The Rest Is Classified - 47. The Leak That Changed The World: Spying on the World (Ep 5)

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

Stories continue to flood out of the Snowden leaks and it's not just American doing the spying. How were the British 'Mastering the Internet'? Should we be surprised that America are spying on their allies? And what damage will these revelations do? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss how the stories from Edward Snowden's leaks continue to make headlines around the world. ------------------- 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.⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- 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

In the CIA in particular, you get a lot of training on how not to get into trouble at customs. You have to think about how you dress, how you act. You have to think about the things in your bag, and the things in your pockets, and the tales they tell about you. Your goal is to be the most boring person in line, with the most perfectly forgettable face. But none of that really matters when the name on your passport is all be the most boring person in line with the most perfectly forgettable face. But none of that really matters

when the name on your passport is all over the news. I handed my little blue book to the bearish guy in the passport control booth who scanned it and rifled through its pages. Then the guy picked up his phone, grumbled some words in Russian, and almost immediately, far too quickly, two security officers in suits approached.

They must have been waiting. The officer in front took my little blue book from the guy in the booth and leaned in close to me. There is problem with passports, he said. Please come with. Welcome back to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey. I'm Gordon Carrera. And that Gordon is the first of these terrible Edward Snowden quotes that you have forced me to read this entire series that I've been, I would say, moderately pleased to read because it concerns Ed Snowden's, essentially his entrapment by the Russian security services in Moscow.

This is him arriving at Moscow airport, June 2013, and that moment, that moment. You ever had it? Well, I appreciated all of the wonderful trade craft that Ed provides early in that quote. And then he says, it doesn't matter because my name's Ed Snowden and I've flown to Moscow after I've released a documentary film about my NSA leaks. He's not exactly secretive. I've taken an Aeroflot flight, I land in Moscow, and now I've got a bunch of big Russian guys who are going to have a word with me, which seems, let's say, fairly obvious.

Yeah, unsurprising. And a little bit unsurprising. Yeah. That the Russians would not wave him through on his eventual path to Ecuador. Now, where we left him last, there was a bit of a mystery about where in the world is Ed Snowden. Yeah. Because he had a flight booked to go to Ecuador, but he did not take that flight. And he is now essentially stuck in Moscow.

In what appears to be the kind of transit area of Moscow. So he's not actually, and it's very interesting, they don't actually let him technically go into Russian territory. They kind of detain him in its kind of halfway place. And these people come to see him. And the they here, we should be clear. The FSB. The Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, notable alums include Vladimir Putin.

Yeah. Yeah. They've decided they want to chat with him. Yes. And there's a little, I won't make you read too many quotes because I'll read a little bit. Oh, you won't, Gordon. Yes, you're being generous here. I'll read one.

At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others, the white of his hair shining like a halo of authority. He cleared his throat. Stop it, spy novelist. And gave me in decent English what the CIA calls a cold pitch, which is basically an offer by a foreign intelligence service that can be summarized as, come and work for us. I knew I had to cut him off. Listen, I understand who you are and what this is. Please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with you.

So they're pitching him. He's open about that. They're saying, we know you got a bunch of secrets. Come be a spy for us. Yes. Come be our man. Yes. And he's saying no. And he's saying no. Yes. Good for him. He's really putting his foot down here in Moscow's airport in front of the FSB. Yeah. With absolutely no leverage. Yeah, it's true. He has got a problem.

He has got a problem. He's a US passport's council. You know, this FSB guy points to this massive media scrum, which I guess they can see through a window. And he says to him, life for, I'll do my Russian accent, life for a, I can't do it, life for a person in your situation can be very difficult without friends who can help. Gordon, as someone who's written a book about...

Russian style. Your title is Russians Among Us. Yeah, I... You need a better Russian accent. Yeah, I got to work on it. I'll work on it next week. There's going to be lots of opportunities in our show to do this. This guy says, life can be difficult without friends. That just sounds like a deep voice.

You could add a few cigarettes. He let the words linger. If there is some information, perhaps some small thing you could share with us. And so they want his stuff. The Russian angle here is interesting because I think it's very possible that when Snowden arrives, that the Russians are at first very suspicious and that the mindset very much could be, is this a setup? Yeah. Is this guy being sort of dangled in front of us by the Americans?

Now, you obviously had the leaks come out and all of that. So there's a very strong counter argument to that. But I have to think that initially when the Russians sit down with this guy, they're doing the case office thing right off the bat of who is this guy? Yeah, what's he doing? Is he legit? Yeah. the case office, something right off the bat of who is this guy? What's the motivation? Is he is he legit? Yeah, because there would be a very strong kind of undercurrent in the FSB. I'd imagine there's also probably some behind the scenes jockeying with the SVR Russia's foreign

intelligence service over who's going to have access to this guy and he's going to interview him. Every Russian security service is probably going to want to sit down with him at some point during his little stay at Sheremetyevo. But, you know, they're going to be assessing him for his foreign intelligence value. They're going to be conducting really deep psychological analysis on him over the course of this time to try to understand how they could sort of work with him or through him. And we should also note, I think this is a really important little detail that good old Ed kind of is a little bit vague about,

I would say in his memoir, is what did he bring or did he bring anything with him to Moscow? Because certainly if he brought any electronic device, any memory card, any SD card, any USB stick, whatever, regardless of the encryption, the assumption has got to be electronic device, any memory card, any SD card, any USB stick, whatever, regardless of the encryption, the assumption has got to be that the Russians are going to image it, get access to it pretty quickly.

Yeah. Let's hit that question. I mean, you know, he's there in the airport and he's going to leave the airport, but he's not going to leave Russia. He stalled there while a lawyer, you know, provided, I think, by WikiLeaks. Well, he's got one lawyer linked to WikiLeaks. He's got another one linked to the FSB. Oh yes, I forgot about the more objectionable lawyer. And knowing that the Americans are after him. I mean, there's a fascinating bit

here where a few days later, the president of Bolivia leaves Moscow airport on his own private jet after a meeting and the US gets it diverted to Vienna because they believe Snowden is being smuggled out on board. Now, I mean, it A tells you just how desperate the US is to try and get him. I mean, it's the president of another country and you are forcing his jet to land to try and get Snowden. And I mean, it causes outrage, probably understandably in Latin America, but there's still this sense is like, where's Snowden? What's going to happen to it?

I've had a good deal of fun with sort of mocking in the last episode, his suspicions about the US using sort of triads to sort of render him. But it was, I think, a legitimate concern on his part that when he left Hong Kong, any airspace he traversed, where the United States would have access or allies, was at risk of exactly this happening. Yeah. And it's not that he would be illegally rendered. It's literally that they'll force him to land and

then he'll be arrested and extradited back. Let's go back to your question, which you raised, which I think is a really important one, which is the material. Cause that's what, you know, the Russians at this border are saying, you know, is there something you can share with us? What have you got? Now we should say here, Snowden is very clear that he says he made sure it was not accessible to the Russians. And the implication I think is that he did not bring it with him to Russia. That he basically handed it off to the journalists, people like you and McCaskill. We met previous episodes from the Guardian to Laura Poitras to Glenn Greenwald, you know, maybe to others as well, but he did not

carry with him at this point, the archive. I mean, in his view, he's given it to journalists, their job to do their work. He hasn't got it. Cincinnati's right. To go back to his absurd narcissistic. The Roman who relinquished power. But there probably is something to be said for that, is that he doesn't see himself in his own sort of heroic worldview as the guy who's going to carry this whole thing forward. Yeah, he's given it to the journalist. Now, I mean, there are some other kind of questions about where it was in China.

I mean, there are people who still think that he might have either carried it with him at some points, or that he uploaded it somewhere. So one of the interesting theories you come across, people who were in the US intelligence community raised it, is that he uploaded the material somewhere and hid the key to decrypt it or to find it and to be able to use it somewhere else. Dead Man's Switch comes from suicide bombs, doesn't it? If you've got a bomb and if you're killed, then the bomb goes off. So you're holding the switch. The electronic version is you upload it somewhere and you have a trigger where if you are taken out of action, rendered, put in prison, killed, effectively the trigger is released and the stuff emerges into the public. So that's been one of the question marks is whether he kind of hid the material somewhere as a kind of form of protection with the idea if he was arrested or stopped, you know, the dead man switch would operate and then the material would be released.

Now, he's never said that. That's just speculation. That's speculation that some people have. But it's an interesting theory and it is just a theory. And the other one is that this material was just very well encrypted on hard drives and taken by people to other places. Well, the other angle here is that he did this actually as he was taking the information originally from NSA. A lot of the documents essentially have his own digital imprint on them to show that he was the one who downloaded them

and took them out of the National Security Agency. And I think that from a Russian standpoint, or frankly from Stoden's standpoint, as he's thinking about potentially needing to deal with the Russians or with the Chinese or with any other sort of foreign security service, having those documents sort of demonstrate that I'm the guy who took them immediately makes you valuable.

Yeah. And frankly, the WikiLeaks minders would have been insane for him to not come to Russia with something, something to show that he is who he says he is. Something like that. A key or a sample of the documents. Now I will note though that the house Intel committee report on Snowden, which takes a very dark view of the man, says straight out that the U S is not clear on what Russia or China have eventually gotten access to.

Now it's safe to assume that anything the journalists had access to. The russians and chinese probably could have gotten but again from this whole trove it is a bit of a mystery what exactly moscow got access to you right it is a mystery which is still there and i've been asking people about it you know to be prepared for this and at the time there was a lot of well the, the Russians and Chinese have definitely got it. You know, they must have got it. They'll be able to break any encryption he's got, which is probably true, given their capable intelligence agencies. And that assumes he brought it with him. But that assumes they brought it with him and they had access to him. And you know, he's always been clear they didn't. And so I think people genuinely now will say, they don't know, they don't know. And there is an element of mystery to that. And I think it's worth saying that because people at the time were very much like that they've got it.

Well, and I think this is the final deadly sin and David Miloszki sort of five deadly sins. That's noted. It's not that he is a Russian, or was a Russian asset. It's that he has allowed himself and allows himself through the process to become a Russian stooge. has allowed himself and allows himself through the process to become a Russian stooge. Yeah. Right? To become the stooge of a foreign adversary. Because what I think the Russian play here becomes is actually a very subtle one in some ways that I think really reflects Snowden's psychology. Which I think the Russian pitch to him becomes, let us help you tell your story. And I think this tracks with his sort of experience

in Moscow stances, he becomes a kind of conduit for conspiratorial, very anti-American worldview that sort of seeks to undermine confidence in our security institutions, our democracy, that kind of thing. So what Snowden becomes the mouthpiece for Russia in many ways. Yeah, I think that's a bit too strong. I think he's not a Russian agent, that's obvious in terms of what he was doing, but they opportunistically use him. They've got him, they give him political asylum, he's stuck there. You know, this is the Russian way, information operations, they

think how they can take advantage of this. And so here we are, Edward Snowden has got political asylum. He thought he was there for a 24-hour stopover. He's never going to leave. He's still there now. Will he ever leave? Who knows? It's a big question for him, I guess. He must ask himself every day. But the stories are not going to stop because the archive is out there. And so even though he's in Russia, the stories and the revelations are going to go on with some very dramatic ones still to come. And so maybe they are with more ridiculous news about the break. And Ed Snowden is stuck in Moscow.

We'll take a break and we'll come back. We'll see what those stories tell us. This episode is sponsored by Incogni. Now David, in the world of espionage, you're trained, aren't you, to assume one thing? Someone's always watching. And in everyday life, Gordon? Well, they usually are. But not spies.

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The link is in the episode description. Well, welcome back. Edward Snowden is still in Skonstan, Moscow, and there is now kind of a rolling tide of stories that are breaking. And now Snowden, of course, American contractor, all this stuff coming from his NSA leaks. But because of the very interesting connections between America's signals intelligence agency, the NSA and the GCHQ Britons through this kind of Five Eyes agreement, in which there's a tremendous amount

of information sharing, a lot of these stories are really going to start to reverberate across the Atlantic in the UK. That's right. Lots of them are about Britain. I just remember this kind of tide of stories that came out and was coming out in this period, which is now in the hands of journalists. I kind of remember it very much as a journalist covering it, where you just every day you would wake up not knowing what amazing revelation would come and that you'd be following up on. It's not easy as a journalist when you're not doing the story yourself. It was a bad June. It was a busy June. Yeah, it was rough. The Guardian is certainly leaving the way of this. The editor at the time was a man called Alan Rusbridger, kind of veteran editor of The

Guardian, kind of owlish, intellectual piano playing figure, very well known in Britain. Americans will recognise that as their caricature of every editor of any British publication. Yeah, especially. Yeah, but an interesting man. He'd also thought through this very carefully about what they were going to reveal from the archive, because there's so many documents. And you know, his instructions to his journalists were focused on mass surveillance and not other stories, even if they were interesting. you can see what he's thinking that this is a kind of public interest journalism, we're going to do a certain category of stories, we're not going to do stories about, for instance, the NSA hunting al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, because there's not

a kind of public interest in terms of revealing surveillance. Because it does mean that all the stories are about on the whole, maybe with one or two small exceptions about the kind of darker side of surveillance, rather than if you like, what else they're doing, the other side or two small exceptions, about the kind of darker side of surveillance, rather than if you like what else they're doing, the other side of things. But that was the kind of decision. And you get a big one even, you know, while Snowden is there in Moscow kind of waiting for his asylum, you get one of the big ones, which is something called Tempura. This is the 21st of June.

Yeah, 21st of June 2013. So very early, still just a few weeks in. And I remember this was a particularly big one because it was about GCHQ, Britain's version of the NSA, tapping the fiber optic cables through which data travels. And it was part of something called Mastering the Internet. Again, it's one of those names which if they knew the slides were going to be revealed, they might not have called it Mastering the Internet, because it sounds quite ominous. How did it get a code name that sounds like a shrimp roll? What, Master? Oh, Tempura, sorry, I was thinking Mastering the Internet.

Yeah, your code names are worse than ours. So the story, Stellar, we got Stellar Wind. And the Wind and Muscular and things like that. There's a few others we haven't talked about on the American side, like Boundless Informant and Byzantine Hades. And you guys have tempura. That is quite British in its own way. The phrase mastering the internet was actually born out of an insecurity

in the intelligence community because in the Cold War, GCHQ NSA were basically monitoring Soviet communications, particularly Soviet radio, military traffic, and leadership traffic to kind to understand military instructions. Then in the 90s, you get two things happening. One is the Cold War ends, you get the arrival of things like terrorism, and you get the internet arriving. Of course, what's different is the targets are now things like terrorists and organized criminals, and they are not using a kind of discrete radio traffic. They are using this very public global communication system, which is just emerging, which is the internet.

And their messages and communications are hidden amongst the communications of everyone else. And so there is this point in the 90s where I think the intelligence agencies worried that they would not be able to cope with this. You know, that you've got this kind of flood of information, their targets hiding within it, there's kind of encryption, which is making it harder to read the traffic. And so they basically think, well, this could be game over for us. And we're going to use the intelligence phrase, we're going to go dark, we're going to lose

the ability to monitor our targets. And so mastering the internet is basically them thinking, we need to be able to master internet traffic in order to keep doing our job. To find the needle, you essentially have to hoover up the whole haystack. And that's one of the questions is, do you need access to the haystack? And so they start to basically tap these fiber optic cables through which the world's data is flowing and Tempora, amongst other things, buffers and filters that to extract what they want so that they can search through it. It's a big ambitious project, but it does mean you are sitting these intercept points at global cable traffic to try and extract the information you need and to look for the people

who are hiding in that traffic. But it does mean filtering through the internet and the world's traffic to look for stuff. When that story breaks here, now I mean, I realize that you guys have not gotten around to writing a constitution yet, despite your country existing for a very long time. But what's the reception? Because GCHQ is actually operating with fewer restrictions. I think it is, right? Yeah. Then the American counterparts at NSF. So I'll tell you a funny story, actually,

which is still very vivid in my mind about when Tempura comes out. I remember calling someone from GCHQ and I said, what can you tell me about the story? And of course, they go, we can't comment on any of our kind of classified operations, which is their line. I said, what can you tell me about the story? And of course they go, we can't comment on any of our kind of classified operations, which was their line. I said, well, is this legal? How is it legal? And they said to me, everything we do is legal and authorized. I remember this asking the kind of obvious journalistic follow-up question, which is

under which law is it authorized and legal? And there was this silence. And what you realize was it was legal, but they couldn't even tell me publicly under what law it was legal. So the legal basis for it was secret, and I can now tell you what it was, because we learned later it was Section 94 of the 1984 Telecoms Act, which is fair to say was pretty obscure and written before the internet era, but that was being used as the kind of secret legal justification. British school children don't recite that. Yeah, it's not quite like the constitution.

And that was the problem they had, which is they could say to themselves, well, this is all legal. We've got an authorization here from the minister, which says that we're allowed to do this. But it was so obscure that they couldn't even publicly say under what law it was legal. That was the kind of problem they had is that they built this massive capability at GCHQ, massive capability, but in secret, from this culture of secrecy which came from Bletchley Park and where they assumed it would continue to be secret and that it would never be revealed. And they'd never thought they'd have to kind of justify it or explain it. Yes, they went to ministers, the foreign secretary, to say, please authorise this capability.

Would the foreign secretaries even have understood what it was they were authorising in the scale of the data? Because a lot of this stuff, frankly, is really technical. How many gigabytes a particular bearer can extract from a fiber optic cable and how the filtering is done. I mean, that stuff is complicated. Right. Well, if you look at the slide decks, one of my former lives, I used to make slide decks with some regularity. And this is a how to class it, how not to make slide decks. Because I mean, these things are extremely hard to understand. Even the ones that have

been used as kind of front page sort of news, right, tend to be quite technical and really hard to dig into. I mean, in this case though, GCHQ though, is not operating with the same restrictions as NSA in terms of what it collects on British citizens. Is that right? It is different. I mean, it is also a foreign facing intelligence agency, but it is also, there are not quite

hard lines that there are in the US about domestic and foreign that the US has. And it is also true that the kind of legal basis was, you know, it's a different culture and you still had these very general warrants, which would allow people to just basically go, yeah, you can scoop up all this data. You know, things like Temporary capturing billions of bits of data every day. And so I think this is where one of the really significant questions comes, which is it's not that the programs were illegal, they were legal, but they were very opaque and untransparent and arguably therefore kind of unaccountable in some ways because of the kind of extreme

secrecy around them. But that's very different from saying they were not legal. That is a critical piece of this because you will, I think, frequently see articles written in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations that will call a lot of these programs illegal. And I think Bart Gelman, the Washington Post journalist who has written a book on this called Dark Mirror, which I think is a great read on a lot of these technical aspects of this, says, and he's got a great line in there, it says, basically, sometimes a scandal is what's legal. And calling these things illegal is factually incorrect. The question is, should they be legal at all? They were. And the intelligence

agencies that were doing this collection, NSA, in the states, GCHQ in Britain, were doing so with legal mandate and authorization from political masters to collect this information. And I mean, there were some later, some legal challenges where certain aspects of them were challenged in the kind of European courts, for instance, you know, about some of the data sharing agreements. And certainly, there were some bits which were, you know, shown to be against, you know, about some of the data sharing agreements. And certainly there were some bits which were shown to be against some pieces of law. But fundamentally, the issue was more about accountability, I think, than legality. But the problem is that they are not in a position

to explain this at the time. Because these programs are secret, they feel they can't comment about them. And so all of this stuff is just coming out in a kind of flow of stories about GCHQ. And there's some other really interesting ones. I mean, I think we've got time to do all of them, but there's ones about the efforts to defeat encryption. So people rely on encryption to kind of communicate secretly. Now, in a way, defeating encryption is something spy agencies have done. I mean, if you think what Bletchley Park did in World War II, it broke codes, it decrypted German communications. And so it's maybe not a surprise that they're still trying to decrypt communications in the modern day. But the

problem is, the types of encryption, our types of encryption used by all of us communicate over the internet, rather than it being the German Enigma machine you're trying to decrypt. So you're effectively trying to defeat or undermine a general form of encryption because that's the form being used by terrorists, for instance, or other states. They have these programs. Again, you're talking about code names. They call them Bull Run and Edge Hill. Bull Run and Edge Hill were civil war battles in the US and UK. They call their programs to defeat encryption after Civil War Battles. Now, I would suggest that's a poor choice of names, whoever came up with

that. It's a poor one. It's a poor one. And also, there were a couple other codenames I forgot to mention earlier that I wanted to. Egotistical Giraffe was another one used inside the NSA, which I think is- Is that what they call you? I'm a little surprised. That was actually my CIA code name. I'm revealing it now for the first time. Yeah, those are poor choices. And a lot of this, we called this at CIA Gordon, whether things would pass the Washington Post

test. I'm sorry, we didn't use the BBC test or the Daily Mail test. And I think a lot of these stories, I mean, these code names are a great example. The logos of all of those tech companies on that slide, you mentioned sharing information with the NSA. All of this is not illegal, but it fundamentally fails that Washington Post test. There's going to be outrage as soon as these things hit the press. I would imagine inside GCHQ at this time, morale is pretty low.

And I think you were, you're actually covering a lot of this in real time. I was covering a lot of this and talking to people. And I mean, I remember I was doing a documentary about cyberspace at the time. And it meant I'd actually been in GCHQ a few months earlier. And I'd been one of the only journalists who'd been in, which is part of the problem for them, because most journalists and most people

didn't know what they were like. They didn't have a feel for the people and the place. Whereas I'd been in for these documentaries. Headquarters is the doughnut. The doughnut in Cheltenham. And when you meet the people, they don't come across as the kind of people who are there desperately rubbing their hands going, how am I going to spy on the local community in Cheltenham and carry out mass surveillance?

Because no one knew anything about them, they were so secret, it was quite easy to think that. And I mean, it was really interesting talking to people and talking to people now, just how scarring it was for these people. I mean, I remember Ian Lobb and the director was kind of angry at it. And I think there was this sense in which they were people who felt we've been working in secret to try and defend the country and we're being told actually we're carrying out mass surveillance and we're like the starzy.

And, and, you know, they found that disjuncture between how they thought of themselves and how they were portrayed that there was some kind of rogue agency, really difficult. Someone said the parents of other kids at school sometimes would be like, Oh, these are, you work for GCHQ. Well, I think you work for GCHQ. You're one of those spies. And the irony is most of the people there were Guardian

readers. I think if you would have done a poll of GCHQ prior to the Snowden leaks, and did which is the most popular newspaper, I guarantee you, it would be The Guardian. You know, these were not secret state denizens out to kind of spy on everyone. What is the US equivalent of The Guardian for American listeners? I don't know. I mean, these days it's probably the New York Times, slightly more liberal end of the spectrum, would you say? Yeah, that would be the... I mean, it is a kind of liberal campaigning newspaper. I think it was traumatic for them.

It was really traumatic. You also get a kind of some revelations which are awkward and which I think do raise some questions. And we talked about the mass surveillance ones, but there were a few others which edged into different areas as well. You get to ones which are about the diplomatic spying or espionage. There was one in which GCHQ was accused of spying on diplomats who'd attended a G20 summit in London in 2009, including the kind of South African Turkish delegations, and

they'd used fake internet cafes to hoover up their passwords. It's a kind of classic spy thing. Right. And is anyone surprised by this? You know, I'm shocked the people are surprised. And this is what's so interesting is some people are surprised by that. And some people are like, well, isn't that what spies do? Right. Because to be clear, I mean, just to center this, this is basically GCHQ spying on foreign diplomats. Yeah. Right. So this is an effort to collect foreign intelligence from a foreign national using signals. And I remember that was part of the, some people in the public were like,

this is outrageous. And other people were like, isn't that what we pay spies to do? And you could see a kind of bifurcation of the debate around that. I mean, the one that got really hot though. This was the fun one. This was the fun one was after a few months, and Snowden had parceled out his information in an interesting way to lots of different countries. As well as The Guardian, he'd also given it to kind of Brazilian journalists, and he also gave it to German journalists. And they would find one particular story, which I think became one of the more damaging ones, which was that the NSA had been tapping the cell phone of Angela Merkel, who was then the Chancellor of Germany, you know, possibly as far back as 2002. Which again, are we shocked by this? I guess a close ally being spied on by the Americans. I think people are a little bit shocked by that.

I guess the reason I'm not shocked is because I believe that if any other country had the capabilities of the NSA, they would use it to spy on foreign leaders too. And Germany is an ally, but what the Germans think, what their plans and intentions are, that matters deeply to us. And the Germans would not be very likely to maybe share a lot of those secrets with us. So I think that avenue for collection is a valid one.

Friends spying on friends is okay in your view. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, what's embarrassing is that it leaked. Yeah. First rule of spying is don't get caught. Yeah. It's not embarrassing that it leaked. Yeah, first rule of spying is don't get caught. Yeah, it's not embarrassing that it was happening. Yeah, I mean, I think she was supposed to be one of, I think, 35 leaders.

In Britain and Mexico, maybe I find less surprising, but Germany, quite a close ally. I mean, as we said earlier, there is this thing called the Five Eyes, which is the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. They don't spy on each other, supposedly. I think there might be, you know, but that's the kind of deal. They share stuff. But there's nothing like formally written down in terms of no spies. I think it's a bit more of a wink and a nod. I think it is a, unless there is an overriding reason you don't spy on each other. That's

the kind of general rule. And anyway, there's some interesting stories about when that might have happened. But this is back to Deadly Sin number four, the indiscriminate, complete lack of sort of proportion in the Snowden leaks. And this is where I do think we should think of him as a privacy jihadist, because he has provided this information on Angela Merkel's phone, on these other foreign leaders, on GCHQ spying, on foreign diplomats. This is all completely outside of the conversation

on domestic surveillance, be it in the UK or in the US. This is not about surveillance on British citizens, American citizens. This is about whether signals intelligence agencies or spy agencies more general should or could spy on foreign nationals to provide their home government with an information advantage over that other country be it sort of friendly or not. And I think this is where among other sort of themes

over the course of these episodes, I very much part ways with what good old Eddie Snowden did because he knowingly provided these documents to journalists knowing that there's gonna be a massive scoop in Germany and Brazil and Mexico about spying on their leaders. And from the standpoint of the American Constitution, which he claims to defend.

There's absolutely no justification for this. You do raise an interesting question, which is he's parceled stuff out to the Hong Kong media, now to the German media, I think, Brazilian media, lots of different countries. And it is interesting because it is slightly at variance with the idea he is blowing a whistle on mass surveillance by the United States within the United States. Whether it's him driving this or whether it's the journalists or whether he's quite hard to know exactly, but it seems to be more about let's expose the global surveillance capabilities of the NSA. And his view seems to be that any surveillance of people, so it's not just American people,

is something to be exposed and to shown. And I think that is slightly at variance with his original kind of claims about the kind of constitutionalist stuff. And it does seem to be more about undermining the principle of surveillance, of the idea that traffic and data should be scooped up about people from the internet. It's again more to that kind of purist idea he has, as opposed to the very domestic American idea. And we should say that these types of collection platforms and capabilities, when they're targeted, let's just take the stuff targeted at foreigners, they're extremely expensive to develop and maintain. After Snowden, much of that goes offline. From the standpoint

of taxpayers, Britain, America, it's a massive loss. It is essentially a theft of information that's been purchased by taxpayers. We'll come back to the damage. There were a lot of capabilities he's providing and he's revealing in some of the kind of spy kit the NSA uses and ways in which it can operate. I mean, it would take so many podcasts just to kind of go through the range of stories about what he's showing. I think the Angela Merkel one though is interesting because she is livid about it supposedly and the Germans are very upset and it's a big story in Germany and it does do some damage to kind of relationships, maybe not permanently. Because I think one of the interesting things is if you're the German government, you've got to be outraged, haven't you? Because you've been spied on. But also, you know, you're relying on a flow

of US intelligence to help your country and keep you safe. And so there's a little bit of the outrage, which I think is performative for the public, because they're outraged that their leaders are being spied on. But beneath the surface, I think there's a bit more realism about it. And I'm sure Merkel's just pissed that her cell phone is being listened to anyway. And so we'll be there with the UK government just overwhelmed by this massive tide of stories.

Let's end and when we come back next time, we'll see how the UK government starts to strike back, where they literally threaten the Guardian with being shut down unless they turn over that archive. Join us on Wednesday for that, although members of the Declassified Club of course have access to the episodes right now, and you can also access our two bonus episodes and hear this Friday from a top US government official who was right at the heart of the Edward Snowden affair. To sign up, go to therestisclassified.com and take

advantage of our launch discount. Doesn't get any better than that. A sort of mystery former US government official, I'm sure, from a super squirrely agency. So do join us for that and we'll see you next time. See you next time.