. And so, you know, ethically, that, that struck me, um, as a bit off, but I, I let it pass, um, because what I, what I've learned over my life, um, (laughs) short though it's, it's been, you know, uh...... is, is that skepticism is something that needs to build up over time. It's a skill, uh, something that needs to be practiced, or you can think of it as, uh, something that you develop through exposure, right? Kind of like a, a radiation poisoning, but in a positive way. Uh, it's when you start to realize inconsistencies, uh, or hypocrisies, uh, or lies, um, and you notice them and, you know, you, you give somebody the benefit of the doubt, or, uh, you trust them or you think it's all right. But then over time, you see it's not an isolated instance, it's a pattern behavior. And over time, that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds and builds until it's something that you can no longer ignore. Now, after the CIA, uh, I went to the NSA, um, in Japan where I was working there in Tokyo. Uh, and then from there, a couple years later, I went to, um, the CIA again. Uh, now I was working as a private employee for Dell, uh, but I was the senior technical official on, uh, Dell's sales account to the CIA. You know, people... these big companies, they have sales accounts to the CIA. And so this means I'm going in, and now i- it's crazy because I'm still a very young man, but I'm sitting across the table from chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions. I'm sitting across from their chief technology officer for the entire agency, or the chief intelligent- or, uh, chief information officer for the entire CIA. Um, and these guys are going, "Look, here's our problems. Here's what we want to do." And it's my job to pitch them a system, right? And I've go- I'm paired up with this sales guy, and the whole thing is to just go, "How much money can we get out of the government?" Right? (laughs) That's the whole goal. And we'll build them... What we were pitching was a private cloud system, right? Everybody knows about, uh, cloud computing now. It's like why your Gmail account is available wherever you go. It's why Facebook has this, uh, massive system of records for everyone everywhere. Uh, the government wanted to have this- these kind of capabilities too. Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon. People, well, (laughs) you know, some people aren't familiar with this. Many of them are. Uh, but Amazon runs, uh, a secret cloud, uh, system for the government. Uh, I, I forget what they've rebranded it now. Um, but this is just the... there's this massive connection between industry and government in the classified space that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Uh, but at this point, uh, I, I was already... I, I had misgivings because of what I'd seen in Japan about government, but I was just trying to get by. I was trying to ignore, uh, the conflicts. I was trying to ignore the inconsistencies. Uh, and I think this is a state that a lot of people, uh, in these large institutions, uh, not just in our country, but around the world, uh, struggle with every day, right? They, they got a job, they got a family, they got, uh, bills. They, they're, they're just trying to get by, and they know that some of the things they're doing, uh, are not good things. They know some of the things they're doing are actively wrong, but they know what happens to people who rock the boat. Eventually, um, I changed my mind. And when I had gone to Hawaii, which was the final position, uh, in my career with the intelligence community, um... I was (laughs) because of an accident of, of history here, I wasn't supposed to be in this position at all. Um, I was supposed to be at a, uh, a group called, uh, the National Threat Operations Center, NTOC. Uh, but because of the way contracting works, and again, this is covered i- in the book, um, I end up being reassigned to this little rinky-dink office, uh, that nobody's ever heard of in Hawaii called the Office of Information Sharing. And I'm replacing, uh, this old-timer who's, who's about to retire. Really, really nice guy, um, but he spent most of his days just reading novels, uh, and doing nothing, uh, and letting people be content to the fact... or letting people forget that his office existed 'cause he was the only one in it. Uh, there's, there's a manager who's, like, over him, but it's actually over a larger group, and he just looks over him as, as sort of a favor. So now I come in, and now I'm the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing, but I'm not close enough to retirement, uh, that I'm (laughs) okay with just doing nothing at all. So I get ambitious, and I come up with this idea for a new system called the Heartbeat. Uh, and what the Heartbeat is gonna do is, uh, connect to basically every information repository in the intelligence community, both at the NSA and across network boundaries, which you normally can't cross. But because I'd worked at both the CIA and the NSA, I knew the network well enough, both sides of it, sides that, uh, normal workers at the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other. I could actually connect these together. I could build bridges, uh, across this kind of, uh, network space. Um, and then draw all of these, uh, records into a new kind of system, uh, that was supposed to look at your digital ID. Uh, basically your, uh, your sort of ID card that says, "This is who I am. I work for this agency. I work in this office. Uh, these are my assignments. These are my, uh, group affiliations." And because of that, the system would be able to, uh, eventually aggregate records that were relevant to your job, uh, that were related to you. And then it could provide them, and basically you could hit this site, and it would be, uh, an update of what we used to call read boards, uh, which were manually, uh, created that would go, "Look, uh, you work in, uh, network defense, right? These are all the things that are happening on network defense. You work on, I don't know, economic takeovers in Guatemala. You know (laughs) this is, uh, what's going on for you there."Uh, but in my off time, um, I helped the team that sat next to me, which was a systems administration team for, for Windows networks because I had been a Microsoft certified systems engineer, which means, uh, basically I knew how to take care of Windows networks. Um, and this was all those guys did and they always had way too m- much work, uh, way too much work, and I had basically no work that I needed to do at all, um, because, uh, all I was supposed to do was share information, uh, which was not, uh, something that was particularly, um, in demand (laughs) uh, because most people already knew what they wanted or what they needed. So it was basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck, unless I wanted to get ambitious. And so, I did some side gigs, uh, for these other guys and one of them was running what were called dirty word searches. Uh, now, dirty word searches are... uh, let me, let me dial this back because I know we're, uh, sort of... uh, this is hard to track. Everything that the NSA does, uh, in large part is classified. Everything the CIA does, in large part, is classified. Um, if I made lunch plans with other people in my office, it was classified. That was the policy. It's dumb. Uh, th- this over-classification problem, uh, is one of the central flaws i- in government right now and this is the reason we don't understand what they're doing. This is why they can get a w- way, uh, this is why they can get away with breaking the law, uh, or violating our rights for so long, you know, 5 years, 10 years, 15, 50 years, uh, before they see... before we see what they were doing and it's because of this routine classification, right? But every system, computer system has a limit, uh, on what level of classified information is supposed to be stored on it and we've got all these complicated systems for code words and caveats, uh, that establish a system of what's called compartmentation. And this is the idea when you work at the CIA, when you work at the NSA, you're not supposed to know what's happening in the office next to you, right? Um, because you don't have need to know, right? Again, that thing from the, the movies. Um, and the reason they have this is they don't want one person to be able to go and know everything, right? Tell everybody everything. Um, they don't want anybody to know too much, particularly when they're doing lots of bad things, because then there's the risk that you realize they're doing so many bad things, that it's past the point that we can justify and they might develop sort of an ideological objection to that. Well, in the Office of Information Sharing, uh, and actually in basically every part of my career before that, I had access to everything. Um, I had a what was called a... a special caveat on my accesses, uh, called PRIVAC, which means privileged access. Uh, what this means is you're a kind of super user. You know, most people have all of these controls on the kind of information they can access, uh, but I'm in charge of the system, right? People who need information, they have to get it from somewhere. They don't know... Even the director of the CIA, right? And he says, "I need to know everything about this." Well, he doesn't know where to get it. He's just a manager. Somebody has to be able to actually cross these thresholds and get those things. That guy was me. And so dirty word searches, uh, were these kind of automated queries that I would, uh, set up to go across the whole network and look at all of the different levels of classification and compartmentation and exceptionally controlled information, uh, that's kind of... You can think of it as above top secret, uh, in these special compartments, right? Where you're not even supposed to know what these compartments are for. You only know the code word, uh, unless you work in them, unless you have access to them, unless you're read into them. Well, one day I got a hit on the dirty word search for a program that I'd never heard of called Stellar Wind. Uh, it came back, uh, because the, um, the, uh, little caveat for it... They're, they're called handling caveats, which is like, you know, you can think of like burn after reading or for your eyes only. Uh, but this one's called STLW, which means Stellar Wind. Unless you know what Stellar Wind is, you don't know how to handle it. All I knew is it wasn't supposed to be on my system and I went, "This is a little bit unusual." And it turned out, uh, this document was placed on the system because one of the employees who had worked on this program years before had come to Hawaii and this person was a lawyer, uh, I believe. Uh, and they had worked in the Inspector General's office and they had compiled a report, part of the Inspector General's report, which is when the government is investigating itself, um, into, uh, the operations and activities of this program. Well, this was the domestic mass surveillance program that I talked about in the very beginning of our conversation that started under the Bush White House. Um, Stellar Wind, uh, was no longer supposed to be really in operation. Um, it had been, uh, unveiled in a big scandal in, uh, December 2005 in the New York Times, uh, by a journalist James Risen, uh, and I, I, I'm not gonna name him because I don't want to get it wrong. Uh, another journalist. You can look up the byline, uh, if you want to see their involvement. But, uh, and there's, there's a lot of history here too, but, um, what they had found was, uh, of course, uh, the Bush White House had constructed a warrantless wiretapping program, if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal, uh, that was affecting everyone in the United States. Um, well, the Bush White House, uh, was r-... really put in a difficult position by this scandal. Um, they would have lost the election, uh, over this scandal because the New York Times actually had, uh, this story, uh, in October 2004, uh, which was the election year. They were, they were ready to go, um, with it. Uh, but at the specific request of the White House, uh, talking to the publisher of the Nor- New York Times, uh, Sulzberger and, um, Bill Keller then the executive editor of the New York Times. Uh, the New York Times said, "We won't run the story," because, uh, the president just said, "If you run this story," a month before the election, that's a very tight margin if you recall, um, "You'll have blood on your hands." And it was so close to 2001, uh, the New York Times just went, "You know what? Fine. Americans don't need to know, uh, that the Constitution's being violated. They don't need to know, uh, that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think it means. Uh, if the government says it's all right and it's a secret and you shouldn't know about it, that's fine." Now, December 2005, why did that change? Why did the New York Times suddenly run this story? Well, it's because James Risen, uh, the reporter who had found this story, had written a book and he was about to publish this book. And the New York Times was about to be in a very uncomfortable position of having to explain why they didn't run this story, uh, and how they got scooped by their own journalist. And so they finally did it, but it was too late. Bush had been reelected. And now, it was sweeping up the broken glass, uh, of our lost rights. So Congress, uh, the Bush White House was very effective in, as I said before, telling a very few select members of Congress that this program existed and they told them this program existed in ways, uh, that they wouldn't object
- 1:15:00 – 1:25:46
Jesus. …
- ESEdward Snowden
to, uh, but made them culpable for hiding the existence from the program, uh, the existence of the program from the American people. And this is why someone like Nancy Pelosi, uh, who you wouldn't exactly think would be buddy-buddy with George Bush, was completely okay in defending this kind of program, in fact. And you know, later she said, oh, well she had objections to the program that she wrote in a letter to the White House, but she never showed us the letter. She went, "Oh, well that was, that was classified," right? Um, and this is not to, to bag on her individually, it's just she's a great example in here and n- named example everyone knows, of how this process works. The White House will implicate c- certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity, and so when the w- when then when the White House gets in trouble for it, the Congress has to run cover for the White House. Uh, and so what happened was Congress, uh, passed an emergency law in, uh, 2007 called the Protect America Act, uh, which should've been our first indication this is a very bad thing, because they never name a law something like that unless it's something terrible. And what it did was it retroactively immunized all of the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day, uh, by handing your records over to the government, which they weren't allowed to do, uh, simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying, "Please do this." Uh, and these companies went, "Look, now that we've been uncovered, now that we've been shown w- that we're breaking..." Or, "Now that, uh, these journalists have shown that we've broken the law and violated the rights of Americans in a, in a staggering scale that could bankrupt our companies, because we can be sued for this, we will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this." And so we get the Pa- Protect America Act, which they say-
- NANarrator
Jesus.
- ESEdward Snowden
... you know, is an emergency. (laughs) This is all public history too.
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- ESEdward Snowden
You can look this up on Wikipedia, you know? Um, and so then, uh, they, um, they go, "It's an emergency law, we have to pass this now. We have to keep this program active. Bush is going to end the warrantless wiretapping program and continue it under this new authority where it's gonna have some, uh, s- special level of oversight and these kind of things eventually, but for now we just have to make sure people are safe." Again, they go to fear. They say, "If we don't have this program, terrorist attacks, uh, will continue. You know, people will die. Uh, blood on your hands, blood on your hands, blood on your hands. Think of the children." Protect America Act passes, uh, the companies get off the hook, the Bush White House gets off the hook. The Congress, uh, that was then sharing in, uh, criminal culpability for, uh, authorizing or rather letting these things go by without stopping them, uh, then passes in 2008, uh, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008. Uh, this is called the, the, f- uh, FAA, uh, FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And rather than stopping all of the unlawful and, uh, sort of, uh, unconstitutional activities that the intelligence agency was doing, they continued it in different ways simply by creating a few legal h- hoops for them to jump through. Uh, now this is not to g- say, you know, these things aren't helpful at all. It's not to say they're not useful at all. Uh, but it's important to understand when the government's response to any scandal, and this applies to any country, is not to, uh, make the activities of the person who was caught breaking the law comply with the law, but instead make the activities of the person who is breaking the law, uh, legal, right? They make the law comply with what the agencies want to do rather than make the agencies comply with the law. Uh, that's a problem and, and that's what happened here. Now, uh, the intelligence community's powers actually grew-... in response to this scandal, uh, in 2008, because Congress was on the hook and they just wanted to move on and get this, uh, over with. There were objections, there were people who knew this was a bad idea, but it, it passed on. Now, what the public took away from this, because a part of these laws, uh, was a requirement that the inspector general, uh, of all of these different intelligence community elements, uh, and the Director of National Intelligence submit a report saying, uh, "This is what happened under that warrantless wiretapping program. Uh, this is how it complied with the law or how it didn't comply with the law." Uh, and basically look back at how this program was constituted, what it did, what the impacts and effects were, uh, and that was supposed to be sort of the truth and reconciliation council, right? Now, why am I talking about all this ancient history? Well, I'm sitting here in 2012, uh, with a classified inspector general's report, draft report from the NSA, uh, that names names. Uh, that says, uh, Dick Cheney, that says David G- Addington, that says Nancy Pelosi, that says all these people who are involved in the program, the tick-tock of how it happens. It says the director of the NSA, that guy who was evacuating the building, uh, at the beginning of our, our, our podcast here, um, that guy was asked by the President of the United States if he would continue this program after being told, uh, by the White House and the Department of Justice, uh, that these programs were not lawful. That they were not constitutional. And the president said, "Would you continue this program on my say so alone, uh, knowing that it's risky? Uh, knowing that it's unlawful?" And he said, "Yes, sir. I will, if you think that's what's necessary to keep the country safe." A- and at that moment, I realize these guys don't care about the law. These guys don't care about the Constitution. These guys don't care about the American people. They care about the continuity of government. They care about the state, right? And this is something that people have lost. Uh, we hear this phrase over and over again, "National security. National security. National security." And we're meant to interpret that to mean public safety. But national security is a very different thing from public safety. National security is a thing that in previous generations we referred to as state security. Uh, national security was a kind of term, uh, that came out of the Bush administration, um, to run cover, uh, for the fact that we were elevating, uh, a new kind of secret police across the country. Um, and what does it mean, uh, when, uh, again, in a democracy in the United States, the public is not partner to government? Uh, the public does not hold the leash of government anymore, but we are subject to government, right? Uh, we are subordinate to government, and we're not even allowed to know that it happened. Now, uh, in, in the book, I, I tell the fact that I had access to the unclassified version of this report back in Japan. And what's interesting is the unclassified version of a report, and we've all seen this today with things like the Mueller Report and all of the intelligence reporting that's happened over the last several years. When the government, uh, provides a classified report to the public, it's normally the same document, the unclassified version and the classified version are the same thing. It's just the unclassified version has things blacked out or redacted that they say, "Oh, you're not allowed to know this sentence or this paragraph or this page," or whatever. The document that the public had been given about the warrantless wiretapping program, um, was a completely different document. It was a document tailor-made to deceive and mislead the Congress and the public of the United States. Uh, and it was effective in doing that. And in 2012, what I realized was (laughs) this is what real-world conspiracies look like, right? Um, it doesn't have to be, uh, smoking men behind closed doors, right? It's lawyers and politicians. It's ordinary people from the, the working level to the management level, uh, who go, "If we don't explain this in a certain way, we're all gonna lose our jobs." Uh, or the other way. They go, "We're, we're gonna get something out of this if we all work together." Civilization is the history of conspiracy, right? What, what is civilization but a conspiracy for all, all of us to do better by working together, right? Um, but it's this kind of thing, uh, that I think too often we forget, because it's boring as hell. Uh, I want (laughs) all your listeners, right, uh, to go to The Washington Post, because this document that I discovered that, that really changed me, uh, has been published courtesy of The Washington Post. Uh, it's called the, The Inspector General's Report on, on Stellar Wind. Um, and you can look at the actual document that I saw that was, uh, un-redacted, right? I had no blacked out pages on mine. Um, and what I believe it shows, uh, is that some of the most senior officials in the United States, elected and unelected, uh, worked together to actively undermine the rights of the American people, uh, to give themselves, uh, expanded powers. Uh, now, in their defense, uh, they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just and noble cause, right? They say they were trying to keep us safe. But that's what they always say. That's what every government says. That's no different than what the Chinese government says or the Russian government says. Um, and the question is, if they are truly keeping us safe-... why wouldn't they simply just tell us that? Why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress? Why wouldn't they put that to a vote? Uh, because if they were and they could convince us that they were, um, they'd win the vote. Uh, and particularly, we all know, like, the Patriot Act passed, one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history, passed. Um, why didn't we get a vote? Uh, and I think if you read the report, uh, the answer will be clear. So, I'm, I'm sorry, Joe. I, I went on for a very long time there.
Episode duration: 2:49:31
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