48. The Leak That Changed The World: Death of Privacy (Ep 6)

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The expected call from the British government finally came.

The cabinet secretary, the most powerful unelected figure in the machinery of state, and the prime minister's closest official aide, would like to visit me.

He turned up in my office first thing on Friday, the 21st of June.

The government was grateful for our responsible behavior so far, he said, in tones of polite reasonableness.

But enough was enough.

British menace comes in many disguises.

On the surface, there was nothing intimidating about Jeremy Haywood, Quaker and Oxford-educated with a playful little tin-tin quiff of hair.

But there was an edge of steel in his voice as he implied he was the nice guy, and he wouldn't like me to meet his rough friends.

A lot of people in government believe you should be closed down and that the Chinese are behind this.

He pointed to the block of social housing across the canal from my office.

I wonder where our guys are, he possibly joked.

Do you know how many Chinese agents are on your staff?

If we had some, it would be nice to know.

Well, welcome to the Russians Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Goulden Carrera.

And that, dear listeners, was a quote not from Edward Snowden.

Thank you, Gordon.

You've become generous as this series has aged.

That is a quote from Alan Rusbridger, who was in 2013 the editor of The Guardian newspaper.

To our American listeners, that's some version of the British New York Times, I guess, although I imagine there's many other newspapers here who are going to review me poorly after I describe them that way.

And he is writing in his memoir about the moment when the British state...

effectively comes to him and says that really his fun's over and it's time to be done writing about Edward Snowden and these leaks.

And I think a little bit on how we got here.

So prior to this, an absolute flood of articles have come out about GCHQ, Britain's signals intelligence agency, mastering the internet, tapping undersea cables, about the NSA and its capabilities to conduct domestic surveillance on Americans.

Edward Snowden is in Moscow in this time, but really at this point now, the UK government is kind of striking back against the Guardian for what it has published so far.

That's right.

The UK government has had enough of these Guardian stories coming out.

Crucially as well, The Guardian has the files from Snowden.

It has an archive of what are thought to be 60,000 documents relating to GCHQ and to the UK, which Edward Snowden gave to the Guardian journalist, Ewan McCaskill, who was the Guardian reporter who'd been sent out to Hong Kong.

He has brought them back and they are now in the Guardian's office in London.

And the Guardian journalists are kind of working on them under Russ Bridges' oversight, there as also in New York, to try and kind of produce articles about mass surveillance or about other issues.

But these are kind of top-secret documents.

And the government is not happy.

I mean, one Downing Street aide does say, you've had your fun, now it's time to hand the files back, as if they're a kind of party piece.

What were the files?

Well, we'll come to that.

But Oliver Robbins, who's actually just become the head of the British Foreign Office, is one of the people who's sent to get in touch and to say, we want these files.

You know, we want them destroyed.

And there's a threat there because basically they're saying, if you don't give us the files, we're going to close you down.

I mean, that's the implicit threat, which the Guardian feel was there.

I mean, whether it was explicit or not.

And as we heard in that quote from Alan Rusbridger, the government officials are saying, how can we be sure, this is their argument from the government, that those those files with really top secret information on them are secure in the office of the Guardian from foreign spy agencies?

That's the comment about assets of Chinese intelligence being on staff or having access to the building, that kind of thing.

And that becomes the discussion between them, because the Guardian says, well, look, we've got controls over who goes in there.

It's in a special room.

It's not connected to the internet.

The files are not online.

You know, there's a physical security list.

Only two people can write names onto the list.

And then the spies from government say, well, who enforces the list and the guardian goes well you know the security guards who are there 24 7 and then the government goes well what's the background of the security guards you know how do we know they're not being paid by the chinese to kind of let people in out of hours you know and how many chinese agents might be on your staff and that you know this is the kind of argument couple guardian rent a cops smoking outside the office guarding the guarding the secrets yeah and the government is clearly unhappy on that now alan rusbridger feels you know snowden has entrusted the guardian with these files they don't want to just hand them back.

You know, they feel that's the kind of wrong thing to do.

And they're also worried whether it might allow some of the state to investigate them and work out how they were taken and build a case against him or use it to uncover journalistic sources.

They don't want to hand it back.

So

in this fascinating kind of compromise, they agree that staff from GCHQ will be allowed to come to the office and supervise the smashing and destruction of the files.

I mean, it is interesting because the guarding the light.

We don't want you destroying it, but we're going to let it be destroyed so you can come and tell us how to do it.

I think American listeners will be a little bit befuddled as to why the government has the authority to do this.

Because, you know, I guess in the States, you would have

First Amendment protection.

And Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure, which, of course, was originally about you people and

what you were up to.

But now I think it is kind of an interesting context.

It's going to be dealt with very differently.

And I think the answer is partly there are less protections for journalists in the UK.

We don't have the First Amendment protections.

And the laws around things like the Official Secrets Act and the ability to put injunctions on people are, if you like, a bit looser and open to interpretation and to be used for pressure.

And I think this is one of the problems in the UK for journalists is that there's kind of ambiguity about when an injunction might be slapped on someone or when the Official Secrets Act could be used to prosecute journalists.

And without some of those constitutional protections, there is a higher degree of risk.

You know, they're aware of that, the Guardian.

So two men from GCHQ come to the Guardian offices, and they start saying that perhaps the Russians could turn the plastic cups onto the table into microphones through some clever way.

The Guardian, I think, rather unfairly nicknamed the pair the Hobbits, but they agree that they're going to be able to come back, I think, the next day and destroy them.

The pair say there'll be a lot of smoke and fire.

So the first day is kind of a reconnaissance mission by the two hobbits.

By the two hobbits.

The smoke and fire means

things like Smorg the Dragon from the, you know, you think it's going to be some kind of Tolkien-like tail.

So they come in on Friday, the 19th of July, right?

And they're going to very politely do the destruction over the weekend.

Yeah.

I mean, it's all kind of bizarrely British and polite, this act.

So the next day they come back and three Guardian staff are there.

And it's so interesting because I think we all wonder, like, if you've got a computer, and you've got some sensitive information on it, how do you really make sure that it's destroyed?

I think everyone probably realizes it's a lot different from just dragging and dropping the files to your

recycle bin

on the thing to make sure that top secret files are not available.

Yes, all of our 13-year-old listeners are going to be very interested to learn here.

This is going to be a Gordon Carrera tutorial.

How to destroy hard drive.

There are things on your computer that you don't want your parents to see.

Listen closely.

And I've got some bad news for you because if you really want to wipe it from a foreign intelligence agency or your parents being able to get hold of it, it's not going to be easy.

So it's not enough just to wipe the hard drive.

You have to destroy physically every part of the computer that could store data.

Because, and I spoke to someone, let's just say in the know, who may or may not have been involved in some of this, about why it was so complex.

And they said you can even hide small amounts of data outside of the hard drive on a device.

So, it's not enough just to destroy or wipe the hard drive.

You have to destroy every significant chip on the board of the computer.

And they use angle grinders to just kind of pound them.

So, this is like sparks and flame, and there's sweat, and there's dust as they literally break apart.

And just every single chip has to be smashed physically.

And then that is even that.

I think

these guys had a lot of fun, didn't they?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, I think it's a bizarre scene.

I mean, the next problem is even that's not enough because you're going to need something called a degausser, which in the show notes,

we are selling rest is classified branded degaussers.

Yeah, okay, this This is where we advertise to Gausser.

I think they cost about £30,000 or £30,000 each though.

And ours are more expensive because of the superior branding.

Yeah, of course.

And they are basically a microwave oven.

For electronics.

For electronics.

And again, I kind of asked someone, I said, really?

What does this do?

And it turns out

you then feed the chips and the boards into it.

And it uses an electromagnetic pulse to realign their magnetic elements on the hard disk and on the computer.

So in other words, it uses physics rather than code to wipe it.

To wipe the drive.

So that it's impossible to recover the data.

Because otherwise, if you just hit delete, basically it's just overwriting it, but you can recover it.

But this, you know, you're feeding the bits of computer into it, and it goes pop

as it wipes it.

And this whole thing, you know, takes three hours to destroy these computers.

And then they just, they shake hands and then walk away.

That is very British.

It is very British.

Handshake is kind of mysterious of why anyone, anyone on either side offered that at the end of this degaussing, this sweaty degaussing session.

I mean, it does remind me in my continual quest to work breaking bad references into our podcast, Gordon.

There is an episode in which I believe Walter and Jesse, Walter is, of course, the guy who's making crystal math for those who have not

something we endorse.

No, no, no.

Not a friend of the podcast.

And I believe the hard drive is in police custody.

It's come off of, there's a laptop that's been taken from a drug dealer that's in police custody.

There's some incriminating evidence on that hard drive.

And they wire up a van that delivers this electromagnetic pulse

outside of the police station.

It's a very interesting scene where basically all of the electronics inside this kind of vault, once they bring the van close enough, go smash against the wall and are sort of, I guess, degaused.

Yeah.

Right.

Well,

if you feel the need to degauss, then that's what it took.

Between that episode, your instructions and the link in the show notes to the rest is classified, officially branded de Gausser.

People now know how to do it.

You're a 13-year-old.

If you have $40,000,

you can wipe your hard drive down to the subatomic level.

Yeah, very good.

And it's described by Alan Ruspiger, I think, as a piece of theater.

Yeah, it sounds like complete with a handshake at the very end.

I understand that there is this kind of vagueness in the law.

And the Guardian, of course, doesn't want to run totally afoul of the British state.

But I mean,

why is he willing to do this?

Well, it's an interesting story because one of the reasons is that that's not the only copy.

And, you know, as we said, British law is somewhat more restrictive.

But they have another copy, which is in New York, where it's under First Amendment protection, and where the Guardian are also going to be working eventually with the New York Times, to whom they will actually give one of the archives in order to kind of keep it protected.

At the very start, I did

tease the idea that I might reveal something of a clandestine mission.

That's right.

You did.

I did.

I did.

And for those who remember all the way back, because it was a long time ago,

I'll lift the cover.

Like Chekhov's shotgun, you are delivering now

on the mantelpiece.

Now it must be fired.

It's my tiny bit part in the story of Edward Snowden and the archive.

So in that summer, kind of September 2013, I get summoned by my boss, BBC, the head of BBC News, who said, come and see me.

And he says, I've got a mission for you.

Should you choose to accept it?

And he didn't quite say it like that.

No, don't ruined it, Gordon.

Did he say mission, though?

Close.

And the stories at that point, The Guardian was feeling pretty lonely.

And it was actually degaussed.

They've been degaussed.

And also, a lot of the British press was having a go at them for endangering national security.

And I think they were looking for allies, which is one of the reasons they were in touch with the New York Times and others.

I was told that senior leadership of The Guardian had contacted senior leadership of the BBC to discuss whether we would be interested in partnering and looking at this archive.

And so my boss boss said, the mission is to go to New York and to look at the archive.

And the instructions from my boss were, do not write anything down electronically.

So don't put anything on a computer.

Don't use your phone out to contact anyone about this.

Just go and then come back and tell me what I think, you know, give me a judgment on the archive and what we think could happen.

Have a quick, breezy look at 10 million documents, secret document.

Come back with a a synthesis.

I was like, sure.

So anyway, I head out to New York, following my instructions, my clandestine mission.

What was your cover for the travel?

Gordon Carrera, BBC journalist.

I was not using a, I was not, this is, I was not a deep cover spy, David.

And I go to New York and I meet actually in the Guardian office, I meet Alan Rosspritcher, Janine Gibson, who is the US editor, Stuart Miller, her deputy.

And they're very nice to me.

And they say, sit down and go and have a look at the raw Snowden archive.

I wasn't given rights to browse through the whole lot.

I was given a kind of selection of the raw documents.

And it's very interesting because even now, how many years later are we, 12 years later, firstly I can remember it vividly.

And secondly, I still don't think I can describe some of the things I saw because I think they were that

sensitive to see stuff which is top secret, strapped to

you know, in front of you.

And also the stuff I saw was not stuff that had been made public.

Probably interesting to give people a sense of it, but I'm going to be very careful what I say because I still think some of the stuff is very classified so there was stuff about how the bearers kind of pick up data from the fiber optic cables there was a very interesting report from a gchq staffer who'd been to a foreign country about what signals could be intercepted in a capital of that country and how they could be intercepted obviously quite interesting also with the name of the staffer on the file there was something which was very sensitive which was and this was one of the most strangest things it was a problem book for GCHQ mathematicians, right?

It outlined what they could do in terms of finding certain types of communications and what they couldn't do and then laid out the problem for the mathematicians to try and solve mathematically.

And the booklet was just full of maths, which I, even with my A-level maths, I could not understand because this is like for the most advanced mathematicians in the country.

But what was so sensitive about it and so fascinating was that it absolutely showed what they could do and what the limits were of their capability.

So it told you exactly what,

and this is why I'm being very careful, and I'm sure they maybe change now, but exactly what kinds of communications in a certain way could be intercepted and what kinds couldn't be, which obviously is very sensitive.

And so it was amazingly interesting to see.

But one of the things that I came away realizing was, A, that there was some really top secret stuff in that archive.

I mean, like properly top secret stuff.

And secondly, that the Guardian actually had been very careful about what it was publishing.

And I think now government officials I've spoken to recognise this with The Guardian.

They were angry at the time, but there was a whole load of stuff that The Guardian didn't touch, which was incredibly sensitive and which could have been incredibly damaging.

But anyway, last point of my story is two things happened, which were interesting.

One was,

so I've been told no electronic notes.

I'd taken some very careful paper notes because I thought I needed kind of a memoir.

to know what to think about this, not of the actual content of the documents, but kind of just general stuff about what I thought about it or whatever i got out of the guardian office and i remember thinking to myself going back to my hotel room and thinking i'm not even sure i should have these paper notes

because i think i think this is this is slightly dangerous did you eat them i'll come back to that because there's a particular risk because actually in august glenn greenworld's partner david miranda had been stopped at heathrow airport under terrorism powers uh because they believed he was taking documents from the archive and taking them i think from berlin laura proitras to rio to Glen Greenworld, but via London.

And they'd stopped him under the Terrorism Act, which was very controversial because it was basically someone couraering, yeah, but for journalism, and they're using terrorism powers against him.

And so there was quite a lot of worry.

Like, hang on a sec, if the authorities know I'm coming back, might they think I've got something?

You're muling papers.

If I'm muling papers, am I going to get arrested?

So I thought, got to destroy this stuff.

How do you destroy papers, David?

I'm in a hotel room.

And you gouse them.

Yeah.

It's physical papers.

But I was sat there with like, and I just, I remember thinking to myself, I don't know how to do this.

I've not had spy training because in the old Cold War spy movies, you put it in an ashtray, don't you, and burn it.

But you haven't got an ashtray in it.

No one has an ashtray now.

You tell me what I should have done.

Well, I'll tell you what I did.

You tell me what you did first.

I tore it up into tiny bits, and then I went around various cafes in Manhattan and then flushed it down toilets.

I think that's the right answer.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

No, I do.

I think that's the right answer.

I think critical to hit multiple

guts.

Would that be better if you had a map of the sewage network to make sure it didn't end up in the same place and someone's going to reconstruct it.

But yeah, I think multiple toilets, small pieces.

And I'll give you my last weird.

Did you shred it or did you rip it yourself?

I ripped it.

I ripped it.

Okay.

You should have bought a shredder.

Okay.

Last bit of this story, which is also bizarre.

So I don't want to make this all about me.

But so phone and laptop locked into a safe in the hotel room all the time, never, you know, never took them out.

So then I go back to the airport to fly home.

And this I remember vividly.

I'm on the plane at JFK in my seat, economy, before you ask,

and

switch on my phone.

And And in front of me, I look at my email inbox, all my emails start deleting one by one, as if someone is pressing the delete key.

And by the end of about a couple of minutes, my inbox is empty of emails.

Now, that was deeply suspicious.

Sure.

And I asked people afterwards, from you know, GCHQ and from America, I said, come on, what was that?

And they said, no, we'd never do something about that.

But I, at the time, interpreted it as someone saying, we know what you've been doing.

And we're going to send a little signal to you to say we know what you've been doing.

You know, we're going to let you know that you thought you were doing a kind of very clever secret mission But actually we know exactly what you've been doing But they people I've spoken to are adamant they wouldn't do that but then it's a little bit of a weird coincidence Did you get the emails back?

I had to reconstruct my inbox and kind of rebuild it when I went back because it's not clandestine surveillance is it if you're deleting someone's inbox I guess it could have been a mistake by the clandestine surveillant who got it there and started monkeying around.

I mean, maybe it was our feeb friends

having a little fun with you in New York.

Yeah.

You're not an American citizen and don't have the same, you know,

protections, though.

Well, you think that has its limits.

Wink and a nod.

But anyway, I remember thinking to myself, someone's got an eye on me on what I'm doing on my...

not very clandestine mission.

And you never got any closure on this, though.

I never got an answer to it.

If anyone knows the answer, if any members of the intelligence community are listening who were involved in deleting my inbox and would like to get in touch,

would like to be whistleblowers, the email, you know where to reach us.

Scroll down past the Gosser link.

But that was my very brief

introduction into seeing the raw documents and the archive and to understand what it really looked like.

And it was eye-opening.

So you have brought back first-hand evidence of Snowden's fourth deadly sin.

Which one was that?

Which is the indiscriminate nature of what he provided?

Because you're attesting to documents that really any responsible British or American journalist should never

have printed.

But also to say that they have not come to light since then.

You know, so so there are archives which I think are in the US, I think with the New York Times, for instance, maybe bits in other places as well.

And still there,

still there.

And still there.

And one of the deals the Guardian made was, we're going to let you have it, but only for a very narrow type of story about mass surveillance, not for kind of dipping into to look for other stories or what else you can find.

And so, yes, that the stuff is there, and it's probably also less sensitive now than it used to be, but it has been, you know, limited in how it's been used, I'd say.

And maybe there, Gordon Carrera has returned from his secret mission, albeit with his inbox completely scrambled mysteriously.

Edward Snowden's still in Moscow.

When we come back, maybe we'll deal with Snowden the man, his life in Russia, and the legacy of what he leaked.

See you after the break.

Welcome back.

We are in the home stretch of our death march through the life and times of Edward Snowden.

And I think maybe, Gordon, as we sort of bring this all to a head, we start with Snowden himself because we've been talking a lot about journalists, your undercover secret mission to New York to look at the archives, all of these incredible, just bombshell stories that have come out.

But Ed Snowden has actually just been in Moscow.

He has been there ever since.

Most of what we talked about happens in 2013.

It's now 2025, and he's still there, really in exile.

Yeah, he is.

I mean, it is a strange life for him, a very different life, maybe not the one he expected.

And first he kind of keeps his head down.

You know, he says he fears being snatched.

He didn't speak Russian.

I think, you know, maybe it got easier for him as his girlfriend came out.

But while I think, you know, maybe the surroundings physically may have got easier for him, politically, I think the surroundings have got trickier for him in a way, because, you know, Russia of 2013 is different from the Russia of today, of 2025, and particularly in the relations with the West.

Being stuck in Moscow looks like a more difficult thing and a more problematic thing now in terms of the way we see Snowden than perhaps it did in 2013 and than perhaps he expected, given the darker turn Russia has taken under Vladimir Putin.

And, you know, the idea of Edward Snowden, a kind of champion of internet freedom, being in this country, which has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive.

I mean, that is, I think, you know, even though he can't say it, it must be uncomfortable and harder for him, as well as for the story about him.

It's taken a turn.

I think that's the way of putting it.

Well, and this is more, I think, on the deadly set number five, which is Ed Snowden as essentially a stooge for the Russians, a mouthpiece.

Yeah, I don't buy that.

In many cases.

But, I mean, interestingly enough, he speaks pretty frequently virtually from Moscow.

And I think between 2015 and 2020, he actually earned a little over a million dollars in speaking fees.

Right.

You know, he's spoken to the EU parliament.

He speaks to companies, conferences.

He actually gave a talk at a big Bitcoin conference in 2024, I believe, where sort of Ed Snowden's head pipes in virtually and he speaks to this big group convened in Las Vegas or wherever.

It's interesting because I think he's unlike a lot of other defectors that we'll probably talk about on this program, he is very comfortable in the virtual world.

I do wonder if for him, kind of exile in Moscow is a little bit less painful than it might be for other people.

Then it might

be a lot of people.

As long as he's online.

Obviously, you know, and he's he's not talked about this or refuses to talk about it, but clearly the Russians have set some boundaries around what he is able to say.

You know, he's he's very clearly enabled by his Russian handlers or sort of minders to speak publicly, to speak negatively about the United States, NSA, the intelligence community.

I also think he's also not been afraid at points to be critical of Russia.

And I mean, I agree, there are going to be boundaries because he is there.

But I think the idea he's some kind of Russian stooge, I don't think that's right.

I think he's a person who has to live under limits.

Yes.

And I guess maybe stooge isn't the most precise word I could use.

I think what seems to have happened, and what I think Putin, because this would have been a Putin-level decision to allow him to stay to kind of create this environment for him.

I think the decision was:

let's just let this guy continue his crusade yeah and do it from Moscow and I imagine almost the Russian pitch to some degree which is not a cold or nasty pitch but is kind of a subtle one is you just stay here and we'll kind of help you communicate your message yeah right we'll let you get on these conferences and video conferences and and undermine confidence in American society, the Western system, the intelligence and security agency.

Well, you can argue he continues to be consistent in his views on internet freedom, you know, and privacy.

He continues to be a privacy jihadist, as I've said.

And he's consistent in that.

He is consistent in that.

It's very interesting.

He essentially has come out and said that he believes that the provisions of the U.S.

Constitution around the right to expression and the right to privacy really apply to everybody, not just Americans.

And so he's kind of continued that.

Yeah.

Really pretty extreme viewpoint.

He's taken that to its logical end in what he communicates from Russia.

But let's step back at this point, because I think it is interesting 12 years on to kind of look at the legacy and what all of this led to and what it meant.

Because at the time it was very intense.

But I think now with a bit of hindsight, you can see a more balanced view, I think,

of what Snowden left behind from that, you know, kind of amazing period.

He wanted to expose some of these programs.

He exposed them.

I think the reality is, and I think this is really interesting, is that most of those programs, whether it's the US or the UK, are still going.

But they are going under much greater public understanding, oversight, and accountability, and under different legal frameworks.

That, I think, is important as a legacy.

Because I think, you know, there is this comment from David Anderson, who did a big study about the kind of British powers that GCHQ, for instance, had.

And his argument was, it's not necessarily that they shouldn't have had the powers, but the lack of accountability and transparency about them made them undemocratic because there wasn't enough control or understanding of how those powers were being exercised.

And I think that is an important legacy of Snowden: to create a public debate and to improve the oversight of these powers that the state had, rather than stop them having the powers, though, which is a different point.

It probably is worth just a little bit of a reminder on precisely what he exposed

Because I think it is

basically

three buckets of capabilities, right?

And I'll just speak to the American context here.

The first one is that the National Security Agency was collecting information from U.S.

tech companies

to be able to target foreign citizens of the United States and their communications.

outside of the United States, but that would pass through those U.S.

tech companies, right?

So that's kind of like one

bucket, Prism.

The second one is that the NSA, the National Security Agency, was collecting telephone metadata

in bulk on American citizens from Verizon, ATT, to enable not searches on directed on U.S.

persons, but to enable connections to be made.

For example, if a safe house in Karachi gets taken down by CIA, phones are collected.

They want to see who in the United States those phones might be in contact with.

It allows for that kind of searching and connection, right?

And then there's another, I think, bucket around the NSA collecting information from U.S.

tech companies abroad.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

That's more kind of traditional sort of foreign hacking.

Right.

Yeah.

So in those cases, and actually,

Bart Gelman, who is the Washington Post reporter who wrote this book, Dark Mirror, on these collection programs, basically says that the NSA behaved responsibly in its searches

through those databases, and there wasn't anything he could dig up to really show that they were misused.

But let me give you a- I just think it's an important thing.

It's a good bit of context.

But for instance, the database of U.S.

phone numbers, they searched it 288 times in 2012 for times when a foreign terrorist dials a U.S.

number.

13 leads are past the FBI.

One person, you know, this is according to official statistics, gets caught planning an attack in Times Square and arrested.

But the FBI actually actually knew about him anyway so you have a kind of mass collection of of data on americans but actually is it proportional is it worth it you know it's part of that post 911 era of kind of collect everything who knows how it'll be useful and that yeah metadata program has kind of died you know effectively and it's gone it was i think it was sunsetted those patriot act yeah stipulations so which suggests it has some utility but not enough to keep it going prism is still there effectively 702 but debated you know and it's quite political about how very political very political in the US.

Some of those capabilities are there and clearly had some use, but I think it's quite hard to judge from the outside how vital it was they had these capabilities.

As I said, to my mind, the mistake was not necessarily building the capabilities, but thinking that you could do some of this without greater public understanding or transparency or accountability.

I'd put it down to just read that quote from Bart the Elementary said, quote, nothing in the Snowden archive and nothing I learned independently offered reason to doubt that the NSA workforce did its best to follow the rules in good faith.

And so I just, there's a lot of different kind of core debates we can kind of bring this down to.

I don't think this is a debate so much about whether the NSA or the FBI was really spying.

on Americans.

I think this is a debate about whether we as a society want our government to possess this information in the first place, right?

It's about whether the government has the right or whether it's good that the government possesses this.

A lot of the real scary scenarios here are not what's happened with this already as it relates to Americans.

It's about what could happen in a future where this information is potentially used by a more authoritarian.

Without wishing to get into US politics, I mean, you could argue we are in a more authoritarian world, you know, in which states and how they use intelligence agencies change over time.

And therefore, you can have these capabilities in secret and go, well, it's fine because it's all under strict controls and the people are good people.

But all it takes is a more authoritarian government to go, I want to use that capability in a slightly different way and tweak the secret way in which it's used.

And suddenly you're on the road to something else.

So that's why I think how much you want those controls over the state, I think it's a really interesting question.

Another area, I think, is how much damage did Snowden do to this spying game?

I mean, you know, at the time, again, I think you can see this in a different way now that we look back.

Because there was a lot of like, like he's done huge damage to capabilities stuff has been switched off we're going dark which is the kind of intelligence phrase for when you could watch something a target you know on the internet or their communications and then you lose that ability I spoke to someone recently they said you know wasn't so much we went dark it went spotty you know it lost a bit of insight and it did have, I think, some some damage to some of those capabilities because it revealed to, you know, terrorists and others how much the us could observe them that they could get their gmail through prism and things like that and therefore they changed their behavior but you know i think the intelligence agencies are pretty good at adapting it was interesting one person said to me that if there was a a mistake or a loss to it it was that they spent so long really focused on on regaining their access and their capability to watch terrorists and insurgents at that point And that if anything, that meant they took their eye off the ball of what other states were doing, you know, you're kind of Russia and China, because they were so focused on rebuilding the capability over Snowden.

And that might be one of the kind of consequences of it, is that, you know, Russia and China got a bit more of a pass.

You can see China since then thinking, how can we build an equivalent capability?

How, for instance, potentially could they use some of their tech companies.

We've talked about TikTok in the past, you know, to collect data or to do things like that.

TikTok obviously say they wouldn't do it, but you could imagine if you're in China, you're thinking, hey, America is using its tech companies, it's using all this access, it's got all these databases.

We want to be able to do something similar.

And I think you start to see changes in Chinese behavior after Snowden as it tries to almost replicate the kind of capability it now understands the U.S.

has.

So that is irrespective of the kind of specific intelligence.

You do see, I think, those quite significant changes.

Well, and I think in addition to the just the very clear hard costs of, okay, there's a lost platform that enabled us to collect on a foreign adversary, terrorist group, criminal network, whatever it might be, that could potentially go away, right?

I mean, that obviously happened.

I would imagine a lot of that over time was regained, right?

But there was a massive effort inside the intelligence community.

I mean, this is when I was still inside.

I mean, and I was not directly related to this at all, but a massive effort to try to understand who had what information and to really conduct a kind of damage assessment.

So there's a massive number of man hours.

It's probably just not even possible to calculate

dealing with the Snowden fallout internally.

There's also the fallout.

You know, we talked a couple episodes ago about those tech companies on that slide.

They had been sort of

some mixture of kind of coercion and payouts had sort of compelled them to cooperate.

And now you look at the latest, I mean, it was early, it was early mid-2024 when section 702 of the FISE Act came back for reauthorization, nasty political fight around it.

And you can see that the tech companies now have basically said, look,

unless you actually compel us to do this, we're not cooperating.

So there's a massive chilling, I think, that has happened between Washington and Silicon Valley in the years since.

Yeah.

Much more adversarial.

Yeah, there was.

I mean, there was in the immediate aftermath of Snowden because the tech companies were furious.

I think Mark Zuckerberg went to see Obama in the White House and said, you blew it by saying that PRISM is only used to spy on foreigners, not Americans, because, of course, most of the customers of Facebook are foreigners, not Americans.

And so they were kind of angry at

bad for Zuckerberg's business to know.

Poor Zuck.

Poor Zuck that actually at the time, Facebook and the NSA were working together to collect intelligence or, you know, to get details of basically their customers.

And of course,

they knew this was happening.

He was just frustrated that it came to light.

And so I think it definitely had a kind of chilling effect with the tech companies.

Although I think now the tech bros are perhaps a bit closer to

the White House, you know, again, and they're a bit more aligned, I think, tech companies to nations.

Whereas in that period in 2013, 2015, they kind of saw themselves as kind of above nations and above politics.

And I think we have a different view of tech companies now than then.

Many ordinary citizens just sort of assume that, well, look, tech companies are selling all of our data anyway.

So there's maybe less of a assumption of privacy now.

Although the focus of that kind of ire or concern is now much more focused on the tech companies themselves, maybe as opposed to the NSA or GCHQ.

Because I always think this is one of the interesting aspects of it, is the reason the state could get this data was because the tech companies were collecting it, you know, and the state's getting it off the tech companies.

And Snowden made everyone go look at the state.

But actually, the tech companies were hoovering up people's data in a massive way and continue to do it and continue basically to mine it and do the kind of data analysis about it, but for the purposes of selling advertising and for understanding them.

And you're right.

I think at the time Snowden came out, we became very attuned to the state doing it.

And it was only maybe Cambridge Analytica 2016, 2017 that we started to think about what the tech companies could do and were doing.

We came to think much more about this kind of, you know, surveillance capitalism model and, you know, what constitutes surveillance, collecting large amounts of data about us, keeping on a computer and having it automatically processed.

is that surveillance?

I mean, in the Snowden world, that is surveillance because it's what the NSA were doing.

If it's surveillance, then we're, we're certainly living in a surveillance society now, but it is as much driven by companies as it is by governments, I think.

And, you know, it goes to big issues about consent.

How do we consent to our data being collected and used and analyzed, whether it's by companies and the state, especially when the systems are so complex?

But I think those big questions, which I think Snowden raised, which are really interesting, which is if you are living in a world in which all your data is collected and analyzed, whether it's by companies or the state, does that take away your privacy or privacy?

Does it remove your ability for free expression?

Does it kind of reduce the ability to have dissent?

I think those questions that he raised are still valid.

But as I said, I think they're as valid about corporate data collection as they are about, if you like, the NSA or GCHQ's data collection.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: The flip side of that privacy or privacy argument is, and this is the case that continues to be made when that Section 702 authorization comes up, as it now will again two years from now, right?

Lawmakers really on both sides of the aisle continue to make the case that these capabilities for the NSA, GCHQ,

in particular to be able to intercept or collect data from U.S.

tech companies abroad, are absolutely critical.

to national security, right?

And that there is a pile of evidence to show that they are critical to disrupting terrorist plots, to gaining an information advantage over adversaries.

I believe they've even been linked to the takedown, really the targeted killing of Ayman al-Zaworri, the head of al-Qaeda, a few years ago.

So, you know, there is a national security argument to be made that these capabilities are critical.

And I would argue that, at least in the U.S.,

policymakers, again, on both sides of the aisle, I think they feel a tremendous responsibility to their constituents and American citizens to continue to provide these capabilities to NSA to protect people.

Yeah.

And it's to some extent, it's about, do you worry more about your government spying on you, or do you worry about your government protecting you from other threats?

And to some extent, that's a very personal individual thing.

It depends a little bit on your own

mindset, your own personal politics about where you're coming from, about what kind of person you are, whether you fear being persecuted by your your own government, what kind of state you live in, how you view your state.

If you're in Germany and you have a history of the kind of, you know, Gestapo and the Stasi, you have a different attitude towards government surveillance and monitoring from other countries.

And America has a more libertarian tradition in some extent than the UK.

But I think it is quite a personal thing, you know, about where you sit as to how you balance those different risks and threats and therefore how much power the state should have.

I think it's critical to frame it as a trade-off because if these authorizations were taken away and if Ed Snowden Snowden had been able to wave his magic wand, he has really worked hard again, because I think he's being dishonest about this intellectually.

He's worked hard to say, oh, look, there's sort of no actual cost, right, to me revealing these programs, and there's no real national security argument to be made to justify them.

And I would say

there's an absolute trade-off here if you decided to wave your wand and end that bulk metadata collection, which eventually did, and the Section 702 authorization, those come with real costs.

Yeah.

And I think

the public should have the ability or its proxy in the form of parliamentarians and congresspeople to have an informed debate about those trade-offs.

I think the problem was before

that there wasn't an informed enough debate and consent to work out what those

trade-offs to even decide.

To determine what they were.

To determine what they were.

So, I mean, as we come to the end, I guess it's interesting, isn't it?

Because it's important not to make this all about Snowden the man, but I think it is interesting to go back to him.

And I I think one of the questions I have, which has gone through this series, is what was he trying to do?

To ask the question, did he succeed and what was his legacy?

If he was trying to stop surveillance,

if that was his aim, to kind of destroy the NSA and its powers, he's failed.

Because the institutions have continued and a lot of the powers, maybe not all, are still there.

If his aim was to expose them in order to put them under better democratic control,

then he's arguably succeeded in that aim.

But I actually, I'm not quite sure which of those two, you know, is he an ideologue or is he a vandal?

Ed, if you're out there, kind of get in touch and tell us what

you feel you've succeeded or not.

That to me is kind of one of the big questions.

Well, he also has, I believe he's got over 5 million followers on X/slash Twitter.

So he's definitely succeeded from the standpoint of his egomania.

And maybe it is worth just sort of bluntly returning to one of the kind of questions that we started this whole series with, which is he a hero or is he a villain?

Right.

And I'm going to re-litigate.

I know you love this, Gordon.

I'm going to re-litigate my deadly sins against Ed Snowden.

Right.

Because I do have a final gun

from what you thought.

Gordon is leaving to go to the bathroom.

I'm going to

communicate this to the youth.

Okay.

Okay.

Directly, tweetly.

Pitches for my personally branded de Gausser that we're selling.

Okay.

So, number one, he has a demonstrated track record throughout this whole episode of fabricating stories and exaggerating his access and telling outright falsehoods about the chronology.

Second one, very impure motives.

I would argue, I think there's a little top hat of ideology on this one.

I think that the core of this is a bit of a revenger's tale against the NSA.

and against really his superiors for not seeing his genius, right?

The downloads start in 2012 after a big fight at NSA with his superiors about a software patch in which he gets reamed for having raised the issue to Fort Mead, right?

Sin number three, he does not avail himself of any of the whistleblowing routes.

Now, I'm having worked in a monstrous government bureaucracy.

I completely sympathize with the fact that these routes are clunky, uncertain.

He had other whistleblowers before him who were sort of told to pound sand.

The roots were available to him.

He decided to not take them.

Yeah.

Okay.

The fourth one, the completely disproportionate nature of what he leaked relative to his stated goals.

If he wanted to focus entirely on the NSA's surveillance on Americans, there's a very small portion of the documentation of the 1.5 million documents, pages of documents that he took that he could have taken to make that case.

And I think he would have been treated a lot differently.

The last one, you know, you've disputed Sin 5, you disputed my word that he's a Russian stooge, but he has become, I think, a

mouthpiece in a Russian active measures campaign against the West.

Passively, they let him talk, right?

They let him spread this message.

I think all of this, to my mind, mind, is absolutely no.

Hey,

no way he's here.

I see him as an arsonist, right?

And here's why.

I think that there have been, and out of this debate over privacy versus national security, more transparency, more openness with the public about what's actually going on.

I think that is good.

Yeah.

I think it's probably good, not to get too technical.

I think it's probably good that that bulk metadata collection was sunsetted and taken away.

Because I actually think that is the most egregious example of really unlawful search and seizure on the part of the U.S.

government, right?

I'm glad that's gone.

But to my mind, the system that we have today, which I think is better than the system that he

was fighting against, is kind of like if I had a house, you burned my house down,

and then I build a better house 10 years later, I'm not really thanking the arsonist for burning my old house down.

And I think that's the role he played.

And I think, you know, he could have done things a lot differently.

I think that if he had been proportional, I think that if he had stayed in the United States, he would be a free man in the U.S.

today.

And he'd be

more or less a hero.

Right.

Now, obviously, there'd be people inside the national security establishment who would disagree with that, but he made these decisions along the way that I've just outlined that I think

firmly cast him in that role as arsonist.

And then, to my mind, absolutely not a hero.

Yeah, I mean, thank you for that very, very long indictment of Edward Snowden.

I've not just returned from the bathroom.

I have a go to that.

I mean, look, I actually think, not just on Edward Snowden, but generally, I think trying to separate the world into heroes and villains is a mistake generally.

And I think it's too simplistic.

And I think it's always a mistake.

People are more complicated than that.

People's motives, as I think, we can see with Edward Snowden, may have been complicated and confused between the ideological and the grievance.

And I think that is true.

And I think the legacy and the effects of him are complicated and not, you know, binary.

I think more democratic accountability over the surveillance systems and the intelligence collection systems are a plus.

But I think there is a legacy of damage in certain ways in certain places, but maybe not as much as people say.

Just as a kind of final thought, I do think he is an interesting figure because going back to the man slightly, he is a figure who comes from a kind of different age of the internet.

To go back to that kid who grew up with computers and this idea that the internet could be free.

And today, that seems like a very romantic, idealistic notion, but also utterly bewildering, I think, to people.

The idea that the internet could be a place of kind of free expression and anonymity and privacy, when the reality is, is actually it does look like a darker place.

It looks like a darker place where darker things happen online, where the state feels it needs to be online to find the darker things that are happening, you know, and what people are doing online and including bad people online, and in which, you know, kind of cyber warfare, cyber attacks are happening and in which states and companies are, you know, acquiring data and eroding that privacy online.

So I think fundamentally I come away thinking Edward Snowden might have been a man driven.

by both ideology and grievance, but he also a kind of figure trapped almost in a time of the past.

And whether you view that as a kind of happier time or not,

it's not today anymore.

No.

And we're in a kind of a different, darker world of the internet than that idea that we had in the past.

Well, and I guess it also, I appreciate, Gordon, that you're, you're justifying my description of him as a privacy jihadist, because he is sort of like a jihadist, trying to go back to this golden page.

But isn't there something, isn't there something quite attractive about that?

About

elements of that when it was a freer place?

I don't know.

Maybe it's unrealistic to think it could be that, though.

Well, it certainly doesn't seem like a past that we can ever really return to, given all that's happened.

And I think it, just as we close out this series on Snowden, I think it leaves us with this question, this tension over privacy and national security that is really kind of unresolved or unresolvable now in this new world of the internet.

So with that, we come to the end of this long and I think fascinating story of Edward Snowden.

We really hope you've enjoyed it.

And before we go, we'd like to say a massive thank you, especially to everyone who signed up to be a member of the Declassified Club.

We're thrilled to have you on board.

And for those who want one more Snowden high,

the bonus content this week will be an interview with Chris Inglis, and he was deputy director of the NSA at the time of the whole Snowden affair.

So, if you want to hear that, you can join at therestisclassified.com and remember to take advantage of our launch discount.

That's right.

One last Snowden high, one punch into your veins.

Join us for that one.

We will see you next time.

See you next time.