43. The Leak That Changed The World: Snowden Hacks the System (Ep 1)

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera and I'm David McLasky.

And before we get to today's episode on Edward Snowden and the biggest leak of government secrets in modern American history, David and I have got an announcement.

Drum roll, David.

That's the drum roll, isn't it?

That's right.

If that hasn't been edited out, I'm doing a drum roll on my desk.

And the reason is, we're launching the declassified club.

That is right.

It's been declassified as of right now by Gordon Carrera, who is announcing it.

We are launching a club.

Why, dear listeners?

And the answer is that we have tried to make this podcast the place

for spy content.

We want to show how the world of espionage really works.

And the idea, I think it's fair to say, Gordon, with the club, is that we want to do a lot more

of that.

And so it's important to note, dear listeners, we are not taking away any of the episodes or any of the content that we have been delivering so far.

The club is more stuff for club members.

That's right.

The two episodes a week will still be there for everyone, but for those who want even more inside access to this world, we're going to be providing all kinds of things.

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That's right.

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And oftentimes, Gordon, I think we'll connect these interviews, these bonus episodes, to the series we're doing.

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That's not right.

It's actually the opposite.

No, our books will not be on there at all.

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Or anytime I see your book in a bookstore, I sign it and put it back on the shelf.

But we're going to sign these, right?

We might even do yours eventually as well, David.

That's right.

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And now, on to the show.

My name is Edward Joseph Snowden.

I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public.

It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was a distinction, and when I did, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

Now, that was Edward Snowden, the start of his memoir, Permanent Record.

And Edward Snowden is the man responsible for probably the largest leak of U.S.

secrets ever.

And I can't believe that you've made me open this episode with lines from his memoir, Gordon.

There will be retribution for this.

I think somewhere down the line, we're going to do an Osama bin Laden series, and it's going to be episode after episode of Osama bin Laden poetry to open that one up.

I look forward to that already.

But the Edward Snowden story is an amazing story because it's fair to say, I think you may not be the biggest fan of Edward Snowden as a former CIA officer.

He's may not be your favorite person, I'm guessing.

Well, despite despite these lines that you put in the script, which I should note here for people listening, Gordon wrote, this is for me to read, as a former CIA officer, I'm a huge fan and think he's great.

I was hoping you'd just read him.

It's not true.

It's not true, is it?

But I mean, and that goes to part of the Snowden story, isn't it?

Which is he's often, and particularly at the time in 2013 when all this happened, was seen as hero or villain.

That was the kind of question that everyone was asking.

And you kind of had to put him into one category or the other.

And I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

And I think it is definitely true that there's a kind of a fascinating individual at the center of this story, which we're going to look at, you know, who goes on a very dramatic journey and whose motives are definitely complex and we can unpick.

But I think it's also bigger than that as well, isn't it?

This story.

Well, and on the hero or villain point, I will say that I do have over the course of this series five deadly sins that Edward Snowden committed that I will reveal in time as we get through the story.

But to the point on not prejudging, you know, sinners go to heaven too, Gordon.

So, okay, he could be a hero who's just very flawed.

But there are kind of, I think on that point, really five terrible things he did along the way.

But it is, I think it's fascinating because it has become, I think in particular in the 12, 13 years since those revelations, with just the incredible advancements in technology all around us, it's become a much bigger story about, I mean, I guess really the nature of what does privacy actually mean in a world where we're all carrying smartphones around?

And really, what level of surveillance, what level of passive collection by our security services and tech companies are we all really comfortable with?

And I think his revelations, they didn't start that conversation, but they added immensely to it and created a lot of color around it that we didn't otherwise have.

That's right.

I think he shaped that conversation and the way it evolved.

And I think it is very consequential for how we think.

I think it's consequential for geopolitics because I think it changed how Russia and China acted as well.

So, I think there's lots of very interesting strands which we can pull out over these episodes.

I mean, for me, it was a big story.

I was a journalist covering it day in, day out.

And one little tease: if you do stay to the end of the episodes, I will reveal-I know you're the former intelligence officer, but I will reveal the closest thing I ever came to doing a clandestine mission, which was to do with the Snowden story many years ago.

But that comes towards the end of this story.

But it's one that, as a journalist, was one of the biggest stories I covered.

And I think was one of the biggest stories of the last 25 years, really, when it comes to intelligence.

There have been a lot of intelligence stories that are headline news, you know, over the past 25 years, but this one, there were headlines breaking pretty consistently because of the massive amount of information that came out, the way that he leaked it to journalists.

I mean, you had headline news for weeks.

And also you think about the reverberations in...

really kind of film and television.

I mean, there was an Academy Award-winning documentary, Citizen IV, made about Snowden by the filmmaker Laura Poitras, and there was an Oliver Stone movie starring Joseph Gordon Levitt called Snowden.

So it is good, bad, ugly, and there's a lot of that, all of those things in this story.

This series of revelations, the man himself, really was one of the biggest intelligence stories of the past generation, I think.

Now with a bit of time passing, hopefully we can kind of, I think, you know, look at it in a different perspective and I think reveal some things that people might find new or surprising about it.

Should we start with the man?

Let's start with the man.

Yeah.

So Edward Joseph Snowden, born 1983, grows up first in North Carolina, then when he's nine, moves to Maryland.

Solid middle-class family with interesting public services, kind of part of the ethos.

Both of his parents, I found this fascinating, had top secret clearances.

His mother at one point works as a clerk doing benefits and insurance for intelligence employees.

And his father works on electronics in the Coast Guard.

And his father clearly is a bit of a tinkerer into this kind of world of early computers.

And he remembers when he's very young.

One night his dad comes home with a box.

His dad unwraps the box and inside is an early home computer.

His dad sets it up and starts playing really early computer games, Tetris, and another one where you rescue people on a helicopter called Choplifter.

And Snowden, it's really interesting in his memoir, he says he spied on his father.

doing this, you know, and watching it.

And one time his father catches him, you know, spying on him, playing the games, and he thinks he's in trouble, but his dad pulls him in to play it with him.

And this is a kind of big moment for the young Snowden.

I think it's the start maybe of an interest in spying, but also of a kind of love affair with computers.

And it's also an era where home computers and computer games are really just arriving.

And Snowden is in the middle of that era.

Yeah, this is kind of the very, I mean, early days of the internet, right?

Yeah.

But he's starting to have this love affair, really, with the online world, right?

Devices, tinkering, that kind of thing.

So, I mean, he gets into computer games.

He's playing a lot of Nintendo.

He's got this great quote here where he says, you know, a computer would wait forever to receive my command, but would process at the very moment I hit enter.

No questions asked.

Nowhere else had I ever felt so in control.

I think, you know, maybe we see kind of in these early days, the first sense that he is more of himself.

in the online world than he is in the physical world.

Which is something we associate now much more, but then was much newer.

And I do remember this.

I'm a bit older than Snowden, but you know, the excitement of the first dial-up modems.

I know if people remember these.

These are ones where you had to literally, you know, dial the phone number.

Nice sound effects.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And you get the, you know, you get these tones.

Someone called the house.

It was busy.

You're using your phone line to kind of connect to the internet and dial a number.

And so he moves online in this and onto these online platforms and bulletin boards, which are just emerging.

And it's really interesting, I think, because the internet was a very different place at this time.

It was less controlled by, if you like, corporations.

You weren't going onto Facebook or WhatsApp or YouTube or anything else.

You're just going onto these bulletin boards, which people run.

And you can go on in those days, really anonymously, in a way that's much harder these days.

And you could be someone else.

You can take on a different name.

You can take on a different identity.

You can play computer games.

You know, he talks about it, used to play Ultima, fantasy computer game, which I slightly remember.

I may have played a couple of times.

You know, he could be a wizard in Ultima and roam around online and interact with other people under a completely different character.

And clearly, this was something that he reveled in.

Did you have hamster dance over here, Gordon?

Do you remember hamster dance?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Snowden's a few years older than I am, but you would go to hamsterdance.com.

I think it's probably gone now.

And there would just be a screen of these sort of cartoon hamsters dancing.

That's my first image of the internet.

The promise of the early internet was

very cheerful hamsters dancing around on screen.

But Snowden, he was also playing a game called Tekken.

Remember Tekken?

Yeah.

You know, at risk of over psychologizing him.

I mean, the whole point of Tekken is you are the leader of a clan and you go out and defend or sort of represent your group in single combat.

You know, there's stories of Snowden kind of going to these, you know, fantasy, kind of these role-playing games, right?

And going to these conventions and things like that.

And he's deeply in this world, right?

I mean, he is kind of an anime and video computer game geek yeah as a kid and quite a solitary figure i think you know you get that sense and he goes i guess even more inwards when his parents divorce when he's a teenager and he describes a family in which everyone has been keeping secrets from each other and he clearly doesn't like school he talks about kind of sleeping through his lessons he rejects authority he doesn't want to do his homework you know he wants to play his games and be who he is online and in in the tech world quite smart but bad at school exactly right yeah exactly So he drops out.

He doesn't finish high school.

He's self-taught.

He basically learns what he wants to learn.

And as you said, I think he's smart.

And it seems like he's almost living on his own from the age of 16, the way he describes it, and kind of just doing his own thing, but very much in this online world.

And going on bulletin boards, often expressing some pretty trenchant views.

The kind of level of...

sometimes vitriol and argument on these bulletin boards could be pretty extreme.

And that was, that was this world as well, by the time you get to the kind of 90s, I think.

There's obviously now, if you just Google him, you'll see plenty of video, and there's a whole documentary made about him.

He looks like an IT guy, doesn't he?

I mean, he's very slight.

He's sunlight deprived, I think it's fair to say.

He's got hair just a bit like yours.

I can't, you know, I can't stomach in parallels, Corden.

But yeah, he looks like a guy who's coming by your desk to fix your computer.

And so he's then kind of moving into a world.

He's not finished high school, not gone to college in a regular sense, goes to a community college, do some courses on designing websites.

A lot of random courses.

A lot of random courses, yeah.

And then, like for so many people, 9-11, September the 11th, 2001, those attacks on the US are a kind of turning point in his life.

It's traumatic.

You know, he's worried if people have been killed.

He's in Maryland, too.

Yeah.

So he's in this atmosphere.

Close to government facilities.

You know, so it's all happening around him.

And America's going to war, the kind of war on terror is starting.

And he wants to be part of it.

And I think, you know, it's interesting, isn't it?

He is a true believer at this point in taking part of that.

What does he do?

It's kind of interesting.

He joins the army.

It feels like he wants to feel like he's contributing and also he's good at something more than just computers.

So he actually applies for special forces training, which is maybe surprising, but it's what he wants to do.

But it goes wrong.

So he says that during training, he's up a tree or he's, you know, out there and he falls badly, breaking his legs.

Now, other people have said that's not quite true and that he just required shin splints.

Well, and he couldn't run.

This is the first sin.

Okay.

Okay.

Because it's, it's, thou shalt not lie.

It's the eighth commandment, but it's the first of David McCloskey's five deadly sins committed by Edward Snowden.

And this is, I think, a point in the story where we should interject that he has a track record of fabrication.

And when you look at the House Intel Committee report that went back and looked at this, said shin splints, not legs broken.

And so I think I'll put this down as a marker here of

this guy has gone back and sort of edited the permanent record.

You raise a good point with this because what we're going to see, I think, as we do his early life particularly is two different narratives about him.

And there's his narrative and there's the narrative of those who are basically also, it's fair to say, not entirely neutral about him, who are trying to paint him in a certain way.

And I think we'll see this, and it's really interesting as we go on, him presenting himself basically as an ideologically motivated figure and other people seeing him as a kind of aggrieved and a bit of a loser, which is the kind of image pointed by that, you know, intelligence committee report.

And we can lay both out, we can see which one we agree with, but it's worth saying there are these two different interpretations, and you're right.

This is the first time we start to see them diverge.

And I do think it's worth stating that, I mean, I have no interest in sort of painting him with an entirely negative brush.

I just think that what has happened is you do have a lot of content out there, his memoir being one of them.

A lot of the work done by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald that has really painted him as a very, very positive figure and has sought to kind of whitewash some of the stuff that he did fabricate in the past.

So I would describe my approach as fact-based.

I would say there are people out to get him.

And

there are people out to get him.

Yeah, so let's part both there.

We're both fact-based is the lesson from this.

Fair and impartial.

So anyway, he's out of the army, which is, he's tried something and it's not worked, which is clearly a kind of source of frustration to him.

So now you feel like he thinks, if I want to do service, I'm going to use my computer skills.

That's the obvious thing to do.

And he'd almost been trying to avoid that, but now he comes to it.

And where does he end up?

In the CIA or working for the CIA, where else?

The obvious

step from washing out of the army.

Because doesn't he, he winds up there through a kind of, I guess it's, it's, it seems like from the outside, maybe a little bit of a bizarre route, but he kind of essentially shows up at like a contractor job fair

and ends up getting in at kind of the literally basement level of a tech job initially, right?

That's right.

And so it is interesting because he is working for the director of support of the CIA.

And you can maybe explain to us what that is, but he is basically an IT guy rather than a spy.

And he is also at this point working through a contractor for the CIA.

So for a lot of people outside of the intelligence community, it's always amazing how many contractors there are.

Because you kind of think, you know, either you're cleared and you're inside or you're outside, but there's this whole category of people who work for the U.S.

intelligence community who are contractors.

And he's one of them at this point.

And most of his coming years, he'll be a contractor.

Why have them as contractors?

Yeah, we call them green badgers because the staff at CIA would have a blue badge that you'd wear around on a lanyard all the time.

It would have your picture on it.

I never had my picture updated.

So, you know, all the time I'm there, I have a picture of me as like a 19-year-old that I took during my initial days there.

But yeah, Green Badger contractors.

It does seem to be a particular quirk, I guess, of the U.S.

intelligence community versus, let's say, Britons,

because there are tens of thousands of Blue Badge employees at CIA.

There's probably an equal number of green badgers,

of contractors that are doing the same jobs as the Blue Badgers.

We even had analyst Green Badgers.

I remember when I joined, I was working Syria.

We had counterparts doing counterterrorism issues on kind of Syria CT.

And there was an analyst working in our counterpart team in the counterterrorism group who had been brought in by a contractor, had the green badge, but she's writing intelligence pieces and doing analysis almost just like everybody else.

And the reality is, if you're a contractor, you might be paid a little bit more, but you're also, you can be hired and fired much more easily, even though you're inside inside the wire.

It's a slightly looser relationship.

So, back to Snowden.

I mean, he's working.

I mean, he describes it as working just past the help desk where people who'd forgotten their passwords would call up.

But then at night, he's there at night on the night shift.

And he said it's kind of vast and this kind of sense of it being empty and the escalators stop working.

So you have to use them as stairs.

But it also feels like he's doing quite a banal job on this IT support desk.

I mean, I like this.

You know, he says the only adult supervision was a guy in his 50s who spent his shifts reading paperbacks by Robert Ludlam and Tom Clancy.

He did no work for the best part of a decade.

He would boast, just sit around and read thrillers and play solitaire.

If the phone rang as there was a problem, he'd just report it to the day shift.

I mean, man,

we all know the type.

We called them Road Warriors.

Did you have this

R-O-A-D?

Retired on active duty?

Right.

There were somewhat senior officers at CIA who might be like perpetual GS-14s and riding it out on a government salary.

Now, GS-14, government scale 14, it's the pay scale.

It goes up to 15.

You could become, after 15, an SIS, part of the senior intelligence service.

So a GS-14 kind of riding it out, I think, is the nexus of sort of mediocrity, laziness, but you're not, you know, you haven't been fired, obviously.

It's very hard to fire people.

So it's a way to kind of ride things out on a pretty decent government salary.

And I can attest to the post-apocalyptic environment at Langley at night because six months after I joined, this is a classic sort of goat rope that the CIA does where they bring you in as an analyst and then they send you on a night rotation for like six months after you join.

And so I was doing night shifts on the PDB staff, the President's Daily Brief, kind of compiling the articles and things like that.

And it was a 10 p.m.

to 6 a.m.

shift, six nights a week.

And that place at night is kind of creepy.

I mean, the escalators are off.

There are these kind of weird, you know, help desk people sitting around who are literally reading or like watching movies.

It has a very bizarre environment.

And I would imagine I don't ever miss a plug for the RIP and Memoriam Langley hot dog vending machine.

But I actually think that Snowden was probably sitting not too far from that down there in the basement.

Okay, so at this point, he decides that he wants to get a staff job.

He wants to be on the inside and, I guess, go abroad.

At that point, let's take a break and see where life takes Edward Snowden next.

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Well, welcome back.

So we are in the story of Edward Snowden.

It's 2007,

which, by the way, is round about the time that I joined CIA.

Edward Snowden and I have our agency identification numbers because his has come out since both start with 234.

Wow.

So, yes, we joined it around around.

One of the many similarities.

One of the hair, the other

similarity.

That's right.

So it's 2007.

Now, Snowden has joined.

He's gone from being a contract kind of tech employee now to a full blue badger.

He's a staff CIA employee.

He is a telecommunications information systems officer, T-I-S-O, but we would call that he's a como guy.

Right.

He's a combo guy.

And como guys or gals spend a lot lot of their career overseas and he is headed out to Geneva, Switzerland.

Which is actually a really interesting place to go.

I mean historically, including during the Cold War, Geneva was actually quite a hot spot because you'd have everything from kind of bankers to UN agencies all coming through.

the city so it's a place where if you're cia or mi6 you'd be a rich targeting environment in terms of like looking for people you might be able to recruit and so in his memoirs and his discussions about it suggests this is where he gets a bit of a feel for human intelligence he's He's out in the field.

You know, he also suggests that he saw the slightly darker side of human intelligence.

He has this story that someone else told him from the agency team there about the CIA targeting a banker who they want to recruit.

They get him drunk in Geneva.

Then he gets arrested for drink driving.

And then they use the arrest and trying to help him out to recruit him as an asset.

I could see that happening.

I mean, and I do think this is also where, and I've gone into the personnel files a little bit here, Gordon.

Not literally.

It's important, I think, to note here that by this point, Snowden, he's actually already gone to the CIA Inspector General.

And do you know what it's about?

No.

A complaint.

It's a complaint.

Is it about alleged surveillance of Americans?

No.

No.

It is about morale and retention issues for his fellow combo guys.

So he thinks there's kind of a morale problem.

And he's sending emails all around, kind of getting people riled up.

Feels like he's not being heard, sends an email, actually, and this is going to be another wonderful Snowden kind of habit over the course of his career, is he has a great habit of sending emails.

And everybody loves people like this at work, sending emails like six levels above where they should go to elevate issues.

And so he has actually sent an email, and this won't perhaps resonate immediately with listeners, but to me as a former CIA guy, it sounds insane.

He's actually going to include the head of the directorate of support on one of these notes, which is almost unthinkable to do something like that.

And then Snowden's going to basically say to the IG, I feel pretty disenfranchised because supervisors didn't listen.

He's kind of talking about the process for overseas assignments and the difficulty of kind of laterally transferring.

The IG basically tells him to pound Sam.

This is going to be a feature of his employment at CIA and NSA.

It kind of starts even before Geneva.

Now, interestingly, in Geneva, so between October of 2007 and April of 2008, he has six counseling sessions, nearly one per month, with supervisors out in Geneva.

And as soon as he's out in Geneva, he's actually applied for a much more senior position as a regional commo guy.

So it's sort of the equivalent of like...

getting in at a new job and then immediately applying for a job that is like two levels above your boss.

Okay, so we get the picture you're painting, which is, you know, a guy-based, which is ambitious, you know, ideas above his station, as you'd put it, and clearly clashing with his, his bosses.

And I think he gets a Derog, a derogatory or a black mark on his file, if that's right, about his, you know, kind of behavior, which he's clearly aggrieved about.

Well, ambitious, I would say delusional, because ambition would be somebody who understands the work to be done ahead of them and does it more quickly than others.

But this is more.

somebody who feels that he should be significantly beyond where he is.

Now, I will say that Derog that gets put into the system.

Now, the system, this is going to be important later.

The system is called Scattered Castles.

It is the essentially security, like the TSSCI top secret special or sensitive compartment and information database that allows for intelligence community agencies to understand, like if CIA has cleared somebody for TSSCI clearance, NSA can look in that system and see if the clearance is still active for how long, what type of clearance it is, and all that.

And that DROG that gets put in there, that's a big deal.

And it gets put in there, I think, although a lot of this is kind of even in the House Intel report has been redacted.

Because what happens with Snowden out in Geneva is that, number one, also, there's a PAR, performance appraisal reviews.

They were the old annual review done at CIA of your

job performance.

He had gone into the actual software and modified the font as kind of like a little practical joke,

which of course pissed people off, right?

Classic actor thing and totally, totally innocent, right?

Yeah.

People are kind of like, whoa, why did you do that?

But it's fine.

But he ends up, because of all these counseling sessions, because of problems out,

essentially just working with people out in Geneva.

He ends up going home short of tour.

allegedly for medical issues, doesn't come back to Geneva.

Geneva has to pack up all of his stuff and send it home.

And at the end of this,

he's got the D-Rog in his scattered castles.

Now,

you're giving the negative, cynical view about it.

I mean, one thing I would say is, you know, he doesn't like authority.

He's the kind of person who doesn't play the system.

He's also a hacker.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff hackers do.

And you could make the case that these are the kind of people you might want as an intelligence community, people who know how to subvert systems, who to play with fonts.

And rather than a kind of strict bureaucracy, which doesn't have the kind of room or space for someone like that, it just doesn't fit.

I mean, I also think you can see this one view, which is, you know, he's just an aggrieved worker.

The other view is he has got an ideology here.

And you can see from these times of these chat logs that he had pretty deeply held libertarian views.

So libertarian believing in the kind of freedom of the individual, that government is a problem and government should largely get out of the way of the individuals.

He's not super kind of...

party political, but the politician around this time he seemed most kind of close to and, you know, whose views he liked most was Senator Ron Paul who is this kind of libertarian figure kind of free market anti-socialist anti-big government anti-foreign intervention anti-surveillance and that seems to be kind of Snowden's worldview and it's interesting you know he has some hopes for Obama who comes in but then comes to dislike him interestingly enough a book from the journalist Luke Harding suggests that one of the reasons is because Obama wanted to ban assault weapons and you know Snowden is a kind of constitutionalist he wants the Second Amendment being yeah he wants the right to bear arms, you know.

So you get a picture of someone who is also motivated by a certain set of beliefs.

And we'll come back to, you know, how significant they are and how they play.

But you're right.

By 2009, he's clearly out of the CIA.

One person from the spy world said to me, he wanted to be Jason Bourne.

No one's Jason Bourne.

Whatever reasons, he's out.

Well, again, this is, I think, part of deadly sin number one of Edward Snowden, this kind of retroactive revisionist kind of fabrication, because he's going to say, look,

I resigned after I saw, you know, the reality of the secret state.

I didn't like all this dirty stuff I saw in Geneva.

I didn't, you know, I didn't like how the government was spying on us.

And, you know, I think, again, this is, I mean, that's garbage.

You know, this guy washed out because it's not like he was, he's not smart.

And I think modifying the par system, whatever, right?

That is, I agree with you.

That's kind of hacker stuff.

You do, to some degree, want people like that.

But this is a guy who's also not able to work in teams with people.

And it just kind of makes sense actually that you'd wash out of a big bureaucracy with that kind of person.

Hang on a sec.

The fascinating thing is by 2009, he's out with the CIA, but he's still in the U.S.

intelligence community, despite all of this.

So now he's back to being a contractor for Dell, the company, or a company that was owned by Dell.

NSA actually looked in scattered castles.

Yeah.

And listeners should note how many times will I say scattered castles over the course of this podcast.

But they looked before CIA had put the D-Rog in.

Okay, but let's explain.

He's working for a contractor Dell, which in turn is working for something called the NSA.

And we should explain to people what the NSA is, because some people will know very well, some people won't.

National Security Agency will know such agency as it was known for many years because it was so secret.

In the UK, the equivalent is GCHQ.

So it's the organization which intercepts and collects communications from around the world and has done it historically, intercepting Soviet radio in the Cold War, moving into the digital is trying to collect communications there.

They're the techies, but they're a big organization.

I mean, they're bigger than CIA, aren't they?

But perhaps less well-known.

They're also headquartered at Fort Meade, not too far from where Snowden grew up.

So we work very closely with our NSA counterparts.

And, you know, they would come to CIA a lot.

We would go out to Fort Meade.

And I'm not interacting with any of the NSA people that we're going to talk about in the story, but I'm interacting with the team that's basically doing a lot of the intercept work in the Middle East.

And this headquarters at Fort Meade, first of all, if you look at the pictures of it, it is essentially a gigantic

black cube with an absolutely Soviet-looking parking lot around it.

And the headquarters itself, I mean, there are aspects of CIA.

You know, we were talking about the kind of apocalyptic feel at night.

NSA feels apocalyptic during the day.

And it's because it is an absolutely, at least when I was there, like really just decrepit place.

Terrible cafeteria, I'll say.

Yeah, exactly.

But the people are very colorful because, I mean, I remember one of the guys on the team that we would interact with,

whenever we went over there, and it could have been on a Monday morning at nine, it could have been on a Friday afternoon at four, he would be wearing cargo shorts, sandals.

He would wear Mickey Mouse hats

and Hawaiian shirts.

Like,

it's a very quirky place.

And there's a, there's a joke that always always makes the rounds and it's a cliche because it's true that you know at nsa the extroverts look at other people's shoes when they talk yeah right instead of

there's a similar joke for gchq i did visit nsa once i went to do an interview there a tv interview and it's kind of unusual we're allowed to take a tv camera in interviewing the deputy director and um you obviously have to leave all your electronics out in the parking lot anyway we start the interview and so you know it's with a very senior figure and a security guard just literally walks in interrupts the interview and he just says someone here is omitting and what it was was some my the cameraman had not taken off his kind of apple watch or his fitness tracker and clearly their systems had picked it up and they were like you know that's got to go so the world of electronics data emitting that's the nsa and so here we have snowden he's actually not in for mead he's in japan it's an interesting place to be working on developing it looks like a backup of their systems for nsa

so again he's not a kind of classic spy is he in this role he's not a he's not an intelligence analyst who's actually going through the data looking for targets and trying to kind of work out what they're saying.

He's working on the systems.

He's a systems analyst here doing a backup of all the files.

So they've got a kind of, if something goes down, they can still run NSA, basically.

And we'll just say it's 2009.

He's 26 years old.

He's a contractor.

He's working for Dell.

And I think, again, I'll just add in my very fact-based, you know, first sin of him as a serial fabricator that he's going to talk about his work here as being under corporate cover when he starts to make his revelations.

But he is, he's a contractor at the NSA working.

He's doing this backup.

So it's not the most exciting job, but he's exploring the files because he's backing them up.

So this is where it starts to get interesting, I think, particularly when it comes to his journey into taking information and releasing it.

Because he starts looking at the files, you know, rather than just backing them up.

And in one case, he finds what appears to be a very classified draft file, which he was supposed to delete, it looks like, but instead, which he read, which I'm guessing is not something you're supposed to do,

frowned upon in the secret world.

But let's stand back and look at this, because I think this is the first chance we get to look at one of these very top-secret programs, which the NSA was running, and which is actually at the core of his initial revelations.

And it's a program which is best known as Stellar Wind.

That's the code name to it.

The code names, by the way, that we're going to talk about are great for this entire series.

I mean, muscular.

Everyone should note their favorites down.

And Stellar Wind is a great one.

It's a classic.

And so what is Stellar Wind?

Well, this all goes back to after 9-11.

And September 11th attacks, the view was it exposed a failure to connect the dots between different bits of intelligence the US had, particularly between foreign intelligence the CIA and NSA might have and domestic work the FBI was doing, and the fact that some people linked to al-Qaeda had come into the US and were communicating with people outside the US.

So immediately after 9-11, a new program is launched within weeks.

And it's something very interesting because it collects domestic phone records.

Now, what it does is not the content of what people are saying on the phone, but what's called the metadata, which is the information about the call.

So it's which numbers are connecting with which other numbers for how long and when.

And so what's being done now for the first time is that there's an order telling phone companies to hand over all of the data about domestic phone records.

The reason why this is particularly significant for NSA to be doing this is NSA is supposed to be a foreign intelligence agency.

It's part of the Department of Defense.

It's not supposed to spy on Americans.

And the reason it looks like they're doing this is what 9-11 showed was the problem was the point at which domestic and foreign met each other, because you had a foreign plot coming into the U.S.

or people in the U.S.

connecting with foreigners.

And whether it was a legal problem or whether it was just basically the intelligence agencies weren't willing or able to share, they'd missed stuff.

And this was part of the, well, we have to make sure we don't miss it again in the future.

So we're going to collect all the domestic phone records.

And then what we can do is we can analyze that database.

And if we get a number which we think is connecting to a foreign phone linked to Al-Qaeda, we can then look at which other phones it connects to and start to trace that through.

What's interesting is it goes to NSA rather than FBI, who'd be the obvious people doing domestic.

It looks like because NSA basically are better at computers and data analysis.

Because I think you're going to tell me the feebs aren't that good at

computers, whereas NSA are the data people.

Sure, that's right.

And the intelligence use case for this would be, let's say the CIA, because this is what's going on in 2001, two, three.

Let's say the CIA takes down an al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan and collects phones.

They want to be able to look and say, okay, are those phones in contact with phones in the States?

Could be a U.S.

person, could not be.

And then be able to run that train, right?

To be able to understand who's

doing what are called hops to see who that person is.

And previously, you didn't need warrants, would have been a more carefully controlled, but they want to do it in a different way through data analysis.

And this is super secret, we should say.

So there is a legal authorization for this.

So it's not, if you like, illegal.

You know, it's been authorized.

Why are you using the scarecrows?

Because people will question its legality and its constitutionality and all those things.

It's illegal.

The

Congressional Oversight Committees, what we call the gang of aid

inside the Senate and the House that kind of really know about the oversight of the intelligence communities, they know about it.

It's illegal.

Elected representatives are read into it and understand what's going on.

Normal, even well-educated Americans have absolutely.

I mean, that's the point about it, is Americans do not know that their domestic phone records are being collected, kept, and stored at NSA.

And, you know, the authorization for the program is locked in a safe in the early days, in the director of NSA's own office, with only a few people allowed to see it.

So that's how secret this program is.

So I think it's worth saying that there is a really interesting difference of opinion here about this what's called bulk collection and its implications for privacy.

Privacy for our American listeners.

And maybe, maybe, maybe some others as well.

So these big databases are being acquired, but in NSA terminology, they're only acquired when people search for something and extract the data from them.

Whereas Snowden's view, and the view of quite a few privacy or privacy activists, is that the surveillance occurs not when people look at the data, but when the data's acquired in the first place, when it's gathered together.

That is the point at which privacy is impacted, rather than the queries of the database when something's extracted from it.

So, in the Snowden worldview, this is the moment when he starts to see this stuff from 2009, where he says he starts to worry about a world in which everyone and everything can be surveilled.

And his love of the internet and his libertarian views come into conflict with what he is seeing the secret state is up to.

Do you buy his chronology here?

I can accept that he's seen some reports inside NSA, but he's already been to the CIAIG.

It's not about this.

He's going to work at NSA for a few more years and never raise any issues around this.

I mean, is this part of his kind of retroactive

memoir to kind of make it look like a clean journey to the point where he leaks?

Or do you really think in this period that it started to matter to him?

I think it does because I think you can see a consistent worldview from his earliest days in terms of his views.

about what the internet and what the electronic world and the digital world represents.

And I agree, it's strange that he's working in that world, but his view is that it's somehow being corrupted by the state.

And that does also fit with his political ideology.

And we do know he's got libertarian views at that time.

That's not retrospective, because I think he gives money and it's known that he gives money to Rompo in 2008.

So he clearly does have these views, but you are right that it is going to take a few years.

for him to act on them because we talked about him going into this contractor job in 2009 but it is going to not be until 2012 that he makes his move.

And I think they're with Edward Snowden right in the heart of the secret state.

This person who loves the internet, who's also had a difficult career, is ideologically driven, also aggrieved.

He has now got access to some of the US and UK's most closely held secrets.

And in our next episode, we'll look at the journey that takes him to reveal them to the world.

And Gordon, if you want to hear that episode straight away, you can do so by joining our new declassified Club, where you'll get access to the entire Edward Snowden series, plus a whole host of other benefits, and access to this week's bonus episode, where we are going to talk about gadgets, sex and spying, and U.S.

intelligence on Russia.

So, to become a member, just sign up at therestisclassified.com and make sure to take advantage of our launch discount.

That's right.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time, and we will find out if Ed Snowden recovers from his shits once.

He's so mean to Edge.

Young Edge.

I'm just.

I'm gonna.

Anyway, young Ed.

Come on.

Young Teddy.