The Rest Is Classified - 44. The Leak That Changed The World: Stealing State Secrets (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Edward Snowden has decided he is going to leak some of America's biggest secrets, but first he needs to steal them. How do you steal from some of America's most secure facilities? Does he have the access he needs? And is he working alone? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera share how Edward Snowden stole 1,500,000 files from the American system. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com or click this ⁠link⁠. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠ Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼⁠⁠⁠ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠⁠ It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://incogni.com/therestisclassified⁠⁠ Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Ugh. All right. Well, that was Edward Snowden, also from his memoir, Permanent Record, and we're back with episode two of the Edward Snowden journey. And despite the fact that I think that line, Gordon, that I just read, that you just made me read, which is actually the better way to say it,

is completely fabricated. Deadly Sin number one, Edward Snowden. We're going to talk a little bit today about, really, Snowden's journey to getting to a point where he is sitting on top of a trove of massive secrets. Absolutely. So last time we looked at Edward Snowden, the early years, him, the young Snowden, a kind of guy who grew up with computers and the internet, loved them.

A libertarian who goes to work as a contractor, CIA, works in the CIA elsewhere, clearly chafes at some of the restrictions on him, has some difficulties at work, also has an ideology. So one of the key questions, which I think we'll come back to is what explains his journey? How far is it about grievance and how far is it about ideology? We left him in Japan working as a contract for NSA and having seen some of the really secret programs in there, which suggested the NSA was collecting data about American phone records. So after that, he does that for a couple of years, then age 28, 2011, he goes back

to the U S and he takes another kind of tech role. He's a liaison between the company Dell and the CIA coming up with cloud computing solutions. So again, another really techie job. Also in this period, I will note that Dell had tried to move him in about September of 2010 to a position where he would support IT systems at CIA. But, but, and for those watching, this is a scattered castles reference, so mark it down. Because of his D-Rog mark, his sort of black flag mark in scattered castles, the system that

manages clearances, Dell couldn't put him in that position. They had to find another spot for him that didn't require the same level of security clearance. And so he ends up back in another role and then eventually in Hawaii. Yeah, it's quite a place to end up because by age 29, 2012, he's working again as a contractor, but for NSA. So effectively inside the NSA in Hawaii, nice place to work. He's living with his girlfriend then Lindsay Mills. She's a photographer and a dancer.

Now he's the place he works sounds amazing. He's working deep underground in a kind of tunneled out facility beneath a pineapple field. And this in World War II was an underground aircraft factory designed to be protected from bombing. And I love the way he describes it as being like a Bond villain lair but with crappier lighting. That's good. I'm going to steal that for a novel. Yeah, take it.

So here he is, you know, again, within the kind of heart, the secret state. Fair to say he's remembered by colleagues as being quite eccentric. They remember him as a kind of pale vampiric figure wearing a hoodie, a particular hoodie, which actually had a parody of the NSA logo on it. So it had an eagle, which is the kind of normal symbol, but wearing headphones and kind of spying on the world. Talents across the world. And he kept a copy of the Constitution on his desk.

So you do get a picture of a man who is perhaps at odds with his institution, which is kind of interesting, isn't it? Well, and he's also remembered in this period for not being able to show up to work on time, which I'll just mention in my fact-based. We've all been there. Right. And apparently because he's playing video games so late at night, you know, and again, it's this kind of thread of this guy is smart, actually likable in many respects.

He's introverted, but you know, he's got a long-term girlfriend, he's got relationships with people, but he's not really able to function in a normal work environment. And he's bored. And he's bored. I mean, I think in some ways he's too clever for many of the roles he takes. Gordon. Gordon. No, I think that's true.

I think that's the picture I get a bit of him. There is another feature here, which is colleagues from the sort of pineapple bunker remember that Snowden was sort of very, he would come out and say that, okay, well, things like the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, these are going to lead to online censorship, which is a theme of his. He's very concerned about that. Yeah, pre-internet is what he wants. But then he'll admit to having read neither bill and not understanding really what's in

them. So I do think you also see these glimmers in this period and even earlier of somebody who is extremely certain about his beliefs does have- Ideological beliefs. Ideological beliefs. He's not just a mercenary, but he jumps to conclusions very quickly, gets to very certain conclusions very quickly

about those beliefs. Yeah, I think that's right. Now it is at this point in 2012 that he's going to turn into someone who is not just kind of aggrieved and chafing against authority, but who is actually going to collect and steal a ton of secrets. His narrative of it is that he'd seen what the secret state was up to, he'd seen the kind of power of the surveillance state, he'd been able to look at these documents and he wants to stop it. So I think this is the kind of interesting point where, you know, how far is this being

like a whistleblower and how far is this being someone who is trying to kind of damage the state or stealing documents. Two quite different interpretations of the same actions. He says he's kind of chasing, going down rabbit holes in his spare time, trying to kind of understand what the secret state is up to and he wants to stop that because he believes it's against the constitution in terms of you know, the collection of Americans data and he believes it's unethical and against his ideas of free internet. Do you buy that, David? I'm guessing you don't.

Well, no, I don't buy it. There's a very kind of critical period in the middle of 2012. That's kind of central to this. But but up until that point, I mean, it is probably worth us talking a little bit about that kind of access he had, because he does end up in a unique position to take a massive trove of documents. And he's kind of pulling together it as, you know, cause again, in Hawaii, I mean, I think he'll say, he had like 30 minutes of work to do a day

of actual work, right? So he starts kind of pulling together, what do a day of actual work, right? Yeah. So he starts kind of pulling together what is this program called heartbeat, right? Where he's essentially trying to create a centralized repository for a lot of the documents he's going to... Yeah, kind of reading list. Yeah, reading list of documents. And it's quite interesting because he does this kind of semi-opening. At this point, he's kind of telling people he's creating this and he's got access to all the systems because he's a systems engineer. In a sense, those people who keep the systems running, by definition, have privileged high level access to all the files because they need to in order to be able to manage them. It does mean he is able to do stuff which maybe a normal spy wouldn't have been able to do in terms of collect and collate all the data that's here.

He starts to collect this material. It's an interesting point to look at here is, is he a whistleblower? Because I think that is how he is framed very much by his supporters. That he is someone who has seen the bad stuff in the secret state, and he wants to expose it, and therefore he's a whistleblower. Being a whistleblower is obviously something which also gets you certain kinds of protections. You know, it's very different from being, if like, a spy or someone who's stealing stuff or out

to damage an institution. Well, if you enter Edward Snowden on Google, his tagline will say, and it'll say whistleblower. That's how he pops up. But I think this is deadly sin number two, Gordon. This is impure motives, okay? This is critical to understand because lost in all of the memoirs, a lot of the very positive reception that Snowden's leaks received

is a very critical piece of the timeline, which is you get to June of 2012, he's in Hawaii, and Snowden has a massive fight with his supervisors over what else? A software patch that gets deployed, it fails, right? And there is a fight on his team between supervisors over why this happened. And essentially what Snowden does, which is similar to what he did in his very first months at CIA, is in this back and forth fight, he sends a note like three or four levels above the chain to a senior NSA employee at Fort Meade. Right?

And keep in mind, Snowden is a contractor working for Dell. So rightly or wrongly, he's not a blue badge NSA employee working at the fort, right? So he's elevated this issue massively. This obviously doesn't go well for him. There's a note that comes back. He gets a quick rebuke from Washington. His behavior is quote, totally unacceptable, unacceptable in all caps. And so you can only imagine what's going on in the cubicle form out under that pineapple field. And it is two weeks after this, June, 2012 incident that he starts these bulk downloads.

So I think the recipe of sort of the sauce here of Snowden's decision, I think really matters a lot. And my view is that it's kind of three things, right? Number one, you have a guy who has this incredible certainty in his own beliefs, his own kind of worldview that feels like he's been put down by the system, wronged by the system, that he should be way ahead of where he is. He should probably have his boss's job or his boss's boss's job.

And so I think you do at the base level have this kind of revenger's tale that has the ideology, this kind of, you know, free internet privacy thing layered on top. But in my view, the facts, the chronology of sort of when he starts down this journey, show it to be very much motivated by revenge. Yeah, it is a matter of interpretation. But I think ideology does play a role.

You are right that there may be triggers to do with what happens in the workplace. And I think he's kind of his views are dismissed by a supervisor, because he's a contractor, actually, he's kind of told, you know, come back as staff, if you want to talk to me like that. And he's kind of flamed out in front of colleagues, I accept that there's there is grievance there. And that grievance is really powerful. Yeah, in the in the espionage business too. Yeah, but I also think there's ideology there. He's decided he wants to do something and he's going to start collecting files. We'll look in a minute at how he does that. He doesn't go through, if you like, whistleblower channels, because there are supposed to be channels.

Now some people have said, well, you know, there's no evidence he did that and he should have done that. I think that's half true, but I also in Snowden's defense will say, you know, the evidence was people who had tried to blow the whistle about some of these programs had been shut up. I mean, there were cases of people like Thomas Drake, who'd been in the NSA and had talked about some of this attitude, and he'd basically tried to blow the whistle internally. It had failed. He'd gone out and gone to a newspaper and told them about it, and then he got arrested. And so it is true that Snowden doesn't go through, if you like, the formal channels

to go put your hand up and go, I think these programs are wrong. But I don't think he feels he would have been listened to or that there was that option to actually have any difference or make any difference about these programs by going through the formal channels. Well, I think that's my third deadly sin, Gordon, is that he doesn't avail himself of these channels. And I agree with you that you could look at Thomas Drake, you could look at these case studies of NSA folks who had tried and it had not gone well for them. But what I find interesting is that

Snowden is perfectly willing throughout his career to go to the IG. The Inspector General, yeah. The Inspector General. Yeah. To go to superiors with all manner of grievances, complaints, issues that have been detrimental to his career. And so number one, I think given the nature of the information that he's going to leak, there are protections for this.

There's a 1998 Whistleblower Protection Act that would have covered contractors. There are DOD regs that cover this. He could have gone to any number of House, Intel, or Senate Intel committee staffs with specific documents and brought them to their attention, right? But he doesn't. For someone who has shown himself willing to go to those authorities in the past,

I think there's a level of irresponsibility, right, with this material. This is material that is funded by the U.S. taxpayer. So to not go through some of irresponsibility, right, with this material. This is material that is funded by the US taxpayer. So to not go through some of those channels, I just think, man, you know, that's an irresponsible decision. Yeah. And I think, you know, it gets to a question of motive, which maybe we'll come back to when we get to the very end of the series, which is what is he seeking to do at this point? Is he trying to place greater oversight on these programs and have a debate about them? Is he trying to

stop the surveillance and the programmes? Is he trying to damage the NSA and the intelligence community? That's a big question. It's quite hard because the answer is in Edward Snowden's head and I'm not sure even he would be able to verbalise it even if he was here and be honest about it. But those are the different levels of what's going on. What is, I think, significant is that rather than take just a few documents, and I think this is one of the big questions I have, is if he was really aggrieved by, say, Stella Wynn, the program collecting American phone records and a few other surveillance programs, he could have just picked 10 files to take.

But what he's about to do and what we're going to see is he's not going to take 10 files, he's going to take almost everything he can lay his hands on about what the NSA and its allies do. And I think that, to me, is one of the question marks is why does he take so much to expose what they do, rather than if you like, the kind of narrow things where he's got an issue about the kind of, and I think a legitimate issue about the constitutionality or the ethics of it. a legitimate issue about the constitutionality or the ethics of it. Well, and I'll just again add to my Deadly Sin number one on Edward Snowden's track record of fabrication, because one of the documents that he's going to take, or one set of documents he's going to take in this 2012 period, mid 2012, he's going to steal the test and the answer key for a job inside a group at NSA called T.A.O., Tailored Access Operations,

which is essentially in that era is the NSA's. Elite hackers. Elite hackers, the guys and girls who go out and try to access really hard to access networks of our foreign adversaries. And Snowden applies for this job, but he's already, I mean, this is where I think you do get this kind of jumbled set of motives for why he's already, I mean, this is where you, I think you do get this kind of jumbled set of motives

for why he's taking all these documents, because I guess he could have chanced upon this and then thought, well, I've got the test, I might as well apply. But he's also does have some very mercenary potential motives for some of these document thefts, but he takes this test and of course passes it with flying colors, right? Because he's got all the answers.

And then he gets offered, and again, I think this is a great insight into his personality because he gets offered a job working inside TAO, which by the way is a premier, inside NSA is a premier job to have, gets offered a GS-12, government scale 12 role inside TAO and turns it down because he felt he should have been offered a GS 15 salary. And this again, it's absolutely fascinating because you just

let's, you know, get into some of these facts around how this guy behaved and who he is. He's 29 at that point. And I mean, it's a little bit different kind of depending on the agency, but it would probably have taken a really competent, no, he joins when he's 23. He gets into the secret world. It would have taken 14, 15 years, something like that for a competent person to rise to the level of GS 15. He's been in for six and he's already thinking,

well, I should have my 15. Anyway, he turns down the TAO role and stays in Hawaii. But there's some really interesting aspects to this guy's character that I think get left out of the geography. One interesting thing though, about not taking that job though, is that people have said, was he working for the Russians or the Chinese? I don't think that's true. I'm sure that's not true. And one of the reasons, and we'll come back to a few other reasons, but one of the reasons here is that if you were a spy, you'd go take the job at DAO, even for a lower pay, because that gets you access to the really hardcore secrets. So it is interesting, but it does suggest you're back to either grievance or ideology, but that's his motivation, not being a spy. So here he is. He's angry. He's

angry at the system, angry at his employers, it here he is, he's angry, he's angry at the system, angry at his employers, it looks like, and he's going to do something about it. After the break, we'll come back and look at how he takes those secrets and what he does with them. From Wandery, I'm Raaza Jaffrey, and this is The Spy Who. This series, we open the file on Eamon Dean, the spy who betrayed Bin Laden. In 1994, 16-year-old Eamon wants to die. He heads to war-torn Bosnia to join the Mujahideen and save his fellow Muslims. He hopes to become a martyr so that he can be reunited with his dead parents in paradise.

Instead, he's about to be confronted by a cruel and bloody reality. A reality that'll lead him to turn his back on terrorism and become the West's top spy inside Al-Qaeda. Follow the Spy Who on the Wandery app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of the Spy Who betrayed Bin Laden early and ad-free with

Wanderi+. All right, well, welcome back. We are with Edward Snowden. He is bunkered under a pineapple field in Hawaii with headphones on, probably looking quite vampiric after a night of playing video games and arriving late to work. Edward Stoden has now moved in his sort of ongoing odyssey through the United States secret state. He has moved and he is now an analyst working for another contractor, right?

Booz Allen Hamilton. Still in Hawaii. Still in Hawaii, still working under contract for NSA, but at this other contractor, Booz Allen. And it is 2012. He has started these kind of bulk downloads off of his computer and out of these internal databases at NSA. And despite his sort of sunlight deprived looks, Edward Snowden has a tremendous amount of access inside this world and is starting to really harvest it. Yeah. I mean, he's working with something called an infrastructure analyst at Booz Allen, earning 120k, 120,000.

It seems like quite a lot of money for me, but maybe that's the contractor world in the US intelligence community. There we go. But he says the key thing here is he had access to something called X-key Score, which is one of the systems used to search through all the different streams of data that NSA collects. And as we'll kind of explore, I think, as we go through the series, there were huge amounts of streams of different ways in which NSA was able to grab different types of data and different types of record and electronic communications.

And X-keyScore was the kind of search tool, if you like, to kind of put an email address in that and see what you could bring up. Will Barron Well, I suppose that wonderful quote you made me read at the beginning of this episode, Gordon, about Stodin having access to every communication on planet Earth, it's total garbage, right? I mean, it's not true, but I think his access to like a sort of a search like X-key score tool like that gave him, you know, I think in his own kind of serial fabricator mind, the willingness to say that because he does have access. It's true, right? He has access to a tremendous

amount of information. Yeah. And I think if you or I or our audience were sitting at X-key score, I think we'd be astonished at the kind of, you know, what you could pull up if you went into it. So I think there is a lot, you know, that's not, you know, the exact who you, you know, whether you can wiretap the president, I don't know. But the idea that there's a lot of data there that you could use. I think that's true. Well, I've seen the PowerPoint documents that have leaked. The complexity makes me wonder if I would be able to operate XPScore because I think I would stare befuddled at the screen for a while

without being able to use it. And Snowden even, I mean, and we'll, I'm sure come to this a little bit later, he did claim to have wiretapped a bunch of Congress people and Supreme Court judges. Yeah. And it's not entirely clear to me what that means. We'll come to that. Deadly Sin number one continues a theme, Gordon, theme through the series. But here's the thing. He's seeing all this stuff.

He's in a job where he's got access. He's decided he wants to blow the whistle or cause damage, however we want to put it. That's his view. So he's decided he's to blow the whistle or cause damage, however we want to put it. That's his view. So he's decided he's going to download this material and it's fascinating how he does it. So he starts to copy the files that he has access to from his reading list system, which is called Heartbeat. And what's interesting is he transfers it onto old legacy PCs, so really old computers left in the office.

So these are not internet connected in a way you'd normally expect. So again, that just stops the trail being clear about what he's doing and stops leaving a digital trail to it. He then takes the material and transferred it onto tiny SD cards. It's really interesting. He doesn't want to use thumb drives, you know, kind of USB flash drives. He wants to use tiny SD cards because one of the reasons is you can smuggle them out much more easily. He can put them in a sock. They're not going to set off metal detectors because they're so small. I mean, at one point he hides one of the cards in his cheek. You know, they're small enough. You put it in his cheek so if someone stops him or asks him something, he could just swallow it.

The problem is it's very slow transferring this. Anytime they're pretty slow, but on probably old computers and old SD cards. So he spends hours overnight on the night shift, kind of copying and compressing the files so that he can fit them onto the SD cards. And it sounds like it is literally like those old movies where the spy is trying to steal something, it's like in the original Mission Impossible film with Tom Cruise, where you're seeing the bar move across the screen, like 81%, 82%, if slowly moving across the screen as he's trying to move those files around.

That's the process initially for stealing them. And then he also has got this thing about Rubik's cubes. And this is, I guess, the thing he loves doing. I find this entirely unsurprising. It is a bit of a hacker trope, I think, the Rubik's cube, and he's definitely got it. And so he starts carrying them around the office, and it's quite useful to do that every day because people get used to him carrying them and they know him as the Rubik cube guy.

And then what he does is he kind of peels off the square on the Rubik's cube and he hides the SD cards underneath so that he can just carry them past the armed guards who were there at the door. Cause there's a fair bit of security there. There's, you know, there's armed guards, there's, you know, you've got to scan your badges, there's, you know, those kind of. There's armed guards, you've got to scan your badges, there's those air-locked security doors you've got to swipe through. But he's able to get this data out, I guess.

He understands the system, that's the point. I think most maybe outsiders who are looking at intelligence community buildings or sites through the lens of Hollywood would probably be surprised to know that there are basically no checks. Once you're in the system, right? Once you're kind of inside. You're cleared, yeah. Obviously, if you were carrying a garbage bag

of documents out, someone might stop him. But if you're carrying an NSD card, or if you have 30 pages of documents or something in a briefcase or a bag, no one's checking this stuff. You could just walk out. And it actually, I mean, I remember every day leaving CIA, kind of going through this process.

And it was a little stressful actually of trying to check all of my bags and stuff to make sure that I wasn't carrying anything out on accident that was highly classified. And that kind of thing happened all the time. I had friends who, and analysts actually, tend to sweat this more than the case officers because the case officers are out there in the world

recruiting people and kind of dealing with classified stuff outside of a SCIF, a secure department and information facility, or vaults. I had a friend who would walk out and he walked out one time with a document he shouldn't have. He was about to have a heart attack. The point is it's easy. People in Britain have done it. They've left them on trains and made mistakes about it. He takes them home and then he transfers them onto a large storage device and encrypts them.

He puts a hood over his head in case there's a camera in his house. Classic spy stuff. Now what's so interesting is it's not entirely clear how many documents he's able to take, but some accounts are up to 1.5 million. I mean, there are different accounts and there's the smaller figures, but it's astonishing how much. And I guess this is also the reality of the digital world because 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, these documents would have been on paper, basically, rather than electronic. You were not going to carry 1.5 million documents out of a secret facility and then hide

them in your room at home, whereas he can do it and stick them on a hard drive. That has changed intelligence, it's changed security, it's changed what people call the insider threat, it's changed what you can do with spying and stealing secrets now, even though Edward Snowden, as we said, is not a spy, because of the ability to kind of collect large amounts of information in a tiny place. Well, and you've just teed up my fourth deadly sin of Edward Snowden, which is completely indiscriminate leaking. Right?

So 1.5 million documents are what he takes. So 1.5 million documents are what he takes. The vast majority, of course, unrelated to any of the domestic surveillance programs that angered him. How high, Gordon, do you think those documents would reach into the sky if they were stacked? I don't know, but you're going to tell me. I am going to tell you. To the moon? I'm going to tell you in kilometers.

Okay, go for it. A measure that you will understand. Five kilometers high. Okay. If you stack those up. Okay. He's a system administrator. So he's got access to massive databases,

kind of read, write, delete access, right? So he can see all this stuff. So the scraping tools that he uses to do these downloads are more or less completely indiscriminate. Now he does do some specific searches, right? But he's scraping through these databases. He has no idea what's even on these.

And there's an interesting kind of techie reason for some of this, which is that when senior NSA officials would come from around the world, come from Fort Meade and would log on to computers out at Hawaii, essentially their hard drive, what was on their system, really their user profile rather in DC at Fort Meade would replicate out in Hawaii. And so a lot of the flashier, sexier PowerPoints that ended up getting leaked initially are because

senior NSA policy people had come out, not to meet with Snowden, but for other meetings and their files are downloaded there and he pulls them unknowingly in many cases off of these databases. So totally indiscriminate. Your point about indiscriminate is taken in terms of what he takes. But here's the interesting thing. The question is, what is he going to do with them? Okay, that is the big question for him.

He's not indiscriminate in what he wants to do with them. And I think this is important because one option for him, if he'd simply wanted to do as much damage as possible, if that had been his motivation, he could have self-published onto the internet these files. That's true. And you know, that is, if you like, the WikiLeaks option. And we should say WikiLeaks, Julian Assange had really just emerged in, I think, 2010. I mean, a few years before, but particularly at that time, there'd been this huge leak of diplomatic cables, which were kind of State Department cables, which WikiLeaks had got hold of, and they just put them out on the internet. And the WikiLeaks,

Julian Assange attitude was information must be free. You know, doesn't matter classification, doesn't matter risk. Just put it all out there. You know, that's what it's for. Now at this point, if Snowden had been seeking maximum damage, he could have given them to WikiLeaks or he could have put themselves onto the internet. And he was capable of doing that. And he does not want to do that.

So I think that, you know, goes back to this point where the complexity of his motives, it's not as simple as just wanting to do damage. He says he wants people who can, if you like, work through the documents, validate them, explain them and publicize them. That's what he wants to do rather than just take indiscriminately and publish them. And I do agree with that and I'm grateful that Edward Snowden did not go the WikiLeaks route. It also bears mentioning that if he had gone the WikiLeaks route and just pushed them out, he would have given Assange and his organization, or something like it, the

credit. I think at his core, Edward Snowden, good, bad, and ugly, he is a narcissist. It would have been almost unthinkable for him to just push this stuff out there and not be the face of it. It's actually more strategic for someone who wants to be the face of this thing. And to kind of ride this, to have journalists or somebody else writing stories that you can sort of catapult yourself on. Yeah, and it is also true that I think working through journalists, he thinks will give him a bit more protection, in a sense, because you can go through kind of First Amendment and the freedom

of the press, and that that will give him a bit of institutional protection, if you like, as he seeks to kind of expose what he sees as the surveillance state. So certainly that is a decision that he's consciously taken, that this is the best route to try and get this information out there. So here he is, he's decided he wants to reach out for journalists. But how? I mean, how do you do that without being spotted? So he sets up a series of anonymous, at least pseudonymous email accounts to try and contact people using kind of particularly interesting encrypted email services. Encrypted so it's hard to trace, you know, who owns the account.

And actually the NSA and FBI will try and trace that eventually. And they go through lots of efforts to do that. It's interesting. He comes up with names for these accounts. Cincinnati, a Roman who voluntarily relinquished power. Tell me you're a narcissist without telling me you're a narcissist. And he uses another one, okay, Virax, truth teller. He's coming up with these email accounts, which he's going to use to reach out to journalists

to say, I've got this stuff for you. Now he's worried about using the internet and being traced, obviously, because he knows a fair bit about what can be done. So he used something called war driving around Hawaii. It's really interesting. So war driving is basically where you drive a car around with your antenna looking for Wi-Fi and hotspots and internet access that you can just kind of jump onto. So it's someone else's, you know, kind of Wi-Fi or network that you can connect to and then use so that you can use that to send your email and then move on.

And then obviously if someone comes to try and trace which IP address or where the email passed through in terms of the network, it'll just be some cafe or something like that. So he drives around doing this kind of wall driving thing, trying to send these emails to check whether it's been replied to on this special account. He then has to go back and find another network. So it's not an easy process, but this is the moment where he thinks, I've got something for the journalists. They're bound to want to listen and to hear what I've got to say.

Because he's sitting on a stack of 1.5 million top secret documents. He has a five kilometer high stack, three miles for American listeners, of documents, 1.5 million documents. And he's going to try to give them to journalists. And so I guess, I mean, the question here is, well, who is he going to reach out to? Which journalist is he gonna try? And who's really gonna help him tell this story?

I think as he sees it, this fantastic story, this lewd story about the surveillance state, NSA spying on Americans, and it's all gonna lead into an absolutely insane encounter and really a chase, I think, in a most unusual place. That's right, and it's going to lead to what was the biggest story of the year in news terms back in 2013.

Join us next week for that, but if you join the Declassified Club, you can hear the whole series right now. Our first bonus where David and I answer the questions you've sent in will be out this Friday but in the weeks to come our bonuses will include interviews with former CIA chiefs, the former head of MI5 and other people from the spy world. So to join just sign up at therestisclassified.com and take advantage of our launch discount. And we may also finally give me an opportunity, Gordon, to watch War Games, right, and discuss

it with you, thus completing my delayed entry into American manhood. So thank you for listening and we will see you next time. See you next time. See you next time. of the American dream. Nine-to-five jobs, dropping the kids off at soccer practice, and just the right amount of charm to slide into the orbits of the powerful. But behind closed doors, they were Russian operatives, meticulously crafting coded messages and feeding Moscow everything it needed to stay one step ahead of the US. When a powerful mole reveals the names and locations

of the undercover spies, the FBI finds itself walking a tightrope, protect its most crucial informant, whilst avoiding a catastrophic diplomatic firestorm. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia early and ad-free with Wondery Plus.