Pod Save the World - Snowden and Surveillance with Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: March 15, 2017

Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald joins to respond to criticism of Edward Snowden and to discuss his views on intelligence collection.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World for those of you who are subscribers. Thank you so much for tuning back in. This is your first time listening to this show. It's basically a show about foreign policy. It's a show where I tried to take you guys behind the scenes inside the room where the big decisions were made during the Obama administration or why we should care about Russia or what it was like to lead the Iran talks or to reopen relations with Cuba.

Today's episode is a little bit different. A few weeks back, Ben Rhodes and I had a conversation where we spent some time talking about Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, who is the editor of the Inner and who is the one who received most of the original Stodden disclosures and has worked with him most closely, asked for a chance to respond. So Glenn and I spent about 45 minutes last week. We talked about some of the things Ben and I discussed in our interview about Edward Snowden, but we also talked about Glenn's views on surveillance generally, the role of the press corps. It was a fascinating interview for me. It was eye-opening. I really appreciated him spending the time, and I think you

guys will, too. Check it out. Okay, here on Pod Save the World, we have Glenn Greenwald. Glenn is one of the three co-founding editors of The Intercept. He is a well-known journalist, a constitutional lawyer, the author of four best-selling books on politics and law. And Glenn, I just want to say, thank you for coming on. You're a media mogul. I'm a random guy with the podcast, so I appreciate you doing this, especially since most of our interactions to date have been antagonizing and trolling each other on Twitter. Totally. I just wanted to bring that to a different medium.

Yeah, exactly. I read your book, No Place to Hide Last Night, and I want to say two things. One, it's a hell of a good read. Truth is Stranger Than Friction Man, and that is a gripping story about how all of this came together. So people should buy No Place to Hide, and you should pay for it. Because Glenn has, like, a lot of doggy mouse to feed, so don't go to the library. It's true. Two, I was struck by how much I agreed with what you wrote, and frankly how much I think President Obama might agree with what you wrote.

So I'm hoping maybe we can find some common ground today. So I would start before Edward Snowden because you're probably best known for your work with Edward Snowden, but you didn't appear into the consciousness that day. Your interest in civil liberties and national security didn't start there. I was hoping you can tell listeners a bit about your background and why you decided to dedicate your life to these issues. Sure. So I went to law school and due to my interest in constitutional issues. And I wasn't really particularly interested in standard kind of political partisan dispute. so it was actually pretty uninterested in those.

I was more interested in issues of free speech, due process, things like that. So I practiced well for about 10 years. I lived in New York at the time of 9-11 and started to see that the climate was changing pretty intensely, the political climate in the U.S. And certain things began happening in particular that really I found alarming, including the imprisonment of U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil with no charges, which is what happened to Jose Badeo, who was arrested at O'Hare International. airport, declared an enemy combatant, put in the cage, denied any access to lawyers,

something I thought that would never happen in the U.S. And just the kind of general climate that was prevailing in the wake of 9-11, and I found disturbing and so started writing about those issues. I stopped practicing law. I just felt like I wanted to have a bigger impact on the broader political conversation in light of those what I regarded as alarming trends under the Bush administration. And it kind of just all developed pretty quickly from there. Got it.

So one of the most amazing parts of the book, and everyone, again, should read the book, is you ended up reporting one of the most significant national security disclosures in modern history. But you almost missed this scoop. I hope you could tell us a bit about that. And if you wake up at night in a cold sweat dreaming about, like, missing PGP keys, that's a, that's some encryption humor for you guys. I mean, I would have woken up in a cold sweat probably every single night for the rest of my life if it hadn't worked out the right way. But since it did, I sleep pretty well. But, you know, basically, and people have made a lot of the story because it is true that I almost lost the story, and it's a good laugh for people to have, and I actually find it kind of funny in retrospect as well.

But the reality is, and you probably know this now that you're a burgeoning pundit and a podcast host, but there are, you know, a lot of crazy people in the world, and a good number of them are very politically engaged, and they think that their delusions are real and that they're, just waiting for the moment for a journalist to expose, you know, the fact that their boss is controlling them with the secret satellite on Mars that's wired through the Pentagon and then into like underground cables and the South China Sea and then into their TV sets. So when you're a journalist, you constantly get emails. I mean, I certainly do every day,

even, you know, through today from people saying, I have a huge story for you, fly to Malaysia and meet me. And you can't just drop whatever you're doing. And so when Snowden first contacted me for obvious reasons. He was very hesitant to tell me what it was that he was contacted me about. All he would say is, trust me, it's in your interest. To talk to me, I just need you to do these 37 steps in order to ensure that we can speak securely. And they were really complicated encryption programs that at the time, very few people really thought much about. And so I just kind of, you know, kept telling him that I would and just never prioritized him because he wasn't saying anything to me that would make me think he was different than the, you know, 4,000

other people who in that period were trying to get my attention. And so finally he got sick of it because he thought, here I am trying to give you this, you know, earth-shattering story, and you won't even, you know, install some basic encryption. And so he ended up going to war of Poitress, who he knew was my friend, the documentarian, and spoke to her because she was using encryption, and said, I've been trying to get a hold of Glenn, and, you know, can you help me with that. And so the three of us ended up working together. It was just an amazing sliding doors moment that I, you know, a reminder that life chooses your path. You don't usually necessarily choose it, right?

Absolutely. So anyway, you agreed to come on, and I am again grateful that you did because you said you'd like to respond to some of the things that came up in my conversation with a former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, Ben Rhodes, when we talked about Edward Snowden in a previous episode. So one, thanks for listening. You're a friend of the pot. I'll send you a T-shirt. Two, I'd love to go through. Okay, medium. I'd love to go through those one by one because I think there's some of the most common criticisms of Stodon. It would be good for listeners to hear your full response.

Totally. The first one is a comparison to Daniel Ellsberg. Some people say Snowden should have acted more like Daniel Ellsberg. For those listening who don't know who he is, Daniel Ellsberg secretly photoshopped thousands of documents that later became known as the Pentagon Papers. He released those documents to Congress and to the press, and they became instrumental in turning the public against the war at Vietnam. Now, the distinction people draw is that Ellsberg went to Congress first and then ultimately leaked the documents and then stayed in the United States to face trial while Snowden left the country. Now, in fairness, Ellsberg wrote an op-ed where he says he believes Snowden did the right thing by leaving the country because the court system is stacked against him. But do you think there's some merit to the argument that staying in the U.S. would have made it an even more principled decision?

I don't. And I'll tell you why. And before I do, let me just say that I do actually really appreciate you having me on. think so often people stay in their little factional bubbles and, you know, talk to one another because they're in agreement and say a bunch of things that ought to be debated, but they don't debate because they don't invite the people on who disagree. So I just think it shows a lot of integrity for you to do that. And so let me just talk about that specific point. So first of all, I think that there's, I just think there's an important analytical distinction between asking,

did Snowden do the right thing in taking these documents and providing them to journalists, and then secondarily and independently did he do the right thing in leaving the country and avoiding prosecution? I think those are analytically distinct.

And I guess what I would say is that, and people should read the op-ed by Daniel Alsberg, because what he essentially says is that when he faced the music, as it were, in 1917, The world in the United States in terms of legal, the legal system and justice issues and national security crimes was fundamentally different. That today, if you're arrested on accusations that you've leaked in harm national security, you would never be able to be released on bail, as Ellsberg was.

You'd never be able to talk to the press. As he did to talk to the public, you would be put away in communicato, only able to talk to your lawyer sort of disappeared. The way that, like Chelsea Manning was, we didn't hear for her for many years from the time that she was arrested. But so let me just, I just want to, I guess, there's a lot to say on this topic, but just two, two points, I guess I would say is number one is that when Snowden took the documents, his overwhelming priority was to make sure that he could meet with the journalists, safely provide that material to us and review the material with us to make certain that we understood what we need to understand and then start reporting it. And what he was most worried about was that he would be detained by the U.S. or some allied government before. or that could happen. So he felt like if he had stayed in the U.S., there was a chance that he would be that what he was doing would be detected and he would be arrested before he could get these documents into our hands, or if he had gone to, as Ben suggested, some small, liberal, European

country like Finland or Sweden, traditional U.S. allies, very small countries, they would never have been able to resist the pressure that the U.S. government would apply to handsnowden over and that, therefore, those were not viable options. He didn't go to China, and, you know, in terms of like mainland China. He went to Hong Kong, which is sort of part of China and sort of not part of China. And the reason he went there is because he knew that that would be a really difficult place for the U.S. government to get its hands on him while he was waiting for me and Laura Poitris to go there and meet with him and during the time that we were actually meeting him with him.

It was just a safe place for him to go, and it's very difficult to think of another place that would actually provide the level of safety that Hong Kong provided, where the U.S. really doesn't have a lot of, the U.S. just can't barge in to the U.S. into Hong Kong. And, you know, interestingly, his fears were proven right, right? Like, a month later, or a month and a half later, when the U.S. government thought that he was on the plane of the president of Bolivia, the U.S. government forced down the plane of the president of a sovereign state

thinking that he might be on that plane. That's how extreme the U.S. government was willing to be. and he was just worried that, or he could get these documents out. And the second issue is, it's a really unfair set of laws that whistleblowers face. The law that you get charged with is from 1917. It's the Espionage Act. And it was enacted in order to criminalize dissent about U.S. involvement in World War I. And under the law, you cannot go into court and offer the defense,

which is the defense that he would want to offer, and that everyone tries to dare him to offer, which is, look, yes, I release classified information without authorization, but I was justified in doing it because it showed crimes, because it should never have been concealed in the first place. You're barred from offering that defense. It's strict liability. If you release classified information without authorization, you are guilty of multiple felonies under the Espionage Act, and you don't get a fair trial because you can't raise that as a defense. And so why should he go and submit to decades in prison? Just so that other people say, oh, I kind of have more respect for him.

It just seems like a very huge ask that the people who are demanding he do that wouldn't themselves do it. And, you know, there are lots of people that we respect, like Nelson Mandela, who tried to avoid prosecution. He hid. He didn't turn himself into the white apartheid regime in South Africa. He tried to avoid prosecution. The U.S. government, which was its ally at the time, find Mandela, and they arrested Mandela and put him in prison for 30 years. I don't think the fact that he tried to avoid prison. means Mandela is a less heroic figure

because I don't think we should look at that as being a duty that you submit yourself to decades in prison in order to be viewed as acting justifiably. Yeah, we're not knocking Nelson Mandela on this show. That's for damn sure. I tried to lure you into that. Headlight and headline grab.

Can you talk about why you think going to Congress or going to one of the congressional committees was just not an option? Yeah, so, you know, I think that the person who said this best was Jamil Jaffer at the ACLU. There was a story that the Washington Post did based on stone documents

that showed that the NSA had occasionally eavesdropped in violation of the law, and they discovered it. There were some agents who sort of did rogue things like listening to the girlfriends, and the calls of the girlfriend, stuff like that. And so the argument that the NSA made was like, look, we didn't break the law

and all that many cases, and when we did, we took corrective action. And what Jamil said was that the scandal with the NSA is not what they do that's illegal. The scandal is what has been made legal. So the idea is that under the laws that the Congress has enacted, the NSA has the authority, the legal authority, to do virtually anything. They're a little bit limited when it comes to what Americans, how they can eavesdrop on Americans, and they're almost unlimited, completely unlimited, when it comes to eavesdropping

on 95% of the population called non-Americans. So if not even had gone to Congress, you know, who would have gone to Diane Feinstein, you know, Saxby Shambliss, people who are vehement defenders of the NSA and the surveillance state and the intelligence community, they probably would have turned them over to the FBI. They've done that before. Or they would have just said, we know they're doing it,

and we support it. He felt like that would be an inconsequential step. So let me just make, the key point that I really wanted to make that that actually relates to this, which is his options, right? So, you know, one of the main points that both you and Ben seem to agree on is that the methodology that Snowden used was the wrong one, and that not only was it the wrong one,

but it actually calls into question what his motives actually were. Sorry, could you define methodology? Sure. So, like, let's say that you're Snowden, and you discover what you believe to be this completely out-of-control, dangerous surveillance state that most of the American public is unaware of. You have options at that point for what you can do about that. Got it. And if he had the motives that I think Ben was strongly trying to insinuate that he has,

he has, he didn't really spell it out, but it seemed to be that he was implying that he wanted to harm the U.S. government, he was a traitor, he was working on behalf of a foreign government that he was trying to on purpose subvert the United States, the country where he had lived his whole life. Think of all the things that he could have done, all the methods that he could have used to achieve those goals if those were his goals. He could have sold these documents to the Russians or the Chinese, made a huge amount of money the way that a lot of actual spies have done. He could have just passed it to these governments secretly in order to just harm the United States, he could have given it to WikiLeaks and said to WikiLeaks, just dump

it all, like indiscriminately just dump it all onto the internet, or he could have just dumped it all on the internet himself. All the things you would expect Snowden to do, if he had the motives that both you and Ben were seeming to insinuate that he had were all the methods that he chose not to use. What he did instead was exactly what you'd want a whistleblower in this situation to do, which is he came to journalists and said, I don't trust myself, Edward Snowden, to decide which of these documents ought to be public, I want you to work with within these journalistic institutions, with your editors, with lawyers, with experienced national security reporters,

and you make the decisions about which of these documents should be disclosed in the public interest and which documents should be withheld. He took away from himself the power to decide what gets revealed and what stays secret. He put that power in the hands of established media outlets. Why would he do that if he had to be? if he had these bad motives that Ben was strongly trying to imply that he had and that I think you agreed he probably harbored as well. It makes no sense to me. Okay.

No, that's fair. I mean, listen, I'd love to get to my view of this because it's probably more nuanced than you'd think. But I think Ben's two specific points to get out what you were just saying is, and one, why put out the blueprints for how the U.S. does metadata data collection versus the fact that we do it? And I think you would probably argue that actually you made that choice. And you can speak to that. And two, For the New York Times or the Washington Times. Right.

Right. I meant you journalists. Right. And two, sort of as a, right, like, you're a very critical, you take a very adversarial approach to journalism. You question every statement in fact, which I think is valuable and justified in the right approach. But shouldn't we view this in the same way? And I think what Ben was saying is, look, I don't know Edward Snowden.

I don't know his motives, but as a factual matter, it is odd to observers that he ended up in China and Russia to the most adversarial intelligence competitors. And maybe there's a perfectly sensible. explanation, but it's sort of, we're trying to find it, I think, was what Ben was getting at. Yeah, so just like about this, I mean, you probably remember, but in August of 2013, after he was allowed by the authorities of Hong Kong to leave, and they actually wanted him to leave because they don't want it to be their problem anymore, he was, there was a plane that he, all that the media had discovered he was going to be on that, that, that he was on his, he, he left Hong Kong and he

was flying to Moscow. And the ticket that he bought was Hong Kong, Moscow, Moscow, Havana, Havana, Ecuador, or Havana, Venezuela, or he was going to figure that the last leg out. Not the friendliest regimes at the time. Right. If you're somebody who wants to make sure that you're not going to be turned over to the U.S. government, you don't want to fly directly into the arms of the U.S. allies, that the U.S. can pressure or course, right? Like, you're not going to fly to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, right? You're not going to fly to, you know, France or the U.K., you're going to try and pick a country.

that is willing to defy the U.S. and, you know, give you asylum. And so on the way from Hong Kong to Moscow, his passport was invalidated because he had been, by that point, indicted. He tried to leave the Moscow airport. He desperately tried to get out of Moscow, but because his passport was invalidated, he wasn't permitted to leave the international zone and wasn't allowed to board an airplane. And so it's always been just so frustrating to me that he got stuck in Moscow, a place he never intended to be, because the U.S. government prevented him from leaving, and now the U.S. government turns around and uses the fact that he's in Russia to malign his...

That's the first thing. And then the second thing is, you know, this is, I think, like, this gets obscured so often. Like, Ben was talking a lot about how these releases were timed to disrupt relations between the U.S. and Germany. I genuinely thought that. I was watching this as an outside observer. It's like, oh, Obama's going to Brazil. Now there's a scoop about collection in Brazil. And look, look, that's smart timing if you're an editor trying to put out a story,

but you could also see a nefarious motive in there. And I'm not necessarily saying I did. Yeah. I mean, look, the reason why Germany and Brazil ended up being, you know, having the biggest impact was because Laura Poitras was in Germany working with their Spiegel. And I live in Brazil where I was working with all the global entities. And Germany and Brazil, are really important, you know, nations. I mean, Brazil's the largest democracy in the,

the largest country in the hemisphere after the U.S., and Germany is in the center of Europe. And so it stands to read that those are really big targets for the NSA. And also, those two countries have a history. I mean, it's smacked of this kind of colonialism that Brazilians are really sensitive to, right? Like the U.S. overthrew their democratically elected government in 1964, imposed a 21-year military dictatorship. So when Brazilian here, the U.S. is invading our telecommunications network. work and spying en masse on millions of our citizens, that makes a big impact. And Germany has a big issue with privacy because of the Stasi and its own history of domestic

spying. So it made a big impact on those. But even it, and I'm not sure what the timing issues are, like I wish we could go back and analyze those, but it'd be kind of boring and a little too detailed. But even if that were true, like even if you think these stories were released in order to, you know, be a big issue because Obama was. going to, I mean, Obama wasn't planning to visit Brazil. I think the issue was Dilma had a state visit plan to the U.S. that ended up, she ended up having to cancel because of domestic pressure.

But that doesn't reflect in any way on Edward Snowden. He had no decision-making role whatsoever in what the Guardian or the New York Times or the Washington Post or Der Spiegel or ProPublica published or when they published. These were decisions that editors made at those papers. So if you're angry because you think stories were published that had no. public interest or that had blueprints, right? Like if you think China and Chinese companies, or why publish it on this particular day, that's not on Edward Snowden. The critique should be directed at newspapers, but the problem is that it's much easier for Ben Rose and for other people to blame that on Edward Snowden than it is to say, try and convince people, oh, the editors of the

New York Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian had treasonous or other nefarious motives. You know, we're trying to be sinister in their behavior. I mean, that's the key point is that he's never the person who made the decision about how things got published or what they published. And a lot of times he was actually upset with the decisions that got made because there were stories that the New York Times and the Washington Post published that he thought went too far, that he thought exposed legitimate spying. So I totally understand what you're saying. And I think it gets to why this is so complicated. And in my personal view here was like, I was out of government when these disclosures occurred. I thank God for that every day.

But I can tell you, I was shocked, right? I wasn't read into the metadata collection program. I wasn't read into the prison programs. I shouldn't have been. But, you know, I suspect very few people at the White House were. I think it is good that those programs were reformed. I think we need to have more scrutiny of surveillance of American citizens, period, more oversight. And I'm with you that Congress can be feckless.

But I would argue that so let's compartmentalize those issues. There are other disclosures that I would characterize as leaks and not whistleblowing in my personal opinion. Like, for example, the Post story that detailed how the NSA enabled the CIA is targeting al-Qaeda or Taliban members in Pakistan, right? Right. I think that's a tool that should be available to us. I'm worried if you guys, and I know you didn't do that, that was the Washington Post. Like, were there concerns about putting that capability at risk or is it, hey, we got to talk more about the drugs? Totally. Totally. You know, it's so, first of all, it's so funny and so ironic because, you know, we, Laura and I usually got depicted as kind of like the rogue, you know,

super independent, not to be trusted kind of journalist. But every time, by, you know, a certain segment in DC, I mean. But every time people go to list the stories that came from the Snowden Archive that they thought were the classic cases of going too far, exposing things that shouldn't have been exposed, it's never our stories of the intercept or the Guardian. It's always the New York Times on the Washington Post whose stories are held up as those examples, which is just incredibly ironic. Yeah, I mean, I remember going through a lot of documents that I would read and think everybody thinks the NSA and the U.S. government ought to be doing, and there's no public interest in exposing what is being done, let alone the methodologies that are being used in order to do them.

And, you know, one thing that has been overlooked is that even to this day, three and a half, almost the overwhelming majority, the overwhelming majority of documents that Snowden gave us, to this day, remain unpublished. Right. And we've been, you know, really loudly condemned by WikiLeaks and by other people who are radical transparency advocates, gatekeeping. And the reason we did that, the primary reason aside from the fact that we just made our own judgments about, you know, just as ethical human beings

about what should and shouldn't be published is because you guys, you and the government got extremely lucky because, in reality, Snowden is a very conservative leaker. He was, you know, he worked in the CIA, he worked in the NFA, he volunteered for the U.S. Army. He, and even though he changed how he thought, he was very much steeped in the idea that we needed to be extremely careful,

whether for tactical reasons or ethical reasons, about not publishing stuff that, you know, exposed how the U.S. government spies on al-Qaeda or actual terrorists. But why take that document to begin with? Was it accidental? No, I think that, you know, to be, I think that what happened was if you're, like, think about it if you're Snowden. So you see this vast, you know, public to understand it and you want journalists to understand it so they can report it onto the public. It's so much easier to just grab everything and say be super careful with it than it is to sit at his desk and try and read, every single one and make decisions while he's inside the NSA about what he's going to take and what he's not going to take.

So the idea was, I'm going to take this huge set of documents. I'm not going to publish any of them myself. I'm going to give them to the Guardian and the Washington Post, and they're going to make decisions about what gets published. So I think it was just more of a practical issue. You know, sort of like Daniel Albrecht, he didn't pick and choose what pages of the Pentagon papers he wanted to publish. He took it all.

he gave it to the New York Times, and they published, I think, 60 or 70% of it. Because it's just easier as the whistleblower not to try and make those decisions while you're trying to evade detection. I mean, I can't imagine the anxiety of going through the process of taking those things. So I hear you. More nerdy foreign policy coming up on Pod Save the World. Okay, so in preparation for this conversation, I reached out to a bunch of people I worked with along the way national security. Also my friends, you mean. Yeah.

The most notable thing about those responses is that, you engender a strong reaction. And I don't say that to be a dick. I say that because I want you to understand their point of view, right? Because I think what it boils down to is a lot of these people feel like their integrity and their motives are being questioned in your reporting and commentary. And so I'm the last person to ever argue that government is perfect. I've seen it way too up close. It is run by humans with human failings. We need checks and balances in place so the citizens feel comfortable if you have Barack Obama as president or Donald Trump is president. But like you were saying earlier, the majority of people who work at the CIA are. or the NSA or in our military do so because they think they're doing something good. And they're trying to keep our country safe. And I'm sure that's why Snowden signed up in the first place. So, again, I get your approach to journalism as adversarial. I think that's a good thing. You guys are holding powerful people accountable.

But a lot of the people I talked to weren't powerful and important. They were like my peers, my age or younger. So I wonder if you could respond to that feeling or speak to them and see if there's any way we can help everybody understand where you're coming from and where they're coming from. Yeah. So, first of all, I mean, if you look at, you know, what the founder, talked about in terms of how the country that they were creating was supposed to work and how they were going to avoid excess of concentration of power in any one faction. The idea was to create different factions that would more or less be at each other's throat,

right? Like Congress would fight with the executive branch and the judiciary would try and take some power, and you would have a pre-press that was independent and intended to be adversarial that was supposed to have conflict with the political class they were covering, not be friends with them. And this, I think, is critical that the roles we play, play are important for the overall system and how it functions. So, you know, I do see my role as throwing rocks at the White House.

And so the people inside the White House aren't going to appreciate that, you know, in every case because some of those rocks might hit them in the head. But I think that, and I think that, you know, journalism in general has become far too deferential to and close to the political class in a way that has really harmed and neutered journalism. We saw that obviously in the run-up to the Iraq War when journalism failed because it was far too close to and trusting in the government. So I have tried to become a kind of model for how to make journalism a little bit more and sometimes a lot more conflictual with people in political life,

not because they have any personal animosity towards them as individuals, but because I think that's important for the democracy. I think things work better that way. And then I think the other issue is, you know, the United States is the most powerful country in the world. And it has been that way for decades. And it has this kind of permanent mentality, this permanent way of doing things. And, you know, if you're in the government, you can say, and I guess that's, you know, sort of true, but it's a very dismissive way of, I think, minimizing some extremely evil and horrible things

that the U.S. government does in the world, from, you know, funding and arming the worst, most despotic regimes on the planet, as I mentioned earlier in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to overthrowing governments, to killing innocent people, to bombing more countries than anybody else. And it doesn't mean that every person who goes to work in the government or even the majority are themselves evil, but there is this system. and this concentration of power that does a lot of damage. And I think it's really important to critique it aggressively and not be patriotic about it and say, well, since it's in my country,

I'm just going to accept that they're morally superior and really pull my punches because at least they're not as bad as China when it comes to press freedom or as bad as Russia when it comes to killing journalists. I mean, the U.S. does a lot of really bad things in the world. Yeah, look, I am biased, and I think the U.S., I think we are better than Russia and China. I think we have better motives. I think we have better laws and better institutions. And I know we've made unconscionable mistakes like the Iraq War.

But. Or Vietnam. Like what would you say that China has done in the last 30 years or Iran that compares to either Iraq or Vietnam in terms of badness? Well, I guess like we're sort of, the ranking of badness is sort of creeping from surveillance to invading places. And I will agree with you that I don't. I don't know that there's a decision that's been made that's more, had worse effects than the Iraq war. But I guess, but here's my question. Is your reporting going to focus on the U.S.

because we just think that we are the most powerful and biggest nation, and that should be your target? And because you get a lot of shit like, well, why don't you ever report on Russia or why don't you ever report on China's intelligence? And I wonder that myself. And I imagine in the Snowden Disclosure is there's got to be some counterintelligent document about what the Russians or the Chinese do to us that would be illuminating. But is that not just not going to be the focus? I mean, yeah, and you guys actually alluded to this in your conversation, you and Ben, I'm glad you brought that up because there is something on it to address. So, look, I'm an American, right?

I speak English. I write for American news outlets. My audience is primarily American. Obviously, I have a base in Brazil, too, and I speak Portuguese, and I do journalism here, but that's because I live here. I could denounce, you know, Putin every day or talk about repression in China, but I just don't think it's going to have much of an impact because I don't have a platform in Russia, and I don't have a base in China. I focus on the bad acts of my government, not because I think that my government is the only country that is engaging in bad acts or even necessarily that they're the worst. But it's because I think that I think that my government is the only country that is engaging in bad acts, or even necessarily that they're the worst. but it's because I think that that's where my ethical duty is, and I think that that's where I can make the most impact.

You know, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, but they didn't publish secret reports about the Chinese military. They published MFA documents, but they didn't publish documents about the FSB. Why? Not because their bias against the United States, but because their journalists are primarily American. They're an English-speaking outlet. Their readership is in the United States,

and they primarily cover the U.S. government. that's where they get their information about. And so, yes, as an American journalist and an American citizen, my focus is much more on the acts of my government than, say, the government of Chile or the government of Kenya or the government of Russia and China. Not because, again, I think that the U.S. is the only one doing bad things, but because that's where I think my focus and impact is the greatest. So would you characterize your position that all intelligence collection is wrong

and that no country should do it, or is there a nuance? How would you describe your views on that? Well, so like, you know, as we talked about before, the vast bulk of the archive that is in my possession, the possession of war poitress and the intercept, remains unpublished. Why? Because we think that there's a lot of legitimate surveillance

that the U.S. government does that could endanger people if it were disclosed, or there's documents that could endanger people's reputations. So I absolutely do not think, and to be perfectly honest, I don't know of anybody who believes surveillance by the U.S. government is illegitimate. For me, I think the key distinction is the distinction between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance. So if the U.S. government were doing what it was doing during the Cold War, which is we want

to spy on this particular person, we're going to go to a court and get a FISA warrant and justify why this person should be surveilled, I actually don't think there would be and Edward Snowden. I don't think I would have any problem with what the U.S. government was doing. The reason there's an U.S.S. Snowden and the reason why there's been a debate around the world is because that's not what the U.S. government is doing. The U.S. government is putting entire populations, hundreds of millions of people, not in countries that have attacked it or where there's particular terrorist and dangers like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but in countries like Germany and Brazil that are allies and democracies, putting the entire population under a

surveillance microscope as well as its own population. And that race is really, profound questions about privacy in the digital age, how the internet can be used, how and that's what I think needs to be debated. If I believe that all surveillance was legitimate, was illegitimate, after I was done talking to you, I would go on to the internet and take my thumb drives and stick them in my laptop and just upload it all of the internet. There's a reason we haven't done that. And that's because we do think that there are legitimate secrets that the U.S. government keeps some legitimate surveillance. You're listening to Pod Save the World.

Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. You have a lot of interesting passages in the book about the psychological impact of mass surveillance that I think are worth reading and worth internalizing as people think about these issues. I want to ask you about the press corps because some of your harshest criticism,

I think people would be surprised to know this in the book is reserved for news outlets and journalists that withhold stories of the request of the government. And it's interesting for me to read about this because I used to be one of the guys who had to make that ask. And I can think of one example where my boss has told me that the world would end if something was reported and then it was reported. And not only did the world not end, but no one gave a shit. And I don't think they intended to lie to me or harm my credibility, but it did.

And it really pissed me off. So I have a unique insight and sympathy for your point of view that the government can cry wolf too often and cite 9-11 too often. But another example is back in 2011 or 12, I think it was the United States was trying to help negotiate a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. And part of that negotiation involves swapping five Taliban prisoners at Gitmo for a U.S. service member named Bo Bergdahl. And so that all started to leak out. And I had to go around and call all these news outlets, try to get them to withhold Bo's name from their stories because we were concerned it would lead, you know, hardline factions and the Taliban to kill Bo or raise the cost on him or somehow otherwise mess up the negotiations. Now, ultimately, those negotiations failed.

And that story gets even more complicated and awful over time as it was politicized when he returned home. But I would do it all over again because my sole goal there was to protect this guy's. life, right? And I'm grateful that these news outlets were willing to have that conversation with me. But my question is, do you think those conversations should never occur, should rarely occur? Like, what's the balance there? You know, it's interesting because one of the first stories that I focused on when I stopped practicing on writing about politics was the Bush scandal about warrantless eavesdropping under the NSA that the New York Times reported in late 2005. And, you know, that, you know,

That story was incredibly important. It actually won the Times of Pulitzer because it said that George Bush and the NSA was spying on Americans without the warrants required by the FISA law. And what ended up being revealed about the journalism part of that story was that the reporters who reported it, James Reisen and Eric Lichblow, actually discovered this in mid-2004 as George Bush was heading into his reelection campaign. himself called the publisher and the editor-in-chief at the time of the New York Times into the Oval Office and said, if you publish this story, you will have blood on your hands. And they barred James Reisen and Eric McBow from publishing the story. George Bush was allowed to stand for re-election without Americans. No, he was spying on them without the warrants required by law.

Rising got sick of it. He wrote a book. He was going to break the story in the book. The New York Times didn't want to get scooped by their own reporter. So they finally published it in 2005. They won the Pulitzer for it, and now they celebrate themselves for it, even though they got forced into doing it. And it never made any sense that it would be dangerous to publish this,

because the only thing that was being revealed, they weren't revealing targets, they weren't revealing methodologies, they were just revealing that they were spying on Americans' calls without first going to the FISA court. And yet the New York Times concealed that story because they got manipulated into doing so. And that was one of the major reasons why Snowden didn't want the New York Times involved in the story

because you thought they would be too deferential. So that played a big role in how I started thinking about journalism. journalism, that this story almost got killed because editors at the most important newspaper were weight and lacked all skepticism when it came to this kind of claim coming from George Bush. And so for a long time, I did have the view that journalists shouldn't talk to the government before publishing the stories. And interestingly, when Snowding came to me, he said one of his conditions was that before

I ever published any document, I would go to the U.S. government and allow them to make the case about why it would be dangerous. to publish it. And he said, you make the decision, all I do is give them the chance to make their case. And through the process of doing that, you know, in 95% of the cases, every time we would go to the government, the NSA, the DNI, they would say, oh, my God, if you publish this, you know, you're going to have blood on your hands, but they could never specify a reason why that would be true. It was just these platitudes, and so we published. But in about five percent of the cases, they actually offered convincing evidence or convincing arguments,

either to me or ones that convince my editors, about why certain information should be redacted, about why certain documents weren't necessary and could endanger people. And so we actually did sometimes make decisions, not very often. So I do think, I now do believe in that process, because as a journalist you should want as much information as you can get about what it is that you're publishing. Why publish an ignorance if you don't have to, I just think it's extremely important to bring a huge dose of skepticism to those conversations because, of course, people in your position, and as I was saying earlier, it goes back to roles, your job is to keep classified information secret.

And the journalist's job is to shine a light on it. And in that exchange, you just have to realize that the people you're talking to are playing a role and aren't necessarily giving you the objective truth. And you have to, through your prism of skepticism, make those informed choices. Yeah, I wish I could think of a way to make that process work better. Because there's just so many, like, I've been in the, oh, my God, you know, terrifying intelligence stream meeting, right? Like every cliche, you know, of some impending threat or attack or what have you. And if there was a better, I don't know how to bring the parties together. Like, do you think the government should give, should read people into programs, journalists, or like give them some sort of clearance for a limited time?

Is there any path forward? You know, it's interesting. It's what you said earlier in these kind of discussions, and you make the case. that publishing will and the world, and it turns out that it's total bullshit that there's no credibility to it. The next, it's the crying wolf syndrome. I agree.

You know, and if you listen to Dean Backay, who's now that, the chief of the New York Times, what he says is there were so many times during the war on terror. He was at the L.A. Times and the New York Times when the government would say, you cannot publish this. All these terrible things are going to happen if you do,

and he would later learn that it was false. And he just said, I no longer trust the government now when they tell me that. my bar for believing them is so much higher. So, you know, I think that people in government need to make that argument only when it's actually true. Otherwise, they lose the credibility for the times when it really is. Yeah, I hear you. I listen, you know, I guess just from having been on the other side of that conversation in times when it made sense, in times when we were wrong, like I, the thing I hope the listeners take away from this is that I think both sides are doing

their best to argue in faith, or at least my experience of the people I worked with, like John Brennan, Dennis McDonough, like the people I was closest to. I knew them well. They were principled good people, like, trying to do their best. But I get you. This is a hard. A broader question for you. Like, I agree with a lot of what you wrote that we spent too much money on surveillance

and intelligence generally. Statistically speaking, right, the threat from terrorism is so much lower than the threat from other ways people die. But Obama himself has made that point many times. Yeah, but it's because people are afraid. And politicians are afraid. it would be called weak on terrorism because, God forbid, you cut the DHS budget and something happened. How do we unscrew up the politics that got us here?

That might be the hardest question I've asked you today. Yeah, I mean, you could write books on that, probably. You know, the reason why, like, why are Americans so much more susceptible, fear-mongering over terror appeals to much greater dangers to their kids or to their own lives, like guns or auto accidents, right, like car. safety. It kills way more people or junk food that causes heart disease. There's so many things

that pose so much of a greater risk to you and your kids than this terrorism fear on which we obsessed. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fear of others. Always easy to raise fears over things that are unknown. Muslims are people who don't have a lot of visibility

in the U.S. They're a tiny part of the population. most Americans don't know Muslims. It's just like when, you know, why did attitudes about LGBT citizens improve? It's because 20 years ago, no one knew that their cousin or their neighbor were their brother were gay because everybody was in the closet. And then once there was visibility, it became much harder to demonize gay people. Muslims are still pretty invisible. And so I think fearmongering over them and demagoguing them is really easy for people who don't know them very well.

Obviously, 9-11 was a huge psychological trauma for Americans that most people have a really visceral memory of. And also, it just seems very kind of extraordinary, right? Like the terrorism, so you hear that, you know, someone locks himself in a nightclub and slaughters 50 people. It just makes so much of a bigger impact on you psychologically than hearing that, you know, 50,000 people die a year of preventable heart disease or gun violence. So I think a lot of it is psychological, a lot of it is about our tribalism, and the problem is that you have a lot of people benefiting from demagoguing it. And actually one of the things that despite being a harsh critic of President Obama

that I think he deserves the most amount of credit for is the fact that he tried very hard, even after attacks, which is a really hard thing to do when people are angry and upset and want explanations to say, look, this isn't the end of the world, Let's keep this risk in perspective. You know, I think we're really going to miss that the next time there's a mass casualty attack carried out on U.S. soil. I agree. I mean, look, he would say that to us. That was his state of – he viewed his role in the event of – after these attacks as, you know, trying to help heal and try to help calm everybody down.

And I worry greatly about what will happen under a Trump presidency. I think their mouths are watering waiting for that first attack. Yeah, I mean, so about the election real quick, there was so much. bad punditry, and I say that as someone who peddled it constantly, that Hillary was going to win, it was in the bag, whatever. I mean, do you have any regrets about, you know, some of your pretty harsh criticism of Hillary is militaristic and, you know, fill in the blank? No, because, you know, again, it goes back to roles. Right. I'm not up, you know, I'm not a propagandist. I'm not a Democratic Party spokesperson, and I think it would be really corrosive

if journalists too much start playing those roles. But did she get too much? I would criticism relative to the difference? I mean, look, elections are imperfect choices between two imperfect people. I just wondered, do you think she got too much shit, given how awful her opponent was? I think, I mean, look, I think that, and

it's really hard to quantify this, but I certainly think this was a factor. You know, I don't know the extent to which it was a factor for me. It probably on some subconscious level was, but when you have, you know, the self-proclaimed data geniuses telling you that it's 96.8 percent likely that she's going to win.

And all of the statistical models are, you know, close to 100 percent. Of course, on some subconscious level, you start thinking that the person who's going to be president needs a lot of scrutiny. Right. And have these polls showed 50-50 likelihood, would Trump have gotten more attention? Maybe. But, you know, if you go back and look at, like, just the overall media coverage, I mean, CNN would routinely put in their on-screen graphics or cry on things that, you know, in the Bush era, we were urging

them to do and they would never think about doing, which is, you know, Trump today says, parentheses with no evidence or completely falsely, whatever it is. Media outlets change their behavior to show how much Trump was lying, how much, you know, out of the norms he was. He got a huge amount of negative media coverage. I honestly think that the bigger issue is the Democratic, you know, the effective politician that it obscured how much the Democratic Party has failed on every level of elective office over the last decade. And I think they have huge messaging problems. They have huge problems with being too captive to their donor class, to being perceived as, you know, American. I think those are the issues that we need to be grappling with, not did journalists do

their job too much of pointing out Hillary Clinton's flaws in dangers. Yeah, I mean, definitely. The Democratic Party has got to get its own house in order in a big way. I just do think, like, you know, it's good to examine these things. My last question for you, because you have been very gracious with your time, and I really appreciate it. You mentioned this earlier, but the Espionage Act was passed in 1917 during some dark times, and obviously a statute cheerleaded by Woodrow Wilson, I believe, is probably not the best way to handle these very complicated leaks in an internet-enabled world. Is there a suggestion you might have for a better way to do this or a better statute to fix it, or are we stuck with this thing? Well, interestingly, people have

have been working on transparency for a long time have obviously been making the argument that the reason why these laws are too harsh that that leaks are punished to, you know, just excessively is because there's just way too much secrecy. You know, I remember when, like, one of the things that I was most struck by when I first read through the Snowden archive, you know, every page of which was either secret or higher, was that, you know, a good percentage of the documents were totally banal. You know, like, even, like, lunch shifts. Yeah, we're, like, classified, which means, you know,

I'm looking at a document of when FNFA bureaucrats are, you know, have lunch, some go at 1130, some 1230, and it's Mark classified, which means it's a felony to disclose it. And I think... Let's explain to listeners what that means. For something to be Mark's secret, it has to be deemed that it would cause grave damage or, right, or what's... Right, to national security.

And people... people like you who, you know, serving government have a huge interest as well in this problem. Once, you know, once Hillary had her issues with the private server, you know, all those classified information going over her email server, which there was, but a lot of it was public information. The problem is that the government now reflexively declares almost everything secret, reflexively, with no judgment about whether it would really cause the kind of harm that you just described. And I think that as long as that's the case, people aren't going to respect classified information in secrecy rules because they don't actually deserve respect.

And think about what a danger it is to democracy when you have Washington instinctively and automatically declaring everything that it does to be secret or even more sensitive journalists about it or talk to the public about it. Of course people are going to break those laws, even with really good intention. And you're going to be turning well-intentioned people into felons really easily, or you're going to have to, you know, pardon people who break the law but with good intentions, or you're going to have to have a two-tiered system of justice like we really have, where if you're a low level, you go to prison. But if you're a general, you know, like Petraeus or General Car Right, you get protected.

And I think all of this is creating secrecy because it's being abused, not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but just through its own institutional inertia. And I think that has to be seriously reformed before people start taking the, is a little serious. Listen, I totally agree with you. I mean, the fact that, like, a piece of classified information could be published by WikiLeaks and yet government officials weren't allowed to look at it on their own computers without getting in trouble was absurd. And, like, as a guy who would have to take calls from reporters who had gotten classified leaks,

I was always in this horrible position of trying to help them understand where they were right, where they were wrong, what we needed them to withhold, if possible. And, like, you know, the fear of, of, of, dealing with that phone call. I can't even imagine what the team who had to deal with the Snowden disclosures was going to because of the highly sensitive and secret nature of those documents. But I agree, like, overclassification is a huge problem that we need to address. Yeah. Listen, man, thank you so much for doing this. I suspect that I'm going to get attacked from the left

and you're going to get attacked from the right, which means this was probably a pretty good conversation. So how can you talk to somebody like Tommy Vader's best friend Greenwald? So we'll just deal with that collectively. But yeah, no, it was great. I enjoyed it. And I appreciate your out. I do too. Next time you're in LA, come on the Potsave America crew. We're a lot more fun over there. This is some... Yeah, I'm going to totally crash the multiple Obama brochures. Okay, sounds good, man. All right. Thank you.

All right. I love to talk to you. Bye-bye.