Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 305 - Edward Snowden: Hero, Traitor, or Both?

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Off and on from 2006 to 2012, Snowden had worked as a CIA analyst, a subcontractor for the NSA, and several other positions that gave him access to classified NSA information that enabled him to see the true scope of how the US was surveilling its own citizens. Does leaking those docs to the press in 2013 make him a traitor? Or does it make him a hero who opened the eyes of the American public to the dangerous and unconstitutional surveillance our government has been clandestinely carrying out for years? I was familiar with Edward Snowden before this week, and the gist of what he did, but I truly didn't realize the scope of the surveillance and the amount of private data gathered on US citizens who were not accused of any crimes. Are you okay with agents working on behalf of the US government going through your private text messages whenever they want for whatever reason? Emails? Looking through your photos? Combing through your internet browsing history? Monitoring your GPS positioning to determine your travel patterns? Are you okay with Big Brother watching you? If you're not, too bad, because it's already happening. It's BEEN happening for years. This is what Snowden exposed, and he exposed it because it's wildly unethical. The fight for privacy is important because it's a fight for freedom. Is possibly allowing the government to make your existence a little safer worth losing so much of your freedom? We got an interesting one today. Bad Magic Productions Monthly Patreon Donation:  The Bad Magic Charity for July is The National Compassion Fund. Their mission is to give funds to the victims of mass casualty crimes, such as mass shootings and terrorist attacks. We donated   $14,697 with an additional $1,632 going to our forthcoming scholarship fund. To find more or donate yourself, please visit www.nationalcompassion.org TICKETS FOR HOT WET BAD MAGIC SUMMER CAMP!  Go to www.badmagicmerch.comWatch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/V0_2w5vbgpEMerch: https://www.badmagicmerch.comDiscord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard?  Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

On June 6, 2013, the British newspaper, The Guardian, revealed shocking top secret information that the NSA had been collecting the phone records of millions of American Verizon customers. A subsequent article published the next day revealed the secret program Prism. Prism allowed data collection of Americans' browser search histories, the contents of their emails, file transfers, live chats, and much more. The NSA got their data from massive companies too, like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, AOL, and Apple. And people were stunned. For years, the personal data on their private devices, devices they've been using every day, their email,

their phones, their credit cards, so much more, had been collected by the U.S. to surveil its own citizens. Innocent citizens not suspected of committing any crimes were being spied on by their own government. And the source of all this leaked information, Edward Snowden. Off and on from 2006 to 2012, Snowden worked as a CIA analyst, a subcontractor for the NSA and several other positions that gave him access

to classified NSA information that enabled him to see the true scope of how the U.S. was surveilling its own citizens. the true scope of how the U.S. was surveilling its own citizens. Working on classified info for the U.S. government, Snowden started to have doubts about the ethics of what he was doing, what he was seeing. Were these programs violating the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which gave citizens the right to privacy? Was the government behaving illegally? Did people need to know about these programs? Snowden decided, illegally that people need to know about these programs. Snowden decided, yeah, yeah, they did.

Over several months in 2012 and 2013, Snowden secretly contacted journalists and delivered a treasure trove of classified documents unlike anything they'd ever seen before. He smuggled them out of his office in microchips that he put in his socks, pockets, even a Rubik's cube. Once the articles came out, Snowden's identity was revealed. Trying now to make it to Latin America, he would instead end up in Russia where he was granted asylum and where he still lives today. Snowden is another name to add to our list

of controversial figures like Suck Subject Eric Prince, founder of the private military contractor corporation, Blackwater. Some say Snowden's a hero, one of the most courageous Americans in recent memory. Others say he is a traitor who should be put to death. Today, we'll look at Snowden's a hero, one of the most courageous Americans in recent memory. Others say he is a traitor who should be put to death. Today, we'll look at Snowden's life, how he discovered and leaked details of elaborate

operations that revealed a terrifying scope of government surveillance. All this and more right now on Careful What You Say, What You Write, Where You Go, What You Photograph, What You Do, Big Brother is always watching you. Edition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck. You're listening to Time Suck. Happy Monday, meat sacks. Welcome back, or welcome to, for the first time. The Cult of the Curious, I'm Dan Cummins, Suck Daddy,

Bhagwan Rajneesh's vocal coach. Guy who can almost always whistle, and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lucifina, praise Bojangles, glory be to Triple M. Also, maybe hail Mimrod. Why not? A couple quick announcements, and then we are off to today's Orwellian races. New merch in the Bad Magic store this week. Of course there is. When I first saw this, it made me laugh so hard,

Logan recreated the Papa John's logo to say Time Suck instead. And let me tell you, it's dead on. Now available on a tee and tank in four colors, white, black, green, and red. Head on over to badmagicmerch.com to check it out. Better body parts, better murder. Waiting for a cease and desist.

Papa John's. Charity time in light of several recent mass shootings that left so many victims and families of victims with huge medical bills, funeral bills, huge need for grief counting, you know, in addition to all the just emotional strife, et cetera, et cetera. We decided to donate to the National Compassion Fund.

We can always use a little more compassion. Whose mission is to give funds to the victims of mass casualty crimes, such as, but not limited to mass shootings. Our donation amount, thanks to our Patreon Space Lizards and our Roberts and Annabelle's over on Scared to Death, is $14,697 with an additional $1,632 going to our forthcoming scholarship fund. If you'd like to donate or learn more, please visit nationalcompassion.org. Hail Nimrod on that one.

And now on to today's topic. It's really several topics all wrapped up into one big technological geopolitical burrito. And I love burritos, by the way. Especially carnitas burritos. Fresh made tortilla, salsa verde, pico de gallo, cilantro, and not much else. Not too much. Don't want to ruin it. Bojangles does too. He's drooling at the mere mention

of burritos. Anyway, today's talk will delve into state security, freedom, international politics, and of course the man who would place himself at the center of the debate regarding whether or not more safety is worth less freedom, Edward Snowden. Our Patreon spacers voted in another great topic to suck uponeth. Their wisdom is strong. I'm here to dive in. Come on, Mojangles. Let's go for a walk, you good boy, you. Edward Snowden, or as I've always called him, starting right now, Eddie Snowbro,

a former American intelligence contractor who in 2013 revealed the existence of secret wide-ranging information gathering programs conducted by the National Security Agency. He's only 39 as of this episode's recording and already earned himself a spot in an American political and cultural lore that will not soon be forgotten. During his brief time working for and or with the U.S. government, he found evidence that the U.S. was doing things that he strongly felt were not moral, that were not legal, strictly speaking. Although the agencies found loopholes that sort of let them do it legally, kind of. At least that's what the agencies felt, or at least they knew they wouldn't get in trouble for doing what they were doing if they got caught. And they really ran with that mantra of better to ask for forgiveness than

permission. And Snowden didn't like it. He believed that what he saw the government doing, what he was being paid to help the government do was a legitimate threat to freedom. That extremely dangerous precedents were being set that could greatly threaten the freedom of every American citizen in the very near future. So he took a bunch of disturbing classified information and he went to the press. His first leak would reveal to journalists that the massive cellular provider Verizon

had been providing the NSA with virtually all of its customers' phone records to do with whatever they wanted, text messages, emails, browsing history, additional data available for the NSA to look through and document. And then it soon was revealed that it wasn't just Verizon, but virtually every other telephone company in America. They handed over access to their servers to Big Brother. Not that they were given much of a choice.

The existence of Prism was the second NSA bombshell, coming less than 24 hours after the first. Prism, which began in 2007 under the George W. Bush administration, seems to still exist in some form, is or was the codename for the program under which the NSA collects Internet communications from various U.S. Internet companies. The PRISM bombshell was less controversial as the NSA doesn't have direct access to the servers, but can request user data from the companies which are compelled by law to comply. Massive companies, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Skype, so many others provided the U.S. government with personal and private data from their servers.

And Snowden's subsequent leaks would reveal all sorts of other stuff and hundreds of thousands of classified documents. Things like X-Keyscore, a tool the NSA uses, or at least used, to search nearly everything a user does on the internet Through data it intercepts, mostly illegal intercepts, across the world In leaked documents, NSA described it as the widest reaching system to search through internet data Documents also revealed the existence of the NSA's elite hacker team, codenamed Tailored Access Operations, TAO, that hacks into computers worldwide, infects them with malware, and does a variety

of other dirty jobs when more conventional surveillance tactics fail to get the desired information. And NSA data collection efforts went, and probably still go, beyond the internet. I mean, who are we kidding? They certainly go beyond the internet. Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA was

intercepting approximately 200 million text messages every fucking day worldwide through a program called Dishfire. In leaked documents, the agency described the collected messages as a goldmine to exploit for all kinds of personal data. Snowden gathered evidence of all of this and more. Estimated he collected roughly 1.5 to 1.8 million classified documents, turned over around 200,000 of them to a few journalists he met up with in Hong Kong. And then trying to make it to Ecuador, he ended up getting stuck in Russia when the U.S. revoked his passport. Had he actually made it to Ecuador, he believes it's very likely he would have been apprehended due to heavy CIA presence in Latin America. Might have just disappeared. He thinks so. And I think based on all the times we've dipped our toes into CIA involvement in

Latin America and additional reading I've done on my own. Yeah, I think he would have disappeared as well. I think we had a tragic accident in the wake of his leaks and being identified as living in Russia. Many people would toss around strong opinions about Snowden. Some saw him as a patriot for revealing the government was definitely doing nefarious shit not allowed by the constitution. Other people would see him as a traitor. They'd say that everyone knows that every government does surveillance and all Snowden did was provide proof to our enemies about what the U.S.'s capabilities are, that the programs he revealed are designed to keep us safe and in revealing them, Snowden put us all at risk. Many people on both sides, fans of this guy or those who despise him,

wondered why. Why did Snowden feel he needed to do this at grave risk to himself? Whistleblower stories are really compelling for that reason. The choice to blow the whistle or to stay silent is a choice about the sort of person you are and the one you want to be. Do you want to keep collecting a check for something you find morally reprehensible or risk your security, safety, freedom, even life to do what you think is the right thing?

Whistleblowers often do not reap any sort of rewards for their whistleblowing. Even when they get away with it, they're often punished to some degree. Snowden, if he just wanted to slice the American dream, if he wanted to own a nice house, live a comfortable life, go on vacations, build up a nice fat 401k, other investments, he could have easily done that.

He was knocking down six figures a year in his 20s. This computer whiz kid who could have just ridden his big brain up some corporate ladder full of stock options, other riches. Could have had a nice summer house, bitchin' boat, docked at a slip, maybe in front of his waterfront home. Instead, he's living in a small apartment in Moscow. Unable to leave a country he has publicly stated he finds corrupt and dangerous. A country where he has no family outside of his wife and child now. A country he can't live without risking extradition to his home nation that currently wants to put him in prison for the rest of the prime of his life, at least. Dude certainly won't be going on vacation anywhere outside of Russia or attending

any 4th of July parades anytime soon. Leaking all those documents made him famous or infamous, rather. But it did not improve the quality of his life, at least not by most people's measurements. Whether you think he's a traitor or not, I think it's hard to argue against the fact that it took some fucking balls to do what he did. Even if misguided, took bravery and courage to risk the wrath that comes with being public enemy number one of the NSA. I mean, would you want incredibly powerful clandestine forces working on behalf of the most powerful government and military in the world to try to take you down? I sure as shit wouldn't. Being a martyr doesn't sound very fucking fun at all. Choosing to be a whistleblower against the government also doesn't just bring about possible legal consequences from the government. It can also make you an extremely hated public figure to many, to the many fans

of said government, to the citizens who believe in their government and want to defend it from any and all enemies and threats. And then they now see you as a enemy and a threat. Snow's no dummy. He had to have known that in doing what he did, he would make millions and millions of people want him dead, right? Want to see him dead. And that certainly happened. Millions would still love to see him executed for treason. But is that fair? Didn't he reveal that what the government was doing, what we have to believe the government is still doing

is far worse and much more dangerous than what Snowden did? Or is that not true? Does our government have to do secretive and shady shit to keep up with other nations around the world doing their own secretive and shady shit? Or is that just a bullshit rationalization when you're talking about doing shady secretive shit to your own citizens? Can two wrongs make a right in this situation? Can the U.S. justify its surveillance programs because, you know, China's doing something similar because Russia is? Also, what does my dad have to do with any of this?

What does Papa John's have to do with any of this? Better surveillance, better citizenry. Papa John's is watching us. Better keep your nose clean. Better keep an eye out for the thought police. Papa Big Brother. Obviously, there's a lot to this story. The issues in this episode will be discussed and extend far beyond Snowden

into the realm of government surveillance in general, morals and ethics, and so much more. The basic questions are, is it reasonable or even necessary for a government to spy on its own people? How much spying should be allowed, if any? Who should regulate that? A lot of people think Snowden revealed that the NSA violated the fourth amendment to the constitution billions of times over. After sitting in the research for all this for a few days, I agree. I mean, the fourth amendment reads, the right of the people to be secure in their persons,

houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. I mean, would you be okay with the government sneaking into your house over and over? Just going through all your shit, taking photos, making copies, whatever the fuck they wanted,

whenever they wanted, you know, no warrant necessary. Would you be okay with the government watching you have sex or listening on your private conversations or looking over your shoulder while you privately browse around on the internet. Fuck no. Strongly assuming we are all in agreement on that one, that you would not be cool with suddenly realizing that some government official was watching you say masturbate or go to the bathroom or use your mirror to figure out if you have a pimple or not on your upper inner thigh. What is that little sensitive spot? You know, just, oh man, what's going on down there? Ah, I just feel like I need to, I need to pop that.

Oh God, what the fuck? What are you doing in my bathroom? Who the fuck are you? Sorry to scare you, Daniel, or do you prefer Dan? Name's Johnny Rogers. I work for the NSA and I've been assigned to keep an eye on you. Don't worry. You're not in any trouble.

Not yet. Just need to watch you all the time. But not just me all the time. No, I'm part of a team. Just following orders. I worked a day shift. Latoya will be here later this afternoon. Pablo will take over for the graveyard shift. And a few others will rotate in as well as we need, of course, you know, vacation, et cetera. You get it. Anywho, carry on. I do think you have a pimple, by the way. I'd love to help, but I can't interact. I'm just watching, just watching, just recording everything on video. And there's nothing you can fucking do about it. I mean, that's fucking insane, right? That's a massive violation of privacy,

an insane breach of the fourth amendment. Well, digitally, the NSA has been basically doing exactly what I just described, you know, for years. And that's what Edward Snowden blew the whistle on. But some will argue that spying has to be done. The spying has to be secret or it isn't spying. It won't be effective. We've talked about that in other episodes. But when it's secret, what prevents people from abusing that power? Also, why does spying have to ever, ever be done on innocent citizens by that, you know, those citizens own government.

Isn't the American spy game supposed to be directed outwards on possible threats abroad? Do we really want to keep rolling down the slippery slope of looking for enemies within when that type of searching inevitably threatens all of our privacy? And isn't privacy a gigantic part of freedom? A lot of complicated questions. So how are we going to answer them in the space of, uh, you know, two to three hours? We're not, I'll be honest with you how are we going to answer them in the space of You know, two to three hours We're not, I'm going to be honest with you This is going to be yet another episode Where I overreach, I don't properly explain

You know, what I set out to understand And I'm going to leave you feeling unsatisfied and angry That you've wasted more of your time by the end of it Fuck me in the face JK, I hope JK I think JK No, first we're going to get into a brief overview of the U.S.'s history of spying on its own citizens, including the laws and acts passed by the U.S. government in the last

30 or so years that have expanded the government's power to spy as well as a few historical examples of whistleblowers. Then we'll get into a timeline of Edward Snowden's life and the years that led up to his decision to leak the documents, the documents he leaked, and the fallout for doing so. So let's get into it. Better details, better narratives. Pop a podcast. We talked about various other governmental law enforcement agencies that deal with surveillance and sneaky shit before,

or we have talked. We've covered the FBI, Suck 203, the CIA, Project MKUltra, Bonus No. 8, and in other episodes. Snowden's story really hinges on the National Security Agency, or NSA. I haven't really gone deep on them before, I don't believe. Mentioned, but not really explored. This is the agency he would go up against. So what does the NSA do?

Depends on who you ask. According to the NSA's website, generating foreign intelligence insights, applying cybersecurity expertise, securing the future. We leverage our advantages in technology and cybersecurity, foreign intelligence insights, applying cybersecurity expertise, securing the future. We leverage our advantages in technology and cybersecurity consistent with our authorities to strengthen national defense and secure national security systems. They don't say anything about spying on innocent citizens. So I guess maybe we're okay now, right? I mean, if they were still spying on us, they would for sure mention it on their website. Maybe it's in a different section.

According to their About section, their mission, the National Security Agency slash Central Security Service, NSA slash CSS, leads the U.S. government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence, SIGINT, insights in cybersecurity products and services, and enables computer network operations to gain a decisive advantage for the nation and our allies. Throughout the site, NSA slash CSS will be referred to collectively as NSA. Maybe decisive advantage is a nod to looking through all your private shit whenever we fucking want to. The section continues. Role in combat support.

NSA is part of the U.S. Department of Defense, serving as a combat support agency. Supporting our military service members around the world is one of the most important things that we do. NSA analysts, linguists, engineers, and other personnel deploy to Afghanistan and other hostile areas to provide actionable SIGINT and cybersecurity support to warfighters on the front lines. We provide intelligence support to military operations through our signals intelligence activities, while our cybersecurity personnel, products, and services ensure that military communications and data remain secure and out of the hands of our adversaries. We provide wireless and wired secure communications to our warfighters and others in uniform no matter where they are, whether traveling through Afghanistan in a Humvee, diving beneath the sea, or flying into outer space. Our cybersecurity mission also produces and packages the codes that secure our nation's weapon systems. Additionally, we set common protocols and standards

so that our military can securely share information with our allies, NATO, and coalition forces around the world. Interoperability is a key to successful joint operations and exercises. I think the others in uniform, no matter where they are, that must be a nod to agents spying on American citizens on American soil, right? Sometimes the others are right down the street or flying above your neighborhood. Sometimes providing wireless communications includes looking through the photos on your cell phone and digging through your text messages and browsing history. Finally, according to an old what We Do section taken down sometime in the last

year, their site has had a big refresh, it appears. It says the NSA saves lives, defends vital networks, advances U.S. goals and alliances, protects privacy rights, is a unique asset. We are well positioned to carry out our missions because NSA is both a member of the Defense Department and an intelligence community agency. U.S. leaders, policymakers, warfighters, law enforcement agencies, and our intelligence community partners face some of the gravest national security challenges

in U.S. history. NSA is the world leader in cryptology, the art and science of making and breaking codes. Interesting to me that they no longer have protects privacy rights written on their site. Huh. Maybe they were going to change it to invades privacy rights or destroys privacy rights. But then they decided just not to mention privacy at all because, you know, it's just so fucking laughable. Back to describe what this agency does, at least what they publicly admit to doing.

Working alongside the Central Security Service, a companion group comprising of active military members, the NSA, the National Security Agency, is tasked with a wide range of code-making and code-breaking abilities. Activities, excuse me. In other words, the agency encrypts secretive government communications, data, and other information to protect it from hackers, while actively seeking to uncover and decode the same types of materials from other countries and persons of interest. And we might just all be persons of interest in the NSA's eyes, right? That's pretty subjective. The agency is just one cog in the U.S. government's intelligence community,

a coalition of 17 different executive branch agencies that both work together and independently to gather information that Uncle Sam uses to develop foreign relations and protect national security. Funniest to me, the 17, I'm not going to list them all out, but the funniest thing is 17 is a space force intelligence. I mean, I'm guessing they do fucking way more than I'm going to joke about, but I just picture representatives from each of the 17 agencies, right? They're getting together for a weekly meeting. The other 16, you know, representatives just always have a lot to report,

but then when it's time for someone from a space force Intelligence to talk, it's just always the same thing. Just some version of. Yeah. Yeah, I got nothing to report again. Still hoping to find out what various extraterrestrials might be up to soon, though. Hoping it's soon. Right now, we just, you know, we need to actually find And identify those aliens Thought we had something on Wednesday

Excited for a second Turned out it was just a signal For stripers to hell with the devil to bounce off the moon To hell With the devil I don't know if I'll ever get tired of hearing that riff While the NSA is often Confused with the CIA they are certainly not one of the same.

They do work together sometimes, such as with the CIA-NSA Joint Special Collection Service, a highly classified intelligence team that, along with who knows what other duties, inserts eavesdropping devices in high-value targets, such as presidential palaces or embassies. They also work with the FBI. Teams of FBI agents also handle domestic surveillance duties. And, you know, they work with a variety of other agencies in a variety of ways we know about, and I'm sure in many other ways we don't know about. Historically, the NSA's role has been to intercept foreign communications and make and break codes, which it does primarily from

its headquarters. CIA agents, on the other hand, tend to conduct covert and counterintelligence operations out in the field and often abroad. The boundaries between each agency's operations have blurred over time, and the agencies are also known for button heads in some instances. The directors of both the CIA and the NSA are appointed by the Secretary of Defense and approved by the president before taking the reins. The director must be a commissioned military officer with at least a three-star rank. And the director, currently General Paul M. Nakasone, since May 4th, 2018, also head U.S. Cyber Command,

a network warfare unit created in 2005 to protect against terrorist data and network threats. And the director heads the Central Security Service, CSS, combat support agency, as we described, the U.S. Department of Defense, which was established in 1972 to integrate the NSA and the service cryptologic components of the U.S. Armed Forces in the field of signals intelligence, cryptology, and information assurance at the tactical level. NSA and CSS have two official missions, signals intelligence, commonly known as SIGINT, as we talked about, and information assurance.

The agencies collect SIGINT from various sources, including foreign communications, radar, and other electronic systems. The work isn't exactly easy. Info they intercept, often coded, not to mention shared in foreign languages, sometimes in obscure dialects of those languages. Meanwhile, information assurance programs are aimed at preventing others from hacking, stealing, or otherwise tampering with national security systems and sensitive information. The NSA is officially responsible for maintaining the security of the information systems used by the Department of Defense, Defense Department, and several other government organizations. And the NSA, a relatively recent creation created in 1952 by the U.S. President Harry S. Truman began as a group of 7,600 military and civilian workers operating out of a former school in Virginia.

By 2013, it had become a roughly 30,000 employee operation agency, officially tracking signals, other info across the globe from a sprawling campus in Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as operating out of other sites. Unofficially, it does a lot of other shit, like look through the photos on your phone phone and if you have any good nudes hidden on your phone, sharing them with some bros in the office and having either a good

laugh or filing them away in their spank banks, at least according to Snowden. Just a variety of very important national security work. The NSA remained under the public radar for years after its founding to such an extent that its staff jokingly claimed its initials stood for no such agency. By 1963, the NSA had moved to their massive facility at Fort Meade Maryland

agents were busily at work intercepting and decrypting communications by 1980 the NSA was classifying 50 to 100 million reports each year which in an era of paper and magnetic tape records led to a serious problem with material storage. Yeah. Holy shit. I bet who's fucking having to go find all that stuff all the time. Hey, Leonard, I need you to grab a file for me. I think the target's name is Patricia Lingen.

Maybe Priscilla Dillon. Pretty sure we wrote the reports in either 1971 Or 73, maybe 75 And then cue poor Leonard Just spending the next 3-4 weeks In a dark musty labyrinth of file cabinets Quietly searching one drawer after another Just every once in a while just muttering Fuck Slamming a drawer shut

Maybe sometimes just quietly sobbing Having to give himself little pep talks You can get through this It's not forever The benefits are good Good health insurance Great pension Come on Leonard Come on don't lose your shit

It's just one file at a time Like we always say It's just one file at a time The NSA classifying so so many reports Would lead to some people wondering about the NSA's power Right? Fearing it Frank Church, a Democratic Senator

Warned the NSA's capability at any time Could be turned around on the American people And no American would have any privacy left This is before, obviously, the digital age Such is the capability to monitor everything Telephone conversations, telegrams It doesn't matter There would be no place to hide

Excuse me, we've met Frank Church before The pride of Idaho Fuck yeah, bro, nice Born and raised in Boise Senator from Idaho from 1957 to 1981 Excuse me, we've met Frank Church before. The pride of Idaho. Fuck yeah, bro. Nice. Born and raised in Boise. Senator from Idaho from 1957 to 1981. Papa Ward voted for him time and time again, as did his wife, Grandma Betty. I grew up camping in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area.

Largest contiguous federally managed wilderness in the U.S. outside of Alaska. Pristine and gorgeous. And Frank had a lot to say about the NSA. Another famous quote of his is, I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. That's a scary fucking quote and a wise one. It's more worrisome now than it was when Frank said it. Frank, not a fan of the NSA.

1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was passed. Makes sense that that would happen in 1978. The FISA court, also established in 78. The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a U.S. federal court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 78 to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the U.S.

by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was intended to limit the NSA's ability to surveil Americans and was passed because of backlash against's ability to surveil Americans. And was passed because of backlash against unlawful surveillance of U.S. political activists, trade union leaders, and civil rights leaders. This court sure seems to have done a shit job when it comes to NSA oversight, as you'll see. We've covered unlawful U.S. surveillance on citizens before.

Shady shit carried out by the FBI against like Martin Luther King Jr., for example. He and many others unethically monitored, harassed under the FBI's domestic counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. The 1978 act made it a law that the NSA must focus on foreign surveillance. And if someone domestic was suspected of terrorism, the NSA would have to get a FISA warrant. The FISA court, however, a secret court, not subject to public oversight. And that's been a big problem. A lot more to come in Snowden's story about FISA when we get into the timeline. The NSA would change with the modern era of bombings and attacks. On April 24th, 1996, President Clinton, old slick Willie, signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. The act made it easier for law enforcement to prosecute

both domestic and international terrorists. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, old Noodle McDryween, a.k.a. Timothy McVeigh, domestic terrorism received more attention and efforts to detect and prevent it became a central focus for law enforcement. Clinton asked for Congress to give law enforcement expanded wiretap access and access to personal records. congress refused because they believed this to be unconstitutional and

they were fucking right and yet the nsa would soon do so much worse than that uh things really shifted surveillance and national security priorities wise with 9-11 after the 9-11 attack state surveillance suddenly seemed very important Everyone was wondering what could have prevented the planes from being hijacked And if there were more attacks on the way After 9-11, the NSA came under fire for failing to catch the plot to attack the World Trade Center With all their surveillance capabilities, what was the point in having them? If they couldn't stop something that huge NSA reported that it had intercepted two messages

That something major was going to happen on September 11th But there was no information in them on where or what the action would be. If only they had more access, access to fucking everything. At the time, the NSA was focused on foreign surveillance rather than domestic surveillance. Now, certain people in power began to discuss beefing up domestic surveillance, you know, to keep us safe, of course. Don't mind NSA tech searching through all your records. You have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide. They're just looking for terrorists. And you're not a terrorist, are you? You're just sacrificing your freedom. The NSA was also criticized following 9-11 for failing to keep up with the technological advances needed to counter terrorism. Get better at spying. All right,

got it. And better at spying at home. Okay, cool. Nothing could go wrong with that line of thinking. Better surveillance, more fear and control. Papa Big Brother. On response to all this, the Bush administration would go about doing a number of things to expand the power of the government and enact a war on terror, including expanding the power of the NSA to spy. Nice. Targets of NSA surveillance would no longer be just people living outside the U.S. On October 26, 2001, the Bush administration passed the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act improved the ability of law enforcement to detect and deter terrorism by uniting and strengthening America

by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism. Sounds perfectly noble, doesn't it? I mean, are you going to let America invade your privacy in unprecedented ways or are you not a fucking patriot? Let the noble American government tilt towards totalitarian control or fuck off, commie. The Patriot Act is over 300 pages long. I don't know if you've read it all. I have not,

but I've looked through enough along with the researchers, Sophie and Olivia, both working on this one in addition to myself to summarize some key points here in a second. The Patriot Act would have

a lot of critics right out of the gate. Freedom advocates worried that it was abusing citizens' constitutional rights. But according to the Department of Justice, the Patriot Act simply expanded the application of tools already being used against drug dealers and organized crime, which there'd be fucking way less of if we just legalized drugs, goddammit. The Patriot Act had bipartisan support and was approved by Congress based on U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's recommendation. And the Patriot Act, which expired in December of 2020, but could definitely be brought back to life in some form, allowed the following.

Surveillance and wiretapping to investigate terror related crimes. Federal agents have the ability to request court permission to use roving wiretaps to track suspects. Delayed notification of search warrants. Agents can get federal court permission to obtain bank records and business records. Improved information and intelligence sharing between agencies. Ending the statute of limitations for certain terror-related crimes. Providing aid to terrorism victims. So how did all of that affect our privacy rights here in the U.S.? Well, the Patriot Act increased the government's surveillance powers in five areas. One, record searches. It expanded the government's ability

to look at records on an individual's activity being held by a third party. Two, secret searches. It expanded the government's ability to search private property without notice to the owner. That's big. And scary. Three, intelligence searches. It expanded a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment that had been created for the

collection of foreign intelligence information. Four, trap and trace searches. It expanded a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment that had been created for the collection of foreign intelligence information. For trap and trace searches, it expanded another Fourth Amendment exception, exception, that makes it sound nicer than Fourth Amendment violation, for spying that collects addressing information about the origin and destination of communications as opposed to the content. Five, DadWatch searches. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of DadWatch, a 5013C nonprofit dedicated to solving dad-related crimes, Dad Watch searches. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Dad Watch, a 5013C nonprofit dedicated to solving dad-related crimes, Dad Watch standing for, of course, dads disappearing where all the corpses hide, this portion of the Patriot Act allowed all dads, and thus nearly all murderers, or dudes about to become murderers any fucking day now,

to have all of their civil rights completely trampled. For the first time in U.S. history, dads could finally, thankfully, legally be stopped at any time for any reason by law enforcement. And the NSA could search their digital records without the need of a pesky warrant. And FBI agents could go through any and all dad possessions looking for something that could incriminate them, including their barbecue grills, smokers, tackle boxes, boxes of old porn mags, high school sports trophies, and New Balance sneakers.

And of course, the Dad Watch portion of the Patriot Act does not exist. Maybe it should. The Patriot Act increased the government's surveillance power in four, not five areas. One of the most significant provisions of the Patriot Act made it far easier for authorities to gain access to records of citizens' activities being held by a third party. activities being held by a third party section 215 of the patriot act allowed the fbi to force anyone at all including doctors uh libraries bookstores universities internet service providers to turn over records on their clients or customers not scary uh the government now had unchecked power to rifle through individuals financial records medical histories internet usage bookstore purchases library usage travel patterns any activity left a record.

Previously, the government had to cite evidence that the subject of a search order, you know, is an agent of a foreign power requirement that previously protected Americans against this type of abuse of authority. Before the Patriot Act, they also had to show a probable cause as mandated by the Bill of Rights, meaning they needed a good reason to suspect that someone had been involved with the crime before doing this shit, but not now. Now they can just blatantly violate rights that should be protected by the Constitution. What's more, under the Patriot Act,

a person or organization forced to turn over records on someone else was prohibited from disclosing that search to anyone. As a result of this gag order, the subjects of surveillance often never even found out that their personal records had been examined by the government. Odds are, some of you, many of you listening to this podcast right now had your

personal records examined by government agents without your knowledge or consent legally under this act. That undercut an important traditional American right, right? The ability of individuals to challenge illegitimate searches. The Patriot Act was clearly a big step in giving the government power over individuals' lives. And many didn't seem to mind. Many seemed to be happy about this. While some people were concerned, you know, others felt that the country had to do whatever it needed to do to protect its citizens, even if that meant violating, you know, just fucking stomping on some rights, all in the name of safety. So did the Patriot Act protect us from terrorist attacks? Did it

actually help keep us safe? It's hard to say. Depending on whom you ask or what you read, the Patriot Act may or may not have prevented acts of terrorism. According to a 2015 Washington Post article, the Justice Department admitted, FBI agents can't point to any major terrorism cases. They've cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act. That's pretty sweet. But a 2012 report from the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative think tank, stated that 50 terrorist attacks had already been thwarted in the 11 years since 9-11,

with 47 being the direct result of the work of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They claim the Patriot Act was essential to helping law enforcement identify leads and prevent further attacks. So maybe it's helped. In 2004, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the FBI director, or then FBI director Robert Mueller said, the Patriot Act has proved extraordinarily beneficial in the war on terrorism and has changed the way the FBI does business. Many of our counterterrorism successes, in fact Are the direct results of provisions Included in the act

He also stated that without the provisions in the act The FBI could be forced back into Pre-September 11th practices Attempting to fight the war on terrorism with one hand Tied behind our backs When they sell it like that, it's like, do you want us to just get destroyed? Or do you want to have your freedom trampled? Freedom advocates would argue

How many saved American lives Thanks to legislation like the Patriot Act are worth all Americans living with less freedom due to our privacy being continually invaded, removed, right? Along and continuing with safety being on one end, freedom on the other, where do you stand? In the middle? Or do you lean more towards one than the other?

I currently lean a lot more towards freedom, much more than I did, I think after the Oklahoma City bombing episode. This has really made me think hard about a lot of stuff. I want safety. I think every sane, rational person does, but not if the cost is too great, right? I don't want to live in a world

where all the edges have been rounded and padded if that also means I have to live in a world where I have to be like a child who has to obey his super strict authoritarian father, Uncle Sam, for the rest of my fucking life or be heavily punished. I don't want a government daddy who can go through my shit anytime he wants because it's not really my shit. The government works for us, public servants, at least in theory, elected officials by the populace. But the more power we give the government, doesn't it feel like we work for them? Back to the NSA post 9-11,

more powerful than ever now. More acts would follow after the Patriot Act. Some trying to protect Americans' rights. Some trying to expand the powers of the government. On March 9th, 2006, President Bush signed the U.S. Patriot and Terrorism Reauthorization Act. The Patriot Act was set to expire, but he gave it new life. The 2008 FISA Amendments Act further permitted collection of private communications without warrants.

So that's cool And the digital age, as it grew and we came to rely on it more and more for both our business and personal needs This would give the NSA more data to collect by far than ever before Now thanks to digital technology, the NSA had the ability to store and retrieve way more info than it ever had before No more sending Leonard off to the file cabinet labyrinth for weeks at a time Fake Leonard just looked at me from the labyrinth, tears welling up his eyes. He shut the drawer in front of him for the last time as his bottom lip quivered as he just kind of squeaked out. Thank you. Thank you. Suddenly, millions and millions of people were walking around with cell phones, computers, other technology

all the time, leaving evidence of their habits whenever they made a call or clicked a button. So what info was the NSA now collecting and how? Your data is our data. Your equipment is our equipment. That is the fucking terrifying motto of the NSA's tailored access operations unit, or at least was when Snowden outed them. The NSA had historically collected personal data by tapping into existing systems, taking the reins of communication channels. Originally, mass collection of domestic telephone metadata took the form of bulk collection, in which the government swept up the full call of records of every customer of America's biggest telephone companies, ostensibly so it could sift the data and identify terrorism suspects based on call patterns. After the Patriot Act, that would change. Mass surveillance of telephone metadata began as a component of the George W. Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program in the aftermath of the 9-11

attacks. In contrast to the bulk nationwide orders that the government had previously conducted, a new detailed records program was meant to preserve the technique of contact chaining, checking if there are patterns between whom the contacts of a surveillance target calls and receives calls from. This means with the call detail records order, the NSA acquires all metadata about the targets incoming and outgoing calls and all phone records of the people who contacted the target. So under a single order, the NSA could now collect all the phone records of the target and the first individuals and some of the phone records of second chain linked individuals. They could also contact companies for records. In the early days of the NSA,

companies such as Western Union were tapped to provide communications without a warrant. Now, post-9-11, instead of occasionally tapping lines, the NSA established partnerships with companies such as AT&T to get access to any individual's Internet activity and phone records whenever they wanted without having to tap shit. Just pull it from the service. Facebook, Google, Apple, Apple, Apple? Apple and APA, the huge conglomerate Apple.

No, and six other leading online services have all gone on record as saying they've gave their customers data to the NSA because they were secretly and legally required to do so. Data shared was not limited to phone calls like the old days. Now, emails, messages, photos, GPS GPS location data, various documents, so much more data is collected. In 2018, the NSA acquired data from over 600 million phone calls and text messages. Proceeded to delete many of them, supposedly, but didn't specify how many were expunged from service. Even scarier than their ability to force private companies to hand over

personal data and not tell customers whose personal data has been collected and passed along, the NSA, based again on documents noted and leaked, could and would just hack your shit. When the NSA would find a security hole in a popular consumer device, it wouldn't fix the security hole, but instead would exploit it. The NSA's hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations, developed a wide range of hacking techniques that enabled the NSA to break into consumer electronics devices and IT systems as they saw fit. In a 2016 interview with Vice's Shane Smith, Snowden said the NSA could hack into anyone's cell phone at any time, essentially. They could turn on your camera, turn on your

microphone without you even knowing it. And then he demonstrated doing this. He hacked into one of Shane's associates' phones, covertly recorded this guy interviewing someone. He was able to map out where this guy was, who he was talking to, all kinds of shit. All these devices that make our lives so convenient, they also make it so convenient to spy on us. If I allowed myself to dig too far into all this and just dwell in the space for too long, I could see myself cracking up a little bit.

You know, just really wanting to get off the grid. No more podcasts, no more computer, no more phone. Communicate by letter, maybe by fucking pigeon. Live in some solar and fuel cell powered home, way out in the woods with no smart appliances, everything analog or real close to it. Signal scramblers, lots of concrete, big thick walls. You know, underground bunker, gold, silver coins, gold bars,

cash, no bank account, all that shit. Stop watching me, Uncle Sam, you fucking creep. NSA even pressured companies into making communication devices easier for them to access, just from the get-go, by coercing many manufacturers to build vulnerabilities directly into the products. That's not nefarious. NSA would supposedly create new guidelines surrounding this practice after the Snowden revelations, but refuses to say what those guidelines are, of course. if all this isn't enough, thanks to Snowden leaks,

we now know the NSA had intercepted shipments of computers and phones to put hacking back doors in them too. These back doors, uh, uh, back doors circumvented the security measure of the device, allow the NSA to more easily and consistently spy on the end user. So how the fuck is all of this legal?

A lot of people say it is definitely not assessing the legality of all this is complicated, right? The answer changes, again, depending on who you ask. Various members of numerous political administrations have said, oh, it's totally legal for various reasons. Some courts thought, many individuals think, no, definitely illegal. Snowden thought, still thinks, very illegal. And he finds it extremely hypocritical that he has been charged for crimes for exposing government agencies committing far bigger crimes and no one within those agencies is being charged with shit because the legal and ethical gray area this all exists in because a lot of people in addition to snowden think that what the government is doing is wildly immoral and dangerous and that it needs to

stop snowden will not in all likelihood be the last big whistleblower here in the states many people who believe that the government is behaving unethically will likely continue to whistleblow so who and what exactly are whistleblowers well with the expansion of the government's powers to surveil came a rise in a category of people known as whistleblowers and according to merriam-webster a whistleblower is someone who performs fellatio in an outstanding and meritorious way. Someone who clamps down on a clean wean in a non-toothy fashion, slides their lips, tongue, and depending on dental situation, gums. Straight rocking that shaft while squeezing the base with kung fu grip. The cause of the owner of said clean wean to cry out in delight with perhaps a ya-ya-ya or some similar expression of unbridled joy.

Hi-oh, sarsaparilla, away! No. No, wait. Noess Perilla, away! No. No, wait. No, the definition, that was not the right one, according to Merriam-Webster. That was according to whatever mental illness I'm afflicted with. It compels me to say silly shit like that from time to time. No, according to Merriam-Webster, a whistleblower is one who

reveals something covert or who informs against another, and especially an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency. So pretty funny that Snowden kind of flips this up a bit. Now, he didn't go to the government to report wrongdoing by an employer. He went to journalists working for private media companies whose employers would expose wrongdoing at the hands of the government. Where did this term come from? Some linguists believe it's a

reference to the whistles blown by British police in the late 19th century, early 20th century, when they saw foul play. Others say it's a reference to the whistles used by referees. The principle of whistleblowing goes back to medieval England, at the very least. Before there were police, people reported wrongdoing to the king's representatives. If a conviction followed, the person who reported the wrongdoing received some money. One of the common reasons for whistleblowing was reporting a person working on the Sabbath.

Unbelievable. Getting fucking tattled on by some nosy neighbor for trying to get some extra work in to provide for you and your family. What an absurd thing to get in trouble for. Edward Snowden certainly was not the first whistleblower, won't be the last. U.S. government has long made protecting most whistleblowers, those who don't rat on them, of course, a priority.

In fact, just seven months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress passed a law protecting whistleblowers. The whistleblowers who sought protection were 10 American sailors and Marines who had reported improper behavior conducted by the Continental Navy's most powerful man. Having already answered the call of the Great New Nation to take up arms against Great Britain, the officers gathered below the deck of the USS Warren, February 19, 1777, to sign a petition to the Continental Congress documenting abuses by their commander, Commodore Essex Hopkins. Lacking any legal protections for speaking out, the men understood that they could be

branded as traitors for denouncing the highest-ranking American naval officer in the midst of the war. He has been found guilty of such crimes as rendered him quite unfit for the public department he now occupies, wrote the petitioners. I know him to be a man of no principles and quite unfit for the most important trust reposed in him, wrote James Sellers, who accused Hopkins of cursing the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress as a pack of damned fools and treating prisoners in a very unbecoming, barbarous manner in violation of orders that British captives be well and humanely treated. Chaplain John Reed echoed the complaints of inhuman treatment of prisoners and added that Hopkins was remarkably addicted to profane swearing

and set a most irreligious and impious example. Ah, for fuck's sake, these idiots. He says naughty words. He's not polite to prisoners. Sure, he's really good at fighting and such, but maybe we should be led by a man who doesn't curse like a, well, like a, like a sailor. Well, while we, you know, sailing and such.

When Pottymouth Hopkins was suspended on January 2nd, 1778 and relieved of his command, he fired back with a lawsuit and two of his accusers were jailed. The pair appealed to the Continental Congress for help, writing that they were arrested for doing what they then believed and still believe was nothing but their duty. The Continental Congress responded by passing a law to protect the men and future whistleblowers. It is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress, or any other proper authority, of any misconduct, fraud, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge. I read the resolution approved on July 30th, 1778

with no recorded dissent. Get those fucking potty mouths out of there! The government later encouraged whistleblowing during the American Civil War. Lacking money to hire an army of inspectors, the federal government instead authorized the public to act as whistleblowers with the passage of the False Claims Act of 1863, also known as the Lincoln Law.

The law allowed private citizens to bring lawsuits on behalf of the federal government against companies and individuals suspected of defrauding the government. If a court ruled against a contractor, the whistleblower was entitled to half the damages won by the government. It paid to tattle. A century later, the Pentagon Papers would be the next famous act of whistleblowing. The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a top secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Many people living in the late 60s weren't aware of how long the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam before the Pentagon Papers and how much the government was sinking money and lives into a war that has shown little to no progress for the U.S. claimed military aims.

As the Vietnam War dragged on with more than half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, came to oppose the war and decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers should be made available to the American public. He photocopied the report, and in March 1971, he gave the copy to the New York Times, which then published a series of scathing articles based on the report's most damning secrets. He took classified government information, went to the media with it, exactly what Snowden would do decades later. Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and could have faced a 115-year prison sentence, but because of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, the judge dismissed all charges against him.

Ellsberg, still very much alive and well at the young age of 91, has publicly voiced support for Snowden's actions on multiple occasions. Numerous officials at the highest level of government supported Ellsberg before and after his trial, agreeing that the American people needed to know about the government's nefariously covert actions. In supporting the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote, in the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizen citizenry in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here

protect the values of democratic government well said judge stewart hail nimrod uh shortly following ellisburg's whistleblowing came one of the biggest acts of whistleblowing in u.s history and a probable future time suck topic, Watergate. U.S. President and Republican Richard Nixon was running for re-election against Democrat George McGovern. During the campaign, former FBI CIA agents broke into the offices of the Democratic Party and George McGovern months before the election, where they listened to phone lines and stole secret papers. As part of this illegal campaign of surveillance, in the early hours of June 17, 1972, five men attempted to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex about a mile from the White House. One of the men was James W. McCord, Jr., a former CIA employee and a security man for Nixon's committee to reelect the president, popularly known as Creep.

How fitting, since Nixon was such a fucking creep. Tricky dick, at least in the running, for my least favorite U.S. president of all time. When a security guard discovered tape on a door latch outside the DNC HQ, he called the police, and soon the five men obviously working on behalf of Nixon were arrested. In May of 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee began nationally televised hearings. It was quite the growing scandal. Trial revealed that Nixon had discussed Watergate at least 35 times, so he knew exactly what was going on. He's all for it. Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward pursued the story for two years.

The scandal eventually implicated many members of Nixon's White House, culminating in Nixon becoming the first U.S. president to resign, when it became a certainty that he was going to be disgracefully impeached and soon if he didn't resign. The anonymous government source known as Deep Throat would provide much of the damning information that introduced the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. Howard Simmons was a managing editor of the Post during Watergate. He dubbed the secret informant Deep Throat, alluding to both the deep background status of his information and the widely publicized 1972 porno, Deep Throat. Why reference porn?

No idea. The plot of the porno does not parallel Watergate in any way. And this was a porno that actually was shown in a little bunch of theaters so it was a little bit different. But no one involved in Watergate, to my knowledge, found out from their quack psychiatrist that their clitoris was located in their throat and then sucked a bunch of dicks in order to find the perfect husband.

Uh, Woodward claimed that he would signal to deep throat that he desired a meeting by moving a flower pot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. Some spy movie shit. When deep throat wanted a meeting, he would make a special marks on page 20 of Woodward's copy of the New York times.

He would circle the page number, draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Roslyn, Virginia at 2 a.m. And to kick off their meetings, Woodward and Deep Throat would, of course, aggressively suck each other's dicks. So maybe that's where the name came from. JK, of course. Better dicks, harder sucking, Papa Deep Throat. JK of course Better dicks, harder sucking, pop a deep throat

For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity Was one of the biggest mysteries of American Politics and journalism And the source of much public curiosity and speculation We now know him to be Mark Felt The FBI Associate Director at that time Watergate was seen as another instance Of important and noble whistleblowing

A necessary act, an important Bulwark against government corruption Now let's fast forward a bit to the modern era in the NSA. Whistleblowing gets more complicated when you take into account how it interacts with state surveillance. It seems obvious, at least to me, that whistleblowing on a corrupt individual politician or say a factory owner skirting federal regulations is morally good and good for the country. But what about whistleblowing when it comes to state surveillance? There is actually a history of whistleblowers

inside the NSA before Snowden. Edward Snowden, not the first NSA employee to find a problem with their surveillance practices. William Binney, an NSA crypto mathematician, blew the whistle on NSA in 2001. As technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney mentored some 6,000 technical analysts that eavesdropped on foreign nations

collecting private phone calls and emails for NSA databases. However, with the expansion of the internet during the 1990s and the explosion of communications that went with it, it quickly became clear that the NSA could not keep up with and effectively analyze all the new data available to them. The net was being cast too wide now. right? They can only analyze so much data. There was now a new surveillance problem being too good at gathering too much data, important intel getting lost in a sea of noise. In response, Benny and his team created a program called Thin Thread that could effectively isolate and streamline data in the new information age. More importantly, it could filter out all types of irrelevant data, thus eliminating the need to forward and store large amounts of information

for subsequent analysis. Leonard just fucking breathed a little easier again. To ensure the privacy rights of American citizens were adequately protected, Binney and his team installed an anonymizing feature to ensure Fourth Amendment protections for communications of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was ready to deploy by January of 2001, eight months before the 9-11 attacks. But NSA leadership ignored it in favor of other, more expensive programs that had been made within the NSA. Leadership chose to go with the program called Trailblazer.

Binney and his associates thought that Trailblazer was way too expensive and that using it meant the NSA was mismanaging money. was mismanaging money. So in early 2000, rather than go to the press, they went to Congress to blow the whistle on mismanagement, a waste of funds that they witnessed in connection with Trailblazer.

Their contact within Congress then, not surprisingly, angered one of their supervisors, General Hayden, who sent an internal NSA memo accusing the whistleblowers of betraying the agency, saying actions contrary to our decisions

will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform NSA, and I cannot tolerate them. In retaliation for communicating with congressional overseers, Binning was demoted to a different position so that he would not have access, or easy access at least, to any congressional oversight committees. Meanwhile, the NSA was now using a new program called Stellar Wind. Stellar Wind recorded 320 million calls a day Too many Again, just a big sea of noise Way too much data to comb through consistently

And find anything useful Also, this program had zero safeguards To protect Fourth Amendment rights People concerned about Stellar Wind's privacy-violating aspects Approached Binney Binney immediately knew that Stellar Wind Was based on a component of the ThinThread capability But without built-in privacy protections.

They'd taken his model and taken off the training wheels that made it safe. Binney now attempted to persuade NSA to use the proper version of ThinThread, proposing an additional capability that would computerize the process of getting a warrant to spy on domestic communications based on probable cause. NSA, they didn't want to do that. They didn't want to play nice. They continued to collect all the data they could find. Get the data was the new NSA mantra after 9-11. The Bush administration grouped Stellar Wind with a handful of other programs

under the so-called terrorist surveillance program, which made it sound patriotic and made it politically difficult for Congress to challenge. Binney knew that he could no longer work for the agency. So October 31st, 2001, he resigned and accepted his retirement package. So happy Halloween. Maybe he should have gone to the press instead of Congress. Going to Congress to whistleblow didn't get anything accomplished other than bringing an

earlier than expected end to his career. And maybe what happened to Benny helped influence Snowden to eventually not go to Congress and instead go public with what he found. In 2006, USA Today revealed that Stellar Wind data was provided by AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South. U.S. government, been invading our privacy in big ways for a long time. Another individual concerned with privacy violations was Mark Klein, an AT&T technician who revealed that NSA was tapping into AT&T's network in San Francisco. AT&T customers filed a lawsuit, Juul versus National Security Agency.

And the court ruled that so long as everyone is being surveilled, no one has the right to sue. They figured that if spying was happening to everyone, it wasn't harming any one individual. Rather, it was the sort of new normal in global security in the digital age. So yikes. The government's defense counsel argued not to proceed with litigation because it could disclose privileged information that would damage national security. The district court sided with the government. Seemed like the NSA was too powerful to fight on the inside. If Congress would do nothing, if the courts would do nothing, seemed like the only option was to go to the press

if you wanted to try and enact any change. Or at the very least, let the public know exactly who was bending them over and fucking them and how. Enter Edward Snowden. Let's get to know Snowden in today's Time Suck timeline. Right after our mid-show sponsor break. Thanks for sticking around. Now it's actually time to get to know Snowden and the whistleblowing that he did in our timeline. Strap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a Time Suck Timeline.

Suck Timeline. On June 21st, 1983, Edward Joseph Snowden is born to parents Wendy and Lonnie Snowden in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Normally, I list out a little info about the place where an episode subject is born. But Elizabeth City, it just isn't worth the time. It's a backwoods fucking dump full of nothing but bridge trolls, shrub sluts And pig dealers And I hope a forest fire Or a series of tornadoes or something just fucking wipes off the planet And if you live there

Or you're from there, even if you weren't offended By what I just said Still, go fuck yourself Anyway, Snowden's family would call Edward Ed instead of Eddie Snowbro So that's a bummer He has one sibling, older sister Jessica And they supposedly never had sex with each other Even one time growing up, if you can believe that

Ed's mom Wendy worked for a federal court in Baltimore, Maryland As chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology Ed's dad was a Coast Guard officer His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, Rear Admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the 9-11 attacks. And before moving on, I was being ridiculous about Elizabeth City and also about Snowden's sister. It just made me laugh to think about someone who just assumes that all siblings have sex with each other at least once come on at least one time growing up and someone who just does not believe any accounts to the contrary elizabeth city actually looks really nice quaint small city with the

metro area population about 65 000 on the banks of the pasquotank river just a few miles from albemarle al alba moral there we go albemarle albemarle. There we go. Albemarle. Albemarle. Sound. Flowing out into the Atlantic Ocean. I feel like that's a word you have to say quite a few times to get comfortable with. Early in Ed's childhood, the Snowdens moved to Fort Meade, Maryland. An actual shithole. Fort Meade is an old Piscataway phrase meaning a large stinky hole for everyone to shit in.

JK, obviously. Now, Fort Meade is a census-designated place of about 10,000 people between Baltimore and D.C., known almost exclusively for being home to the NSA. It's like he was destined to have his life intertwined with a national security agency. Snowden had a relatively normal childhood for a super smart kid. From an early age, he was fascinated with technology, showed signs of extremely high intelligence.

Snowden scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests. On some IQ scales, that's considered genius level. And many have said that this man is a genius. And one doc I watched, in terms of computer wizardry, he was described when he was working, doing some government contracting as a genius among geniuses. Around the age of six, he started playing video games.

By the time he was nine, his family had a computer. By the time he was 9 his family had a computer By the time he was 12, 1995 He spent a lot of time On the internet The internet of the 90s was a much different place than it is today The first browser software as we think of browsers today Mosaic Precursor to Mozilla Firefox

Was not introduced until 1993 And it enabled a fluid use of images And graphics online for the first time And opened up a new world for internet users. 93 was the first year the web really began to be commonly used by the average person. By 1996, there were approximately 45 million people using the internet. By 1999, the number of worldwide internet users reached 150 million, and more than half of them were from the US.s just a year later 2000 there were 407 million users worldwide and by 2004 there were up to 800 million users the web was mostly used by random people not businesses or big firms and you know people were more anonymous online as well than

they are now uh you know few forms of social media existed the first social media site was born in 1997. 6degrees.com. Do not remember it. You could set up a profile page, create a list of connections, and send messages within the network. It never amassed more than about a million users at its peak, and somehow is fucking still around. You can still go to that website. It doesn't look like it's been updated since 1997. The first social media site to become wildly popular and reach a global audience was Myspace Do you remember Myspace? Launched in 2003 by 2008

It reached its peak of 115 million users And it also is somehow Still around and supposedly Still has a few million users There's no fucking way that they're active How? I haven't heard someone talking about Updating their Myspace profile In a serious way in over a decade

I picture Tom from Myspace Being the only active user I haven't heard someone talking about updating their MySpace profile in a serious way in over a decade. I picture Tom from MySpace being the only active user. I picture him sitting in a giant warehouse somewhere that used to be full of employees, just some giant campus. And now it's just literally like him and like maybe like one programmer and like a secretary. Just the three of them in a huge, just cavernous campus. The early days of the internet opened up a lot of new possibilities for young tech hungry minds. One was hacking, which young Snowden was very interested in and he was good at it. Teenage Snowden detected a security hole in the Los Alamos National Laboratory's website, a nuclear facility. Snowden's parents

divorced in 2001 when he was just turning 18. His father would move to Pennsylvania and remarry. Shortly before this, Ed got a bad case of mono, missed nine months of high school while recovering. And while sick at home, he learned that he didn't need a high school diploma to attend college, so he got his GED. Spent even more time on the computer. Fell more in love with the computer. After getting his GED, he started taking classes at Anne Arundel Community College. taking classes at Anne Arundel Community College.

Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree, he would later work online towards a master's degree at the University of Liverpool, England in 2011. And then he returned to study at Anne Arundel again from 2004 to 2005. Back in 2001, a friend owned a web design business and hired him. He was having a good time being a nerdy teen. He had a fun job.

He got deep into anime, became fascinated with martial arts and Asian culture in general, studied a bit of Japanese, eventually got a new job, He got deep into anime. Became fascinated with martial arts and Asian culture in general. Studied a bit of Japanese. Eventually got a new job. Worked briefly for an anime company that had a resident office in the U.S. Studied Mandarin Chinese. You know, loving computers.

More and more still a wizard. Test four passes the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Certification course with ease. Still in 2001, Snowden registers on an IT forum on the website Ars Technica, a Latin-derived term that the site translates as the art of technology. He joins under the name of The True Hoo-Ha, of course. Ars Technica is still around. His first post on Ars, December 29, 2001, contained questions about how to set up your own web server. The True Hoo-Ha wrote, I want to be my own host.

What do I need? And then he signed off with Fish, the one true hoo-ha, editor 7xgm. Then beneath the sign-off, he wrote, real programmers never die. They just go sub with no all caps return.

Holy fucking nerd. Good for him. The late teens, it can be such a fun time For most of us, you're starting to really experience independence Figuring out who you are, apart from your role in the family The real beginning of becoming your own person I love that phase of life

Snowden will ultimately post over 700 times In this forum He was fucking pumped His Ars Technica boner, rock hard His post spanned all kinds of topics From online anonymity, to to the government to the NSA. The True Hoo-Ha also talked about things a lot of other folks like to chat about

in Ars forums, right? Talked about gaming, anime, his sex life, which, you know, maybe not true, but probably mostly consisted of jerking off to anime. At least when he first started to post.

Better anime porn. Better... I don't know what i was talking about i was just trying to do some most fucking stupid better anime porn better i don't know something papa nerd i don't know what i'm doing uh 2003 snowden asked it forum users about how to mask his internet activity online privacy so already on his mind back in 2003 he would type all right i'm familiar with the layman's version of how to remote proxies or excuse me of how remote proxies can be used to make yourself more anonymous.

However, while I have a fairly deep understanding of networking, I've got some serious holes that need to be filled regarding how the different protocols come into play with each other, especially when you've got a slightly masked IP address. Fellow Orisians, further my education. further my education. And then he wrote a whole bunch of nerdy shit that only hardcore programmers, hackers, etc. with a deep understanding of early 2000s web usage and programming would enjoy hearing about. A lot of talk about chained HTTP proxies, FTPs, RDPs, data streams, etc. And then he signed off with, that's about it for now. If you've got any answers or if these questions have raised any other questions that you guys might want answered, please feel free to contribute. Ultimately, my goal is to further my own understanding of what would

be logged at any given point during transmission i wouldn't want god himself to know where i've been you know written like a true privacy advocate and or dude hoping to hide a lot of creepy illegal porn or something uh the following year following watching the u.s fight the iraq war for over a year wanting to join the fight snowden enlists in the u.s army may 7 2004 and becomes a special forces candidate he enlisted as special forces recruit uh 18x special program 18x candidates are approved to try out for the special forces after passing a test and the training listed as being 14 weeks long at that time looks like it's about 13 weeks now snowden never completed that training he claims he was discharged after breaking his legs

in an accident but a report from september 15th 2016 by house intelligence committee says he dropped out of training due to shin stress fractures uh basically really bad shin splints whatever it was his training came to an end septemberth, 2004. I guess, you know, both stories are technically correct, just, you know, framed a little different, presented differently. He'd later write online, discharges do not happen fast. Both of my legs were broken during AIT, and they

helped, and they held onto me until the doctors cleared me to be discharged. And then after being cleared, they held onto me for another month just for shits and giggles. Snowden was unemployed for less than a year in 2005 as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the NSA. He's a bit lost at this point in his life, right? Normal time to be lost. Doing a lot of soul searching all over the place, trying to figure out who he is. According to the university, this is not a classified facility, as some have asserted when talking about snowden although it is heavily guarded and june 2014 snowden told wired that his job as a security

guard required a high level security clearance for which he passed a polygraph exam and underwent a stringent background investigation and it seems this was his first real brush with the u.s intelligence agency i mean i mean he grew up down the street from the NSA, but now he's actually working at a facility that is somewhat ran by the NSA in a roundabout way. In early 2006, Snowden, now 22 and soon to turn 23, begins his career in intelligence. He gets a job at the CIA after attending a job fair focused on intelligence agencies. And the agency assigns him to their global communications division at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just 40 miles from Fort Meade. He would later say about his first day as an employee. My very first day entering into duty for the CIA, I was required to pledge an oath of service. Now, a lot of people are confused. They think there's an oath of secrecy, but this is important

to understand. There is a secrecy agreement. This is a civil agreement with the government, a non-disclosure agreement called Standard Form 312. It says you won't talk to journalists. You won't write books as I've done, as I have now done. But when you give this oath of service, it's something very different. It's a pledge of allegiance, not to the agency, not to a government, not to a president, but to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So Snowden has maintained ever since, or has maintained ever since he became infamous for leaking classified documents that he took this oath to defend the constitution very, very seriously.

And I do believe him. After distinguishing himself as a junior employee on the top computer team, Snowden was sent to the CIA secret school for technology specialists, where he lived in a hotel for six months while studying and training full-time. CIA university is located in Chantilly, Virginia, just 20 miles from Langley. He would post about his life at this time in 2006 writing, disclaimer, I'm going to come off sounding as an asshole, but I'm not. It's just the nature of the business. To succeed in a hostile environment, you need to be both confident and aggressive. Anyway, you're going into IT. Nobody gives a shit environment, you need to be both confident and aggressive. Anyway, you're going into IT.

Nobody gives a shit what school you go to. Choose the cheaper school. Listen to what they say about networking. This is absolutely vital. If somebody likes you, it doesn't even matter if you put your pants on before your underwear in the morning, you will get the job. What you will need is IT work experience. You must get a job in IT while going to school. The sad reality is that an IT degree means dick in terms of competency to an employer. You need demonstrated specialized skills to be competitive. So you need work experience.

Get a part-time IT gig anywhere you can. Even if you don't want to work through college, that's fine. Get it. Here's the dirty little secret. You can scale back your hours until you're only working four hours a week if you need more school time, take leaves of absence, but remain employed. It doesn't matter how many hours you work because the only thing going on your resume is the number of years you worked there. What does matter is that you are an absolute best of friends or what does matter is that you are the absolute best of friends with your supervisor. And when your new post-college employer calls them for a reference, they absolutely bleed love for you. As long as you're good at what you do, you'll never have a problem. And that work experience will make that

degree worth far more than it is on its own. People might argue, but they'd be wasting their breath. I speak from personal experience in the most disadvantaged position in the job market. I don't have a degree of any type. In fact, I don't even have a high school diploma. That said, I have $0 in debt from student loans. I make 70K. I just had to turn down offers for 83K and 180K. They're going in different directions than where I'm heading. And my coworkers have BSs, MSs, and 10 to 15 years of experience. Employers fight over me and I'm 22. That's networking. Good luck. His disclaimer was correct. He does come off sounding a little bit like an asshole,

but I do love the advice he gives here. I mean, it is so practical, right? In every interview I've seen with this guy, he just seems like a no bullshit, not going to fluff things for you kind of dude. And I do like that. And he had a shit figured out at 22, fucking way more than I did.

At 22, I would have taken just about any job for 180K a year. I did have student loan debt at 22. I took a job making 18K a year. $1,500 a month for a full-time gig. 40 hours a week. Plus had to be on call during my off hours for extra shifts. One out of every four weeks. If someone would have offered me literally 10 times that amount, even if it was for something horrible, I would have probably at least considered it, right?

Try and get kindergartners hooked on crack. Are you fucking kidding me? That's what the job is. Man, fuck you. No way. That's disgusting. I have integrity. 180 K a year though, really?

With benefits Paid time off Listen, I'm not saying I'm interested But how many kids Theoretically would I have to get hooked on crack 50 a year Shit, I mean 50 kindergartners a year

Are probably going to end up hooked on crack Whether I try and get them to smoke crack or not I mean, yeah I'll take no, I'll take it. I'll take it. Give me that crack! Still in 2006, Snowden slash hoo-ha jokes about how one user's Xbox 360 is NSA's new surveillance program, and that

in that IT forum he's still active in. The strange clicky noise that another ARJ user heard coming from his console, that's the sound of freedom, citizen! You know, so he's still thinking about privacy and privacy concerns. March of 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, pretty fucking cool, where he'll be responsible for maintaining computer network security for the agency there. Assigned to the U S permanent mission to the United Nations, a diplomatic mission

represented us interests before the UN and other international organizations. Snowden receives a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment near Lake Geneva. And he's just 23 years old. Right? How fun. Moving to Switzerland had not been his first choice. His dream picks were in Asia and maybe Australia, but certainly not that. According to his diplomatic cover, he's just a regular old IT guy.

There's a regular old IT guy with a life elevated by a hint of international intrigue. He'll quickly abuse his new power a bit, blow off parking tickets, citing diplomatic immunity. I get it. He's an international man of mystery now, baby. And men of mystery don't pay parking tickets like some fucking plebe. That is so mid, bro. Yeah, that's right. Sometimes I say mid now. So fucking young and in touch uh snowden would travel the continent he'd befriend some uh estonian rock star right in the funniest parties he's a super nerd uh he'd race motorcycles in italy taking the muslim call to prayer from a sarajevo hotel room

and indulge in the food and flirt with women in bosnia romania and spain living it up he'd stay connected with all his virtual friends in that same ars technica it chat room he'd return there dozens and dozens of times during his roughly two years in switzerland he'd wax philosophical about money politics all kinds of other subjects also could be abrasive in posts users who didn't agree with him about the the rightness of the gold standard or the need to eliminate social security for example uh we're not just mistaken they were complete fucking idiots uh He detailed cultural observations about Switzerland, his travels elsewhere. To anyone who happened to be in the chat room,

right? Just one thing he wrote, Jesus Christ are the Swiss rich. The fucking McDonald's workers make more than I do. They make like 50,000 franc a year. He admired those who managed to survive on the margins of society in Switzerland. It was the hardscrabble intelligence of the Nigerian refugees that impressed him the most. He asserted, it's that whole necessity thing. Motherfuckers have been there like eight months and speak all three languages. While in Switzerland, Snowden also starts posting a lot in another Ars Technica forum, hashtag Ars Official, a random channel on Ars Technica's public internet relay chat server. In a departure from his nearly 800 posts and other Ars forums, here he begins to speak bluntly on matters of state. In the months before the 2008 election, he discusses his embrace of a return to the gold standard.

During the election, Snowden suggests he will support Obama if he were to somehow join forces with his opponent, John McCain. Snowden saw McCain as an excellent leader and a guy with real values, unlike Bush. I like McCain too But he was not dreading An Obama presidency though He wrote, we need an idealist, first and foremost Hillary Clinton, I think, would be A pox on the country

Later in the 2002 election, he voted for a Third party candidate, though he would later say That he believed in Obama's promises But once Obama took office, Snowden groaned about his policies With increasing frequency Fears that Obama might revive an assault weapons ban did not sit well with him as a defender of the second amendment. He wrote me and all my lunatic gun toad and NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-SPAN feed finished. Another sticking point for him was social security. Snowden was an individualist,

even when it was unpopular, he saw little need for a safety net his social views uh veered more and more libertarian in february 2009 chat snowden said that while he never had anything to do with drugs the marijuana farming that was conducted openly in some parts of australia reflect reflects positively on the country plus one for personal freedoms later in the same chat snowden made a joke that may have been telling. He wrote, too bad the Australian government is Luddite technophobes. USA, fuck yeah. We love that technology shit. Helps us spy on our citizens better. All caps. Snowden's irritation with Obama grows in 2009. During a January web chat, Snowden wrote that Obama had appointed a fucking politician to run the CIA. In that same conversation, he vented his rage over reading the New York Times article about U.S. sanctions on Iran,

which was based on confidential leaks. He'd say, that shit is classified for a reason. It's not because, oh, we hope our citizens don't find out. It's because that shit won't work if Iran knows what we're doing. In a January 2009 entry, the true hoo-ha exhibited strong support for the U.S. security state apparatus

and said leakers of classified information should be shot in the balls. Clearly his opinion would change drastically on that front in the coming years. Or I don't know, maybe he still has that exact same opinion and he just no longer has any nuts because he shot his fucking balls off. Just blew that chicken skin duffel bag the fuck off. Rocking the Enoch look now. By the end of a Switzerland stint, young Snowden, Eddie Snowbro, began to grow disillusioned with the government, telling the Guardian years later, much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions

and what its impact is in the world. Well, he said there was no moment seeing officials lie about these omniscient, there we go, spying programs over a period of years, pushed him over the edge. He said it was seen a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress and therefore the American people. That's what he told a Guardian reporter. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper badly lying to the public without repercussion

is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it's not informed. Yeah, I love that. At this time, Clapper was the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, by the way. 2009 would spell out trouble for the NSA. January 5th, 2009, the FISA court was notified the NSA had been querying metadata from businesses, quote, in a manner that appeared to the court to be directly contrary to the court order. This was a court order from December of 11, 2008, that allowed collection of data only if the NSA identified reasonable suspicion to access the data. Visa ordered the NSA to provide an explanation for what they had done.

February of 2009, Snowden resigns from the CIA, leaves Switzerland just under two years of being assigned there. He was suspected of breaking into classified files, but never charged. His faith in the righteousness of U.S. intelligence agencies quickly eroding. He will later say about his resignation. And so when I realized we have been violating in secret the fourth amendment of the constitution for the better part of a decade, the rate of violation is increasing. The scope of the violation is increasing with every day that we are committing felonies in the United States under a direct mandate from the white house billions of times a day, honestly, I fell into a depression. And I tried to think, how can I just

get by? And this leads to a period where I resign from what would be considered direct mission related work. And I returned to a purely corporate position for Dell as a sales official at CIA headquarters. That same month, NSA would address the FISA court back On February 17th, the NSA stated that the NSA's alert list process Was inaccurately described to the court And that the order did not give them the authority to use the list in the manner they did Basically, they claimed that they only overreached Because of a miscommunication If the FISA court would have just explained how they couldn't just spy on whatever the fuck they wanted a little better

Then things wouldn't have been taken so far guys dang on my heck so we apologize even though it's your fault um they asked the court not to rescind or modify the order and the court did not the nsa and the court went back and forth the next six months uh that august a report describing compliance issues stated the court entrusted nsa with extraordinary authority and with it came the highest responsibility for compliance and protection of privacy rights. In several instances, NSA implemented its authority in a manner inconsistent with the orders, and some of these inconsistencies were not recognized for more than two and a half years. Despite the FISA court recognizing the NSA had grossly overreached and done so for years, on September 2nd, 2009, Judge Walton reauthorized the metadata program

and this time removed FISA court oversight measures. Now the NSA could take their abuse of power even further. So that's cool. It's like, hey, we don't like what you guys are doing. We realized that you really kind of like fucked up and didn't follow the court orders. So what we're going to do is we're just gonna let you do whatever you want.

It would just be easier on everyone if we just, you know, just had no oversight for you anymore. Back to Snowden, still 2009, he leaves the CIA, as I said, to work for Dell. Kind of. I mean, technically, assigned to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, Snowden instructs top officials and U.S. military officers on how to defend networks from Chinese hackers. During his four years

working for Dell, but really working as a private tech contractor, oftentimes for the NSA, he rose from supervising NSA computer system upgrades to working at what he called in his resume a cyber strategist and an expert in cyber counterintelligence at several U.S. locations. His new girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, a blogger and an acrobat, random combo I know, pretty awesome, also from Maryland, moves in with him in Tokyo. She would later claim to be completely shocked by the whistleblowing. And I believe her. I believe Snowden went to great lengths

not to share what he was doing with anyone until he leaked the documents to journalists. While working in Tokyo, Snowden discovered some important things. As part of his job, he had to speak at a conference about China's surveillance of its own citizens. He'll talk about this later in an interview. This is a big turning point for him. He says, I'm invited to give a presentation about how China is hacking the U.S. intelligence services, defense contractors, anything that we have available in the network, which I know a little bit about, but not much about, because they have the person who is supposed to be giving the presentation drop out. So I go looking, seeing what exactly is it that China is doing? What are their capabilities?

Are they hacking? Are they doing domestic surveillance? Are they doing international surveillance? What is occurring? And I'm just shocked by the extent of their capabilities. I'm appalled by the aggression with which they use them, but also in a strange way, surprised by the openness with which they use them. They're not hiding it.

They're just open and out there saying, yeah, we're doing this. Yeah, we're hacking you. What are you going to do about it? And I think this is a distinction. I think, yes, the NSA is spying. Of course they're spying, but we're only spying overseas. We're not spying on our guys at home. We wouldn't do that.

We have firewalls. We have tripwires for people to hit. But surely these are only affecting terrorists because we're not like China, but this plants the first seeds of doubt where I see if the capability is there. He would soon realize in his own words, I see that we have the same capabilities as the Chinese government and we are applying them domestically just as they are. We have an internal strategy at the NSA, which was never publicly avowed, but it was all over their top secret internal slides that said the aspiration was to collect it all.

What this means was they were not just collecting and intercepting communications from criminals, spies, terrorists, people of intelligence value. They were collecting on everyone, everywhere, all of the time, just in case, because you never know what's going to be interesting. And if you miss it when it's passing by, you might not get another chance. know what's going to be interesting. And if you miss it when it's passing by, you might not get another chance. And so what happened was every time we wrote an email, every time you type something into the Google search box, every time your phone moved, you sent a text message, you made a phone call, the boundaries of the fourth amendment were being changed. This was without even the vast majority of members of Congress knowing about it. And this is when I start to think about maybe we need to know about this. Maybe if Congress knew about this, maybe if the

courts knew about this, we would not have the same policies as the Chinese government. Another groundbreaking event for Snowden occurred during his time in Tokyo. The unclassified report on the president's surveillance program was released to the public. This report was created in response to 9-11 and allowed the NSA to wiretap without a warrant. The PSP expired in 2007, which is why the report was declassified. However, Snowden found the classified version of the PSP report, which revealed the NSA was still surveilling

well past the expiration date. This report also gave details about Stellar Wind, that highly classified program of electronic surveillance I mentioned earlier within the U.S. that President Bush directed the Department of Defense to undertake in October 4th, 2001 in response to 9-11. Also learned how the NSA bypassed the Constitution and court rulings. The FISA court gave the NSA a blanket warrant to collect American citizens' data, which they'd continued doing for many years. So there really was, like I said earlier,

no court oversight anymore, just a facade. Maybe it always was. 2010, Snowden still writing on forums. He responded to a post about a system built by Cisco meant for government wiretappers that was found unsafe. And he wrote, it really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles. Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types. I wonder how well would envelopes that became transparent under magical federal candlelight have sold in 1750 or 1800. 1850, 1900, 1950.

Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that snuck in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy. Snowden returns to Maryland with Lindsay in 2011 after a brief stint in India, now spends a year as a lead technologist on Dell's CIA account. In this capacity, he is consulted by the chiefs of the CIA's technical branches, including the agency's chief information officer and its chief technology officer. Much to Snowden's disappointment, he also is noticing the rising popularity

of clouds and smart home devices. People are willingly sharing so much data with companies. These companies' data is being hacked into and stolen by U.S. intelligence agencies. This all concerns Snowden so much he has his first seizure, has to take a leave of absence from work. In March of 2012, Snowden is transferred to Hawaii

at the recommendation of his doctors, who believe the stress of his job is making his seizures worse Snowden and Lindsay move to Honolulu His girlfriend Lindsay Not my wife Lindsay, I hope It was right before we started dating So who the fuck knows what she's up to Snowden's neighbors have no clue who he is

Who he really works for Nor the secret project he's working on Ed and Lindsay rent a three bedroom, two bath home In Waipahu for 13 months. Also in 2012, at a congressional hearing with Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, Alexander's asked directly if the NSA intercepts phone calls, emails, texts, Amazon orders, et cetera.

The answer's no to all questions. When asked what judicial consent is required for the NSA to intercept communication, he responds that the FBI leads the operation and that it would need a court order to be authorized. He claimed the NSA alone is not authorized to collect data and denied any NSA involvement in mass data collection. All of his statements would later prove to be fucking lies. Launched an investigation into the NSA, and he will never be punished for any of this. launched an investigation into the NSA. And he will never be punished for any of this.

He'll retire from government work with a nice big fat pension in 2013, then launch his own private cybersecurity company. Of course, he knows how important it is to have good cybersecurity because he led the charge in stealing people's online information on behalf of the government for years. This is a publicly traded company

that he's still the CEO of. And in late, I didn't write the name of the cat that's not very important detail but in late 2020 he joined amazon's board of directors so dude is killing it snowden's the villain he's a retired four-star general multi multi-millionaire american hero because he never leaked any info he just snooped on god knows how many of us uh u.s officials other sources familiar with snowden's later espionage investigation said snowden began downloading documents describing the government's electronic spying programs while working for dell in april of 2012 his second month in hawaii that summer he had really started formally reviewing the u.s constitution studying it reading it over and over seeing how it was interpreted in various

court cases trying to see how if at all the secret program stellar wind violated the fourth amendment and he decided that it sure as shit did. Following months, Snowden posts the last of the 753 posts he would write on Ars Technica. In response to a question about creating a dead man switch, a program that would automatically delete a computer's contents if its owner failed to log in periodically, Snowden replies, you could write one. There are also plenty of orphaned open source ones out there

you could just pick up that need to be finished if you want to head start. This was the first time he'd post on the forum in six months. He's busy with other shit now. December of 2012, an anonymous individual sends messages to Glenn Greenwald, an American freelance journalist who contributed to Britain's The Guardian, among other publications. Initially, they were unable to establish a secure method of communication and the correspondence would be delayed. This individual, of course, would be Edward Snowden. To contact Greenwald, Snowden would have to drive all around the island connecting to random Wi-Fi networks and using encrypted emails. In January of 2013, Laura Poitras began receiving encrypted emails from an anonymous messenger. Poitras is an acclaimed journalist, documentarian who

contributed to the Washington Post, amongst other publications, and someone who had released a short, a short film, short documentary in 2012 on whistleblower, William Binney, right? We met him earlier. That would be part of an award-winning documentary released in 2014, a full length on whistleblowers titled Citizen Four. And Snowden will be the star of that doc. One of the first emails to Poitras that Snowden wrote is a chilling read. Laura, at this stage, I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more.

This will not be a waste of your time. The following sounds complex, but should only take minutes to complete for someone technical. I would like to confirm out of my email that the keys we exchanged were not intercepted and replaced by your surveillance. Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase. Assume your adversary is capable of 1 trillion guesses per second. If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications. Understand that the above steps are not bulletproof

and are intended only to give us breathing room. In the end, if you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated. This must not deter you from releasing the information I provide. Thank you and be careful, citizen four. Poitras responded quickly And then another email arrived shortly after the first

You asked why This is fucking crazy to me You asked why I picked you I didn't You did The surveillance you've experienced means you've been selected A term which will mean more to you As you learn more about how the modern SIGINT system works

For now, know that every border you cross Every purchase you make Every call you dial Every cell phone tower you pass Friend you keep, article you write Site you visit, subject line you type And packet you route Is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited

But whose safeguards are not The email showed Laura a file Documenting her activity at Newark Liberty International Airport U.S. Customs Border Protection Logs Even showed what she had said To the airport employees there. Fuck! Due to her previous films about the government, she had become

a target for surveillance. The reason she now had a file on her in the NSA's archives. The file proved to Laura that the person she was speaking to was legit. Shortly after she began receiving these emails, Poitras left the fucking country. She moved to Berlin to protect her film footage that she was worried about having seized now.

And she also increased her personal security. That's just wild. Imagine someone sending you an email with, say, audio footage of you talking to someone at a fucking coffee shop a few months ago. Then more footage of you is having a conversation in your house. The email list where you've been the past few months, you know,

what you bought at the grocery store, maybe some screenshots of some text exchanges, maybe a book you purchased at the bookstore, maybe some nudes you don't remember taking because you didn't fucking take them. But someone, while you were looking at your phone or your computer, secretly turned your camera on, started recording. Holy shit. All of that is possible based on what Snowden uncovered and what he has said in numerous interviews.

And all of that is so scary. What a violation. Big Brother really is watching. March 12, 2013, Snowden reaches a new breaking point. That day, during a U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, quotes NSA Director Keith Alexander's keynote speech

from the 2012 DEFCON, an annual hacker convention. We might've mentioned that one, I think, in the anonymous episode, Alexander had stated that our job is foreign intelligence and that those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people dossiers is absolutely false. From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense.

Wyden then asked Clapper, does NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? And he responded, no, sir. Wyden asked, it does not? And Clapper said, not wittingly. There are cases where they could have inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly. When Snowden was asked in a January 26, 2014 television interview in Moscow on what the decisive moment was or what caused him to whistleblow, he replied, sort of the breaking point was seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. Seeing that really meant for me that there was no going back. On March 15, 2013, Snowden quits working for Dell,

takes a new contractor job with Booz Allen Hamilton, a huge American management and information technology consulting firm at the same NSA facility in Hawaii. He'd only worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for two months. The point of the job for him was to gather more classified data and then release details of the NSA's worldwide surveillance activity. Of his time subcontracted as a whole, Snowden would say that 18 to 22-year-old analysts were suddenly thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now have access to all

your private records. And of course, their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation, but they're extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a coworker. Sooner or later, this person's whole life has been seen by all these other people. This was very troubling to him as it should have been snowden used a program in hawaii called x key score as part of his job x key score mentioned that earlier allows a person to view a compilation of any individual's internet activity he could see their personal photos search histories phone calls a lot of other data and they had no fucking idea

they thought her shit was safe and secure and private. Maybe Snowden, before he quit, was looking at some nudes that you've deleted in the years since. Maybe one time you sent someone a jerk-off video or a video of you spreading your ass cheeks in front of the camera, maybe with your face in the video. Maybe a video of you having sex with an ex that you would rather not have your current partner see. But you deleted it. But is it gone? Or is it sitting in some folder with your name and social security number on it? Maybe in a massive US intelligence data storage center in Saratoga Springs, Utah or somewhere. And perhaps 10 years from now,

someone will use that video as blackmail to get you to do something or not do something, just to keep quiet, to obey. How fucking scary is it? The shit like that is absolutely possible. The tech is there. And thanks to Snowden's leaked documents, the government is for sure spying on us and gathering this kind of information. They do have that kind of shit. They do have folders on some of us, right? And if that folder gets into the wrong hands, a folder that should not fucking exist in the first place,

your whole life could be turned upside down. What if the folder contains emails that prove you've been cheating on your spouse or stealing from your employer, talking a bunch of shit with a friend, shit talking that looks really bad out of context. It's just crazy, the possibilities. These possibilities deeply disturbed Snowden, and he continued emailing Poitras and Greenwald. Laura, I will answer what I remember of your questions as best I can. Forgive the lack of structure. I'm not a writer, and I have to draft this in a great hurry. What you know as Stellar Wind has grown. SSO, the expanded special. What you know as Stellar Wind has grown.

SSO, the expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind's share of the pie, has spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States. Disturbingly, the amount of U.S. communication ingested by NSA is still increasing. Publicly, we complain that things are going dark, but in fact, our accesses are improving. The truth is that NSA has never in its history collected more than it does now. I know the location of most domestic interception points and that the largest telecommunications companies in the U.S. are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove. We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man, yet its directors exempt themselves from accountability. NSA Director Keith Alexander lied to Congress, which I can prove

Billions of U.S. communications are being intercepted And gathering evidence of wrongdoing, I focused on the wronging of the American people But believe me when I say that the surveillance we live under Is the highest privilege compared to how we treat the rest of the world This I can also prove On cyber operations, the government's public position Is that we still lack a policy framework That That too is a lie. There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations created by the White House. It's called Presidential Policy Directive 20 and was finalized

at the end of last year. This I can also prove. I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk. If I have luck and you are careful, you will have everything you need. I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the American public. Damn. Booz Allen Snowden is furiously copying, downloading hundreds and hundreds of thousands of additional classified documents, building a massive collection of documents with information he finds the most concerning. He also creates a computer program called Heartbeat. Heartbeat can search intelligence agencies' news blogs and pull documents from them. It also creates a computer program called Heartbeat. Heartbeat can search intelligence

agencies' news blogs and pull documents from them. It can create a feed for Snowden about any agent he wants to research. Snowden uses Heartbeat to research mass surveillance without the government detecting a security breach. Now he just faces one problem when it comes to sharing the data he's collecting with the public. He has the documents he wants, but can't move them anywhere without getting caught. So Snowden switches to a night shift job to finish his secret project. He invents a compatibility testing project that uses a cover to transfer heartbeat files onto other computers, computers not connected to the NSA network. He then compresses and encrypts the documents onto SD cards, then smuggles them out of the NSA office in his cheeks, socks,

even Rubik's cube. It's like something out of a fucking movie. I hope this story comes across as exciting to you as it was to me when I first learned about it. I'm still excited. Going over it again. Now Snowden has all the info he wants to release, but he knows he'll be prosecuted for doing so, maybe even executed potentially. So he researches where he can expect to, you know, be granted asylum. Snowden then informs his NSA supervisor that he needs extended leave for medical reasons.

Claims he's recently been diagnosed with epilepsy. They buy it. asylum. Snowden then informs his NSA supervisor that he needs extended leave for medical reasons, claims he's recently been diagnosed with epilepsy. They buy it. April 2013, Laura Poitras is instructed by Snowden, still using the code name Citizen4, to travel to New York City and await instructions for their first in-person meeting. He writes, the encrypted archive should be available to you within seven days. The key will follow when everything else is done. The material I provide, an investigative effort required, will be too much for any one person. I recommend at very minimum you involve Glenn Greenwald. I believe you know him. The plain text of the payload will include my true name, details for the record, though it will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my involvement. My personal desire is that you paint the target directly onto my back. No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions,

and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who could prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source. On timing regarding meeting up in Hong Kong, the first rendezvous attempt will be at 10 a.m. local time on Monday. We will meet in the hallway outside of a restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I'll be working on a Rubik's Cube so you can identify me. Approach me, ask if I know the hours of the restaurant.

I'll respond by stating that I'm not sure and suggest you try the lounge instead. I'll offer to show you where it is, and at that point, we're good. You simply need to follow naturally. Let's disassociate our metadata one last time so we don't have a record of your true name in our final communication chain. This is obviously not to say you can't claim your involvement, but as every trick in the book is likely to be used in looking into this, I believe it's better that particular disclosure come on your own terms. Thank you again for all you've done, so sorry again for the multiple delays, but we've been in uncharted territory with no model to benefit from. If all ends well, perhaps the demonstration that our methods worked will embolden more to come forward. Citizen four. May 20th, 2013, Snowden

takes a flight to Hong Kong. His girlfriend has just gone on vacation without him and he just dips out, tells her he's going on a last minute business trip. She's used to him, you know, working clandestinely on some capacity. So it doesn't have to give a lot of details. Hong Kong, he orchestrates the meeting with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and another journalist, Ewan Macaskill, who worked for The Guardian. It takes place on Monday, June 3rd. After months of cryptic emails, it was time to sound the alarm to the public,

time to put a face on Citizen Four. During the eight consecutive days of Snowden speaking to these journalists, he will review the classified documents with them, explaining what he knew, telling his personal story. Laura Poitras will film it all. They meet at the Mirror Hotel in Hong Kong, China. Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald head to Snowden's room.

Greenwald informs him he wants to publish articles in the next few days. Their goal is to work through the documents, but also to learn Snowden's story, how he came to realize these issues needed to be exposed. Snowden tells him that modern media always focuses on personalities and that it's commonly used as a distraction

to hide the truth. And he doesn't want to be part of the story. When asked why he does it, he lists several reasons. He says the issue is the state's power against people's ability to oppose that power. He was paid to design methods to amplify state power.

Policy changes are the only thing that restrains the state's power. He tells them how at NSA, they can watch drone videos on their desktops in real time. You can stream low quality drone videos, mostly surveillance drones, not murder drones. These drones followed individuals' homes. Although they didn't know the identity of these people, they could see a list of different code names. They could click and watch whichever one they wanted. Now Snowden, a deeply private person and an advocate for privacy, would have to confront that leaking these documents

would get rid of any privacy he had left, but he still chose to do it. Why? He said he remembered the days of his childhood back in Maryland, surfing the internet in its early days. He remembered the equality, the mutual respect between people in the initial days of the web. And then he said it changed.

He said it turned into a place where people self-policed their own views, making jokes about ending up on the list for certain activities because they knew they were being watched. He'd been told by people that they watch what they type in their search engines, voluntarily limiting their own curiosity because they're worried about being surveilled. Their intellectualism is being curbed now, the desire to explore being extinguished. He said he didn't want some new age of government surveillance to bring about the end of intellectual freedom and curiosity. I do like the way this guy's

mind works. Tuesday, June 4th, there are more meetings. Snowden meets with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald again, also Guardian journalist Ewan Macaskill. They immediately dive into the interview. Snowden tells them about an infrastructure built by NSA in cooperation with other governments. This infrastructure intercepts digital communication, radio communication,

and analog communication that it has sensors to detect. This allows most human and computer communication to be intercepted. Individuals can search your communications retroactively. He provides an example. If he wanted to see your emails or phone calls, he says he just has to use a selector, something in the communication chain that might identify you as an individual. Your email address, IP address, phone number, credit cards, unique to only you. He can input the selector and search the database, and he can also put scrutiny on you in the future to monitor your activity in real time. Right.

This is how they put targets on people. He then speaks about how Elizabeth City, where he was born, has a Coast Guard station, but that he spent most of his childhood near Fort Meade talks about how his family doesn't know what's happening, that he won't be able to keep, uh, keep his family ties after this is all over. He tells them that the closer he stays to his family, the more likely they are to be leaned on.

They then transitioned to viewing the documents. There would be seven of them to go over that first day. He tells Greenwald, he needs to encrypt the documents so they can't be read until they're sent over. Greenwald informs him, informs him they'll be posted within two or three days. Snowden then walks him through how to encrypt these documents. Maxkill asks if they can make the documents available for all to see.

And Snowden responds, because some of these documents are legitimately classified in ways that could cause harm to people and methods. I'm comfortable in my technical ability to protect them. I mean, you could literally shoot me or torture me and I could not disclose the password if I wanted to. I have the sophistication to do that. There are some journalists I think could do that, but there are a number of them that couldn't. But the question becomes, can an organization actually control that information in that manner without risking basically an uncontrolled disclosure? Snowden doesn't want to make a decision about what should or shouldn't be disclosed or published, Which is why he's running the document through these journalists to remove his own biases He discusses how the UK's GCHQ

Government Communications Headquarters Has the most invasive network intercept program in the world called Tempora It's the world's first full take of content and metadata All the info he leaked would not just expose US corruption, right? But the corruption elsewhere around the world in the UK and other nations wednesday june 5th uh more meetings snowden speaks to poetras you know greenwald mackenskill again puts a pillowcase over his head while changing the sd card on the laptop to prevent visual detection he informs greenwald his computer password is too short once the story is released might be able to uh find and they might be able

to find and look into his computer then a fire alarm goes off inside the hotel. He seemed concerned about the fire alarm, worried that the people might be trying to lure him out. But after speaking with staff, you know, he agrees that it's just a routine testing. Snowden gives a trio a tour of the documents that he's organized with them.

He he wants to bring focus to SSO, not prison SSO, special source operations, that worldwide passive collection of networks, both domestic and international. He explains that corporate partnerships are one of the primary methods of collection. He explains, you know, X-key score,

describing it as a front-end system that analysts use for querying the raw SIGINT signals intelligence data. With it, you can perform retroactive searches, live searches, flagging. He informs them how in 2011, the NSA could monitor a billion telephone and internet sessions simultaneously

with just one device. It's holy shit, some device. They could collect 125 gigabytes a second per device. There were 20 sites at the time, so 20 billion data collection points. It's not science fiction, he tells them. This stuff is happening right now. And this is all you know 2013

what the fuck are they doing in 2022 uh six hours later greenwald publishes the first article along with it parts of the snowden documents are released to the press those documents revealed that the foreign intelligence surveillance court right visa uh implemented an order requiring verizon to covertly release private customer information daily to the nsa cnn quickly interviews greenwald he says this story is important because the patriot act gave the government power to collect release private customer information daily to the NSA. CNN quickly interviews Greenwald. He says this story is important because the Patriot Act gave the government power to collect data about people with a lower justification than probable cause. This order is not directed at any individuals who are suspected of anything criminal. Many in the public are shocked, of course, outraged.

Thursday, June 6th, The Guardian and The Washington Post released more articles on Prism Now, the top secret NSA program that collects data on American Internet activity. It also allows real-time data collection. The June 6th Guardian article reveals top-secret information that the NSA had been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. Snow now tells Poitras, Greenwald, and Macaskill that the government has started asking his girlfriend Lindsay questions. When she last saw him, what he's doing, asking about his illness. Lindsay told him an HR person and an NSA police officer came to their home and were planning to break in. He tells Lindsay to cooperate, to worry about herself, not him.

He says Lindsay is calm about the entire situation, mostly because she has no clue what's going on. He hadn't told her shit, so she wouldn't be guilty of any crimes. He says while Lindsay was on vacation, he left only leaving a note saying he'd be gone for a while for work. They change the subject. Snowden tells him NSA will only be able to see what exactly he took in a peripheral sense because he cast such a wide encryption net. This means they won't be able to see exactly,

you know, which documents he was able to get out of their facilities. Snowden decides not to release any employee names or actual data, only trends about what the government is doing. He tells reporters, we have some time to play this before things get really nasty. On Friday, June 7th, Laura Poitras publishes an article in the Washington Post, adding to a growing media firestorm. CNN then does a long story about the secret U.S. surveillance programs, adding to the story the NSA, the FBI are tapping into the central servers of nine leading companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, excuse me, YouTube, Apple, all under the program prism.

They're collecting audio, video, photo, emails, documents, connection logs that allow analysts to track movements, contacts over time. But no one aside from the three journalists still in Hong Kong have any idea who the whistleblower is. Greenwald now videos into CNN,

informs them that in 2008, the government eliminated the warrant requirement to surveil non-US citizens Snowden receives a response from Lindsay now she's still alive and free but his rent checks aren't being accepted by the landlord so she's at risk of eviction. Snowden finds this suspicious fears she'll be a victim of a violent attack

Snowden discusses more classified surveillance projects with the journalists he tells them he wants to go public soon says he's not afraid of the government and they certainly can't bully him into silence like they did to others. He tells them you can stomp one person, but there's going to be seven more of us. Greenwald worries if they give out the name of the whistleblower, they'll be doing the government's work for them. Giving away confession for free, Snowden answers. He doesn't want to hide. Meanwhile, the NSA and the government

are now dealing with a PR shitstorm. They claim that they only looked at the origin and content of all these phone calls, never at the actual content. No, no way, Jose. Just because we monitor all of your phone calls doesn't mean we're ever listening. Gosh dang, we plug our ears. Pinky swear. What a lame ass lie. That's like getting caught naked in bed with someone you're cheating on, right? Your partner with. And just being like, affair? What? Me?

With this naked lady? Here in bed with me? With the messed up hair and the slap marks on her ass and the smeared makeup? Okay, shut the front door. No way. We were, uh, we were, um, uh, having a naked tickle fight. Am I guilty of naked tickling? And maybe using my raging boner to do the tickling,

which I realize now probably is not cool. Yeah, guilty as charged. Did I have sex with this person I'm in bed naked with? No way. I'll prove it. Go ahead and smell my penis. It will for sure not smell like her vagina.

100%. Just let me go to the bathroom first where I will not be vigorously washing my clean wing. The cleanest it has ever been before you sniff. Fucking absurd. These stupid lies. Saturday,

June 8th, Snowden sits with Poitras, Greenwald and Macaskill again. Tells them more about his personal life. Monday, June 10th, shit hits the fan. Snowden's out in the open. The government finds out that he is that one of its own employees is the whistleblower. The U.S. Department of Justice confirms it's in the first stages of criminal investigation.

Investigators interrogate Snowden's family as well as Lindsay. They're all put under 24-7 FBI surveillance. Snowden is fearing for their lives. Inside his hotel room, which most days he does not leave at all, Snowden shaves his facial hair, making himself less identifiable. The group has to move to Laura's rooms and Snowden's

room is now getting flooded with calls. They call up Jonathan Mann, a human rights lawyer. Mann and Snowden discuss Robert Thibault, another lawyer who's going to take Snowden on as a client. Snowden says he has a right to protection in Hong Kong. His lawyers want him to come into the office and they plan to lock everyone out of the building. Same day, June 10th, the U.S. confirms part of Snowden's military service to the Guardian. George Wright, a U.S. Army chief civilian spokesman, gives a statement. His records indicate he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruits, 18X,

on May 7th, 2004, but was discharged September 28th, 2004. The Army refused to release his DD-214, which details a person's entire military career, locations, job, honorable or dishonorable discharge. Snowden now quickly applies for refugee status through the UN. He sneaks out of the Mirror Hotel,

is housed for two weeks in several different apartments by other refugees also seeking asylum in Hong Kong. An arrangement set up by his attorney, Robert Thibault. Now he's hiding from US authorities. Laura remains in Hong Kong hoping to film more, but then she realized she's being followed by government agents. She returns to Berlin, June 16th.

Over the next several weeks, she and Snowden exchange messages. Snowden, are you there? Laura, yes, are you okay? Snowden, I am. I don't think I'll be able to meet with you guys again for some time. Your profiles are too high. And now that my handle has been published by the Washington Post, NSA may destroy my accounts or block connection attempts. So we need to re-verify each other. Laura, okay, if I could get you a camera,

would you be able to film where you are? Snowden, not now. My hosts are very vulnerable people. I really can't speak out loud here. Laura, you can't? Snowden, I don't want to get anybody's door kicked in. Shortly after the info about spying on U.S. citizens is leaked, Greenwald reveals that the U.S. also is spying on Brazilian emails and phone calls, especially in Southern Brazil. The prison program was part of the spying

and the government collaborated with corporations to get the data. Greenwald and Poitras exchanged messages about potentially returning to the U.S., something that would now be tricky. Greenwald is in London. Poitras is in Berlin.

Glenn writes, what are your current thoughts about going to the US? Laura, I wouldn't go now Glenn, later? Laura, I don't know, what about you? Glenn, I don't know Laura, there's a strong chance we'll be served a subpoena if we go back Glenn, for me, that's the best case scenario

We'll see In London, the Guardian began releasing information on the GCHQ Specifically an undersea interception site For cables that assist in the Tempura data collection programs. They're hacking into cables laying along the ocean floor. Meanwhile, Snowden and Poitras would exchange more messages. Snowden, how are things there?

Poitras, I'm at the Guardian. They're publishing Tempura today. They are very nervous, worried about an injunction. Snowden, the NSA loves that program. Laura, why? Snowden, because they aren injunction. Snowden, the NSA loves that program. Laura, why? Snowden, because they aren't allowed to do it in the US. The UK lets us query it all day long. Laura, they're getting cold feet about publishing names

of the telecoms collaborating. Snowden, do they know the companies? Laura, yes, I believe so. Fast forward a couple of days. June 21st, Snowden is charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person holy fucking word salad uh the final

two charges violations of the espionage act the espionage act of 1917 prohibits uh obtaining information recording pictures or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation. Before Obama took office, the Espionage Act had only been used in prosecution three times since 1917. On the internet, more than 100,000 people now sign a petition asking for a presidential pardon for Snowden The US asks Hong Kong to extradite him Hong Kong replies, they're considering it Eddie Snowbro knows it is time to get the fuck out of Dodge

June 23rd, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks Organizes Snowden's departure from Hong Kong to seek political asylum Initially, Snowden wants to travel to Ecuador But he becomes stranded in a Moscow airport for over a month because the U.S. government annuls his passport. He wants to get to Ecuador because the president there at the time, Rafael Correa, was an outspoken critic of the U.S. government and would very likely not extradite Snowden to the U.S. In hindsight later, as I talked about earlier, he'll be glad he never made it to Ecuador due to the CIA's presence in South America in general. Russia denies the request to extradite Snowden. This leads many people to believe he's a Russian spy. Here's what Ed will say about those claims. Had I cooperated with the Russian government, if you think I'm a Russian spy, I would have been in that airport for five minutes before they drove me out in a limo to the palace where I'd be living for the rest of my days before they throw the parade where they call me a hero of Russia. Instead, I was trapped in that airport

for 40 days. Assange learned Snowden was trapped in the airport because the U.S. annulled his passport. Since Snowden wasn't officially in Russian territory, it was difficult to get him out. A member of WikiLeaks went inside the airport with Snowden, tried to get him from Moscow to Ecuador via a private jet. While Snowden was trapped inside the airport, international lawyers met to discuss his legal status pro bono, discussed how he was charged with two legal violations of the Espionage Act. But the act is traditionally used to prosecute spies, not whistleblowers. The act doesn't distinguish between press leaks for public interest and selling secrets for personal profits. Lawyers are going up against the government, a very angry government,

and they feel like they don't have a very good case. Two very important arguments they couldn't use was that one, the dissemination of the documents was in the public interest, and two, the government programs were illegal. Two of the most important aspects of the case out the window, this is because the government didn't have to defend their classification of info. The Espionage Act classified Snowden as a spy, not a whistleblower. Additionally, the government could charge him for each document he published, which could end up being, you know, literally millions of fucking charges or hundreds of thousands. Excuse me. Yeah. Snowden and Poitras exchange more messages. Snowden. So I have news for you, which won't be shocking. Poitras. Okay. I'm here. Snowden. The FBI has authorization to work with

the CIA and a number of unnamed foreign partners, including the UK, to team up in finding out my plans and the location of the people in contact with me worldwide. Poitras, where does this come from? Snowden, all I can say is a reliable source. They've been asked to use all appropriate means, including government pressure, where appropriate, to persuade media to refuse publication. pressure where appropriate to persuade media to refuse publication. Scary, right? July 5th, Snowden announces that he's been offered asylum by Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, but that he's choosing to remain in Russia, mostly because he can't get a direct flight to any of those places and is worried about being apprehended when he has to stop for fuel. Anatoly Kucharina, one of his new Russian lawyers, states that the asylum he's been

given is only temporary and that Snowden is considering pursuing citizenship. Snowden publicly gives his thanks to Russia. July 20th, UK government pressures The Guardian to destroy the GCHQ archive given to Makaskill in Hong Kong. He does not destroy it. August 1st, after 40 days stranded in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetovu Airport, Snowden receives asylum in Russia for a year. He'll then make a new life for himself, start to make one in Russia, leading more people to suspect he's a Russian agent, been one all along.

He has continuously again denied ever taking any money from the Russian government, saying, I have my own apartment. I have my own income. I live a fully independent life. I have never and will never accept money or housing or any other assistance from the Russian government. People ask how I make a living. I give lectures. I speak publicly for the American program bureau and places book me to speak about the future of cybersecurity, what's happening with surveillance and about conscience and whistleblowing. I've never been to the, I've never been the nightclub type. I'm a little bit of an indoor cat, whether I lived inaryland or new york or geneva or tokyo or moscow i always spend the majority of my time looking into a screen

because i think the thing that's on the other side of it is beautiful it has the promise of human connection and although the internet is very much a troubled place i think it is something worth fighting for something that uh we can improve the u.s government has confirmed that he uh you know does make over two hundred thousand dollars a year From lectures he delivers from his computer Kind of like Zoom lectures If they ever capture him They want all that money back that he's made August 7th, 2013

President Obama cancels a trip to Moscow To protest Russia's protection of Snowden Two days later, August 9th Obama speaks to his decision in a press conference Saying, I don't think Mr. Snowden was a patriot I called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks. My preference, and I think the American people's preference,

would have been for a lawful, orderly examination of these laws. A thoughtful, fact-based debate. That would then lead us to a better place. Get the fuck out of here. What the NSA was doing was in blatant violation of U.S. constitutional rights. What's the point in having a thoughtful, fact-based debate with a clandestine organization notorious for going to great lengths to hide the truth, to hide important facts? I mean, you might as well have a nice, thoughtful discussion with a literal fucking monster accused of impulsively and constantly eating people. So, monster, why do you think that you've been accused of recklessly eating people all the-

AH! AH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP! It's fucking craziness. Third article, published in September 2013, reveals how the U.S. and U.K. crack the encryption that protects everyone's data. Encryption protects our personal information, transaction histories, emails. The GCHQ and NSA have spent years trying to break this encryption Through supercomputers, collaboration with internet companies And shockingly The NSA setting international encryption standards themselves

Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse This description This decryption Excuse me Compromises guarantees from internet companies Phone companies and online stores That their customers' information is protected From September to October 2013, the European Parliament holds hearings to investigate

NSA surveillance of EU citizens and companies. At this conference, they hosted Ladar Levinson, creator of Lavabit, a surveillance software and encryption software. He discusses how the NSA has access to encryption keys and pays companies to give them more access. LavaBit allows surveillance without any humans having to access the data or having access to the data. Snowden was a user of LavaBit, but Ladar Levinson refused to give the government access to his user information. Because he refused to give over one user's information, the NSA told him they would have to look at the entire database now. Once again, Levinson refused, and he said he was forced to shut down LavaBit as well as sign an NDA. Then he had to go through an exhausting legal battle

to reveal what happened. And the NSA, man, they do not play nice. Scary motherfuckers. October of 2013, Snowden makes a statement saying he no longer has any of the classified documents. He says he gave them all to Poitras and Greenwald, kept nothing for himself, claimed it wasn't in the public interest for him to keep the files. Also, October 2013, his dad, Lon,

travels to Moscow to support his son and gives statements to the press in Ed's support. November 4th, Snowden's request for clemency from the U.S. is rejected. He's a wanted man. By this point, political leaders all across the country, all across the world, have formed opinions for and against Snowden, for and against NSA. Prime Minister of Britain David Cameron warns the Guardian that they are risking national security by revealing Britain's GCHQ Temporal Mass Surveillance Program. Cameron was outspoken in his support of the NSA and GCHQ. He said, what Mr. Snowden has in effect done and what some newspapers are assisting him in doing is going to make it a lot more difficult to keep our countries and citizens safe. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, stated,

this is called protecting America. She initially proposed legislation to change but preserve the NSA's programs until she found out about the U.S. spying on friendly countries. She then called for a major review of all data collection. Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, called the spine a breach of international law and wanted Brazil to distance itself from U.S. influence. Angela Merkel, German chancellor, was very angry to find out about the U.S. spine on Germany and pushed for more international regulations against digital surveillance. March of 2014, the U.S. military reveals that Snowden's leak caused billions of dollars in damage to national security. March 20th, 2014, Germany begins a parliament inquiry

to investigate NSA spying. Snowden and Poitras exchange more messages. This is, oh my gosh, Poitras. Merkel's story is happening, still waiting for German government response. Snowden, did you try calling the number? Poitras, not yet. Don't want to tip hand. I have a question on background. Is it plausible that Merkel is referenced with her real name and not codename? Snowden, yes. Codenames are typically for assets, not targets. May 22nd, 2014, Snowden has an interview with Brian Williams from NBC News. Tells Williams that he was a trained spy who worked for the CIA and the NSA the first time that had been revealed. That claim later denied by the NSA.

In this interview, Snowden announced he viewed himself as a patriot and that his actions were for the benefit of the country. He said he enjoyed seeing the debate and discussion amongst U.S. citizens. Also admitted he really wanted to come home to America and be with his family again. July 3rd, 2014, William Binney, that first NSA whistleblower, attends the German inquiry to speak as an expert witness. He will say this about Snowden. All those programs that Edward Snowden exposed fundamentally are ways of acquiring information. Every dictatorship down through history has always done that. One of the first things they need to do is try to acquire

knowledge of their population. And that's exactly what these programs do. I see this as the most major threat to our democracies all around the world. And then Benny's testimony is interrupted when news surfaces that the CIA has a fucking double agent spying on the German NSA inquiry. Jesus Christ. Later that month, Lindsay Mills moves to Moscow

to be reunited and live with Snowden. August 7th, 2014, Snowden is granted a three-year residency permit in Russia. Sometime that month, Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald meet to discuss new sources of classified information. Whatever info they discuss has never come out publicly. Not as of this recording. October 10th, Laura Poitras' documentary Citizen 4 is released at the New York Film Festival. Citizen 4, the third part of a trilogy on post 9-11 America she made.

Citizen 4 documents the eight days Snowden spent meeting with Poitras, Greenwald, Macaskill, and Hong Kong, as well as other historic events related to surveillance and privacy. It is rated highly after its premiere and renews the Snowden debate, hero or traitor. And then on February 22, 2015,

Citizen 4 wins an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. June 2, 2015, President Obama signs the USA Freedom Act. This act ends bulk collection of all records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the section that the United States of Appeals for the Second Circuit had found illegal. The USA Freedom Act allows changes to certain gag orders. My God, excuse me. This is like, there's so many fucking big technical words.

Required more transparency on data collection. Allow the government to track suspected terrorists for 72 hours if they enter the US. Increase the required maximum penalties for anyone who gave support to certain terrorist organizations and allowed limited use of bulk data collection in an emergency. But is the NSA actually playing by the rules after this? Like, does any of that kind of legislation even fucking matter? That's what I think.

Like, do we just now trust the government to stop spying on us just because they were exposed by Snowden? When government officials get caught for breaking laws like this, they almost never, ever get in trouble. It's a fucking joke. They get pardoned.

They get these reduced sentences. They get some little posh, you know, incarceration for six months in some bullshit, you know, incarceration for six months in some bullshit, you know, fake prison. September 29, 2015, Edward Snowden joins Twitter, and he gains 2 million followers in just a day. His first tweet reads, can you hear me now? The way Snowden uses his phone is kind of interesting.

He also reveals this in 2015. You have to wonder, how does a guy so worried about privacy use a device that he knows is used to track him? Well, he hacks it. He said, I try not to use one as much as possible, and when I do use one, I have a cell phone that I have myself modified. I perform kind of a surgery on it. I open it up with special tools, and I use a soldering iron to remove the microphone, and I disconnect the camera so that the phone can't simply listen to me when it's sitting there. It physically has no microphone in it.

And when I need to make a call, I just connect an external microphone through the headphone jack. And this way, the phone works for you rather than you working for the phone. I did watch him do this in a Vice interview. It is pretty cool. He comes across sometimes like a real-life character in some variant of The Matrix. A few days after he joined Twitter, Snowden spoke with New Hampshire Liberty Forum and stated that he would be willing to return to the U.S. if he was

guaranteed a fair trial September 13th, 2016 Snowden has an interview with the Guardian He announces he is seeking a presidential pardon and says, yes, there are laws in the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists, for the exceptions for the things that may seem unlawful

in letters on a page, but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems that these were necessary things, that these were vital things. Well, he has yet to get that pardon. Two days later, September 15th, the house intelligence committee releases a three page unclassified summary of a report about the Snowden investigation. Uh, the report characterizes Snowden as a disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with managers, a serial exaggerator and fabricator, not a whistleblower. The report claimed Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security and the vast majority of these documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual

privacy interests. They instead pertain to military defense and intelligence programs of great interest to america's adversaries members of the hic unanimously signed a letter requesting obama not to pardon him after this report is released snowden tweets Their report is so artlessly distorted that it would be amusing if it weren't such a serious act of bad faith It feels like the politicians in that house intelligence committee were a bunch of fucking nsa stooges like puppets Like they're missing a very important piece of uh what was happening here it seems like I mean he he released so much intel regarding privacy breaches right that was the that was the most important thing he released that got all the media attention oh man that shit fucking kills me when

they were able to like say things like that a bunch of people believe that community like yep yeah they're right they're right really wasn't about. You know, some people doesn't matter like what you, what you show them. If somebody just denies something that they liked, they're like, well, I'm just going to believe him. Now you can have a videotape of somebody like literally putting their hand in a cookie jar, taking the cookie out, eating it, charging with cookie theft at court, play the video. But then if the accused said, nah, it's not me. Ah, I don't know. I mean, it looks like me. Yeah, I get it, but no, I didn't do it. They can be the guy's fingerprints on the cookie jar

Bunch of other witnesses There's still maybe Going to be a jury member or two It's like Well I don't know I mean when he said He didn't do it He looked like he was

Telling the truth So not guilty September 16, 2016 The docudrama Snowden is released A movie produced By Oliver Stone Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Plain Snowden Renews more interest In Snowden February of 2017 NBC reports That Russia is considering Giving up Snowden, renews more interest in Snowden. February of 2017, NBC reports that Russia is considering giving up Snowden to win favor with newly elected President Trump. Not true. That was just a suggestion from former CIA director Michael Morell. Russian officials respond and announce that Snowden has been granted an extension until 2022. And although

their anniversary date is not known, Snowden and Lindsay get married in 2017. September 17, 2019, Snowden publishes his memoir, Permanent Record. The memoir details his disappointment with Obama's efforts to build up surveillance from the Bush administration. Also gives an account of the events leading up to June 2013. On release day, the Department of Justice files a civil lawsuit against Snowden, alleging that he violated the NDA he signed with the government, entitling the DOJ to profit from all sales. The suit names the publisher, Macmillan, asked the court to freeze assets related to the book so Snowden will not be able to profit from it. It doesn't seem like they pulled that asset freeze off, luckily. October of 2020, a federal court rules that the U.S. is entitled to more than $5.2 million from Edward Snowden's book royalties, though. But I don't think Snowden gives a fuck. That really only matters if they catch him. And if they do, he has, you know, bigger problems and

Owen royalty, royalty money. October 22nd, 2020 Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucharina announces that Snowden has been granted permanent residency in Russia. October 28th, 2020. So Snowden's wife, Lindsay tweets a pregnancy announcement. She writes a long time in the making. Our greatest collaboration is coming soon. December 25th, Christmas Day 2020, Lindsay tweets a family photo showing herself, Snowden, and their newborn son. She jokingly calls the baby Citizen Five. And with that, let's hop out of this Time Suck timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. Wow. So we covered a lot today.

That's a huge story. I still shared, you know, I still haven't shared my answer regarding a very important question. Was Edward Snowden a traitor or a patriot? Now, what do you think? Treason is defined as the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family. Was Snowden a whistleblower bringing awareness to what he believed was a wrongdoing or a traitor to his own country?

Or can you be both? So many famous whistleblowers, some we mentioned here like James Biddy, others we didn't have time for, went against the status quo, risked their careers, reputations, even their safety to do what they felt was right. But was doing this right, like in Snowden's case? I think it was. I'm on team Snowden. I do understand why the government will possibly never pardon him and why they will have to prosecute him if he's caught you know it would set a terrible precedent not to do so it would do grave damage to national security to let people get away with uh leaking classified information whenever they just you know think it's terrible even if it is terrible uh that being said i'm glad that he did what he did and i do think he was brave to do so he sacrificed a lot to do what he did and what he exposed is fucking terrifying i do understand that we need to employ surveillance abroad to help win military conflicts to keep our nation safe i get it i get it you have to fight dirty sometimes but i also firmly think that after letting all this sink in

that we should definitely draw a hard fucking line when it comes to surveillance of you know citizens especially on american soil who have not been accused of any crimes i mean will it stop violent acts from happening from time to time if you're just surveilling everybody? Yeah, for sure. But does that justify doing so? No, I don't think so. I don't think so.

I think it opens up the door to the possibility of some kind of 21st century Stalin to take over and control the population like no population has ever been fucking controlled before. I mean, maybe at first, at first, excuse me, like in a situation like this, the result, the arrest could be somewhat justified. Maybe people are putting cuffs for kiddie porn or

plotting a bomb or plotting to bomb some building or to shoot up a bunch of people. And then they're caught thanks to NSA agents snooping around on their phones, computers, you know, listening to their conversations in their homes. But then what if later, like the wrong person comes into power and now you're arrested for just like privately talking shit about the government for expressing dissent for just you know doing this fucking podcast like i'm doing right now well then welcome to 1984 right now we're in a dystopian nightmare where you either toe the line and salute the flag no matter what the people behind the flag are doing or you go to jail thrown in a work camp executed whatever now now it's some kind of

north korea shit so why the fuck are we risking becoming that in the supposed land of the free? In 2015, comedian John Oliver flew to Moscow to interview Snowden for HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And he asked Snowden, why did you do all this? And Snowden said, and I love this quote, the NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we've ever seen in history. Now, what they will argue is that they don't use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens. In some ways, that's true. But the real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them.

It's like, while I have a gun pointed at your head, I'm not going to pull the trigger. Trust me. Exactly, right? Don't worry. We're not going to use the tech we have developed and implemented to ruin your fucking life but now that it's out there someone else can you know what if the next person you know holding that gun uh you know pointed at your head does pull the

trigger so yeah i mean did what snowden did was it you know treasonous is he is he a traitor i don't think he's a traitor i think um you know there was other things we didn't get into as far as non-privacy kind of uh you know intel that was released um you know could he have done a better job of not releasing some of the things he released yeah yeah i think he could have been uh better at that but overall was what he did very eye-opening very important and very courageous yeah i think so i think more hero than traitor uh does snowden accomplish what he wanted by very eye-opening, very important, and very courageous. Yeah, I think so. I think more hero than traitor. Dissnote and accomplish what he wanted by bringing awareness to government surveillance of our private metadata. Well, let's look at some stats, some from 2013, some from 2019. In 2013, 58% of Americans believed the government was doing a poor job

of protecting privacy rights. Half of Americans were opposed to the government monitoring internet searches without a warrant, including searches by U.S. citizens. 62% of Americans were opposed to the government reading emails without a warrant. 71% opposed to the government listening to phone calls without a warrant. 42% of Americans opposed to government analysis of financial transactions processed by banks without a warrant. Finally, 60% of Americans believe that 10 years later by 2023, so next year, Americans would lose more freedoms than they gain. Now 79% of Americans are concerned about how much data companies collect about them and 64% with how much data the government collects. So there seems to be more concern now than there was back in 2013.

Could be due to Snowden. 7 out of 10 Americans now feel their information is less secure than it was six years ago. 72% of Americans believe almost all of what they do online and on their phones is tracked by major companies. But only 47% believe that activity is tracked by the government. Over 60% of Americans think they can't go through daily life without companies or the government tracking them. 78% of Americans say they don't go through daily life without companies or the government tracking them. 78% of Americans say they don't understand what the government does with their data. 81% believe the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to data collection. That's crazy. 81% believe the risk outweighs the benefit.

49% of Americans believe it's acceptable for the government to collect their data to prevent terrorism. 84% of Americans feel like they have no control over the data collected by the government to collect their data to prevent terrorism. 84% of Americans feel like they have no control over the data collected by the government. And finally, 63% of Americans have little to no understanding of data protection laws. So I guess maybe not as much change has been enacted as much as Snowden had hoped. It's the same frustrations continue.

Snowden's actions led to a national conversation about the ethics of surveillance, an investigation of the NSA, court cases about the NSA's programs, USA freedom act companies and individuals increasing their encryption as well as EU whistleblower and privacy protections. Sadly, overall though, despite more fear about government surveillance, uh, really nothing's changed. The U S government still collecting our data, uh, company still collecting our data, still giving that data to, the government i'm sure and how fucked is that oh man um i want to circle back to this question once more time about like you know snowden you know being a traitor should be punished for treason now i think like why isn't the bigger question like why aren't politicians and people who run agencies like the nsa you know people who make the decision to spy on innocent americans

why the fuck aren't they ever charged with treason i am way more worried about them than i am about run agencies like the NSA, you know, people who make the decision to spy on innocent Americans, why the fuck aren't they ever charged with treason? I'm way more worried about them than I am about Snowden. I mean, all of this pushes me further into libertarianism, less government. We need a strong military to protect us from other nations, right? For sure. I think we need less laws though, for us to be punished in this one, less justification for the government to be involved in our lives, to spy on us, to do other shady shit. Right? Don't kill. Don't beat the shit out of your partner.

Don't rape. Don't molest. Don't steal. Don't do the other basic, you know, common sense laws that have been around for a long time. Outside of the basics, I do think more and more like you're not my mom, Uncle Sam. Just fuck off. Like we need schools, health care, infrastructure, safeguards against completely unregulated capitalism so that we can try and avoid a small group of haves oppressing a huge group of have-nots. It gets worse all the time as I've talked about.

We don't need so much of what Snowden exposed. We don't need to sacrifice so much fucking freedom for the possibility of safety, not even the guarantee of it. You know, stay off my fucking lawn, Uncle Sam. Stay the fuck out of my house. Stay the fuck off my phone, computer, and more. At the end,

you know, hail Edward Snowden. Fuck the domestic surveillance programs he exposed. Live free or die. Time for today's top five takeaways. Time shock.

Top five takeaways. Number one, Edward Snowden was something of a child prodigy when it came to computers. Spent a lot of his childhood on the internet. Liked how it was a space for free discourse, open-mindedness, research. He would go to work for the U.S. intelligence community at the young age of 23 and eventually rise to get to the top of security clearance and become quickly disillusioned. Number two, holy shit, the NSA collects so much data, so much.

We'll never really know exactly how much data they collect and what kind. It's important for national security for us not to know, so our enemies don't know exactly what we're capable of and currently pursuing. But the Patriot Act following 9-11 severely expanded the NSA's powers to surveil not only those suspected of crimes, but us regular old citizens leading regular old lives. Alexa, Siri, please stop spying on me, you pieces of NSA

shit. Number three, Snowden met with three journalists, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewan Macaskill. His name never looks like it's, I should not say. After months of contact with them as an anonymous citizen for the hoops they had to jump through to meet privately and securely were like something of a spy movie, but very necessary for the seriously risky work.

They were all engaging in number four. How does Snowden smuggle secret files out of the NSA? He stuck them in his cheeks, SD cards, socks, Rubik's Cube over a period of months while working, you know, for an NSA subcontractor. Number five, new info. Edward Snowden once told the internet that he could last all night, like that kind of lasting all night. Just a random funny post.

He posted, my ex-girlfriend is the most amazing girl I've ever dated. She's one of those who even wanted it more than me sometimes and would kind of sadly pot my man totem. Okay. Like a cat after it is killed to pray. Some of it comes from natural than me. Sometimes. And would kind of sadly paw at my man totem. Okay. Like a cat. After it has killed the prey. Some of it comes from natural sex drive.

Yes. But the same girl took like six months. To get into bed the first time. A great deal of a successful. Successful. Uh. A great deal of a successful sexual relationship. Is taking the time to properly build up things.

And establish their comfort level. After the honeymoon phase. Things do slack off sometimes. But the more sex you have, the longer you should last. Look at these fucking tutorials he gives. And the better you should be for one another. Virginia Farm Boy is not shitting you. There have been times when I've been having sex marathons from sundown till sunrise. He adds, go to your nearest Krispy Kreme drive-thru, pick up one of the warm, fresh-off-the-line ones, and put it on your nightstand.

You have not lived until you've rolled over to Post Coital Krispy Kremes. That's what being an American is all about. Is that what being an American is all about? Maybe so. I mean, it sounds really nice. I'll have to try it. I do like a Krispy Kreme donut, and, you know, I love sex.

Lucky for Eddie Snowbro, Moscow has had a Krispy Kreme since 2013. Hail Lucifina. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Edward Snowden has been sucked. Another one, the complex one. Hopefully did an okay job. A lot of information to process.

Thanks to the Bad Magic team for help again in production. Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Joe Pacey for production today. Thanks to Bit Elixir for upkeep on the Time Suck app. To Art Warlock, Keith, Logan Keith. I wanted to call him Keith Logan randomly that time. Creating the merch at badmagicmerch.com

and for helping us run our socials. Thanks to Olivia Lee and Sophie Evans, both doing initial research this week. And thanks to the All Seen Eyes, moderating the Culticurious private Facebook page. Thanks to the Mod Squad for making sure Discord keeps running smooth. And thanks to everyone over at the TimeSuck Reddit thread, r slash TimeSuck.

I saw a fun little poll there the other day. Showbiz! Like Albert Fish is the most popular TimeSuck character. Next week on Time Suck, we dive back into the realm of true crime with some lesser known dirtbags. But just because they're lesser known doesn't mean their crimes were not heinous. But you know that now. I mean,

remember the Ripper crew? How many of you had heard of them before that episode? Fucking Satan's titty twisters. Between 1978 and 1980, Gerald and Charlene Gallego, who looked to all the world like a normal couple, killed 10 people in three different states, wreaking havoc across Northern California and the Nevada desert. Their crimes free would be dubbed the sex slave murders. As Gerald Gallego sexually assaulted his

victims, many of them young teenagers before disposing of their bodies in the wilderness. Charlene acted as both a lure and a driver, charming the girls to get in the back of the van for some pot and a good time before Gerald took over. For Charlene, these crimes would be her first. As an only child in an upper middle-class family, she had all the world's advantages, including two loving parents who gave her anything she wanted.

For Gerald, these crimes were merely the last on a laundry list of criminal exploits, going back to when he sexually abused a six-year-old girl when he was 13. By the time he met Charlene in 1977, he'd been arrested 23 times, exploits, going back to when he sexually abused a six-year-old girl when he was 13. By the time he met Charlene in 1977, he'd been arrested 23 times, served prison time after being convicted of armed robbery. And then with Charlene's help, he would graduate to murder. They wouldn't be caught until two years after their bloody spree began in 1980 when they abducted a young couple on their way back from a fraternity formal. A frat brother saw the license plate,

gave detectives their first real lead in the case that had stumped them for months. But then before police could make an arrest, the Gallegos disappeared. The FBI now got involved and the hunt was on. How did Gerald and Charlene get away with it for so long? How did they manage to convince Charlene's family to support her felon boyfriend slash husband? And what would happen to them after investigators caught up with them? All that and more next week on Time Suck. Right now, let's head over to this week's Time Sucker updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker updates. Gonna start off with someone with something cute and short to say.

Northern Sucker from the land of a shit ton of Rileys. Riley Short writes, Greetings, Master Sucker land of a shit ton of Riley's. Riley Short writes, Greetings, Master Sucker, from a small homestead in Alaska. I'm a longtime listener of the Time Suck podcast. My brother-in-law, also named Riley, introduced me, my uncle, and my dad to the suck, and we've been dedicated listeners ever since. Our favorite and most used quote is, and I hadn't thought of this in forever, it's chain of clock, motherfucker, from the Bruce Lee episode.

Anyways, just writing to end hoping for a shout out for my dad. Todd, aka the Toddfather. That is a great nickname. Just shattered his leg while cutting trees for our cabin. Excuse me, the tree snapped, flew full force at his shin and shattered his tibia plateau. He's currently propped up in the living room with exterior pins drilled in four different spots. Looks like some serial killer torture device. Needless to say, he'll be healing in bed

for at least the next three months and will surely be listening to the podcast to pass time. Thanks for all you do and the Bad Magic Production team do. Keep on sucking. Three out of five stars. Wouldn't change a thing. Before I go further, I did have a funny moment.

I had a guy come over and do some work in the yards the other day and he's a listener and it was just funny like in real time he was like hey man your day comes right and I was like yep and he's like oh man just love the podcast 3 out of 5 stars and then just like walked away it's a pretty fun little moment I love the 3 out of 5 stars thing he's just never going away

Riley thanks for bringing the suck up to a remote part of Alaska I hope you're enjoying your current small slice of sunshine and warmth. The Todd father. What kind of misery-like situation do they have you in up there? Is your son playing the part of Kathy Bates in that horror show? And why don't you have fucking stronger shins?

God, when you heal, start doing some shin presses or shin squats or maybe kicking a post like that dude did in Bloodsport, I think. Hope the Rileys take good care of you Sleep with one eye open You're vulnerable right now Maybe hold a loaded gun, a lot And wink at the people around you Just let them know, yeah you're fucking, you know, lamed up But they're not going to take advantage of you

Or maybe not, I don't know what kind of painkillers you're on right now You might not be very stable Now for a sweet husband sack Showing some love and appreciation Some. Now for a sweet husband sack, showing some love and appreciation, some support for his also sweet wife sack. Andy writes, greetings and salutations, worshipful suck master, generous and wise God of all things suck worthy. I write to you today in hopes that you may cast your suckly light upon my dear pregnant wife. We've been loyal space lizards for a long time, and she was the one responsible for bringing the suck into our home.

She's a tailor focusing mainly on custom short sleeve button up shirts for men and women working out of a studio set up in our home. I heard one day over the rumble of her sewing machine, the unmistakable sound of Jim Jones

addressing his followers in a tape released by the FBI that you played on the Jonestown episode. I ran into the room, asked her about the podcast. Turns out it was yours. I've joined her in the land of the suck. And we both feel the caress of Lucifina Bojangles

from now until the end of time together. As I said earlier, I'm writing you today in hopes that you may simply give her a shout out on the show. She's currently pregnant, due in mid-August to bring forth our first child in this world, and she still works so hard to build her tailoring business. I believe if you held one of her shirts in your hand, you would see firsthand that she is a very skilled tailor and that her items are very well-made. As you know, it is difficult to build a business and sell yourself. It takes time and hard work in the advertising area alone, let alone all the time needed to make all of her most excellent garments. I'm not writing you to try and get a plug, just maybe say something awesome for Christina, aka Mrs. Drizzle. She loves to suck, and it would mean so much to her

at a time when things are so chaotic with her business and the baby coming and everything that is already happening in general. I hope all is well, and I will be in your debt if you could. We love seeing you in Cincinnati about a year ago. Look forward to the next time we can attend some sort of live event. May the suck lords always bless

you in the highest. Praise Bojangles, and hail to mighty Lucifina. Your minion and follower, Andy, a.k.a. Drizzle. Well, Mr. Drizzle, what a sweet, sweet man you are. Thanks for writing in, you beautiful bastard. Christina, in another email that Andy sent, he clarified that he would love any business or parenting advice I could give you. I don't know if you need it.

I don't know the Taylor business, but I do know that for small businesses, you know, like ours here is as well. Nothing beats word of mouth, right? Like encourage your clients to talk about you. Offer them a discount. If they recommend someone who becomes a client, you know, or if you're like, you know, putting these shirts in stores,

you know, maybe do something special, show up at the stores and like try and get people talking or, or, you know, uh, get some kind of like special sale to get people talking. Maybe if, uh, someone, you know, buys one of the things or gets a shirt repaired by you, uh, if they recommend someone who also uses your business, they get, you know, a certain discount, uh, give business cards away to help them spread your, your name and talent around. Also maybe make a local contacts, you know know, local retail stores, dry cleaners, give them some free work in exchange

for doing some promotion for you. Maybe do some kind of cross promotion with them, put a little display on their counter. You promote them, they promote you. You know, maybe put a one page slick looking document on the business boards like they still have it, like little tack boards, local coffee shops, other businesses, run a sale in the local paper, perhaps.

I mean, it sounds like you have the skills. It's like you're very skilled. Now you just got to like let people know, right? Get on social media, of course, but I know that you're probably already doing that. You know, and tell your husband to mention your business name next time he messages. I know you're in the Cincinnati area and your name is Christina Tempalski. Oh my God. It's his Polish name.

Tempalski. There we go. Tempalski. T- God. It's his Polish name. Tempalski. There we go. Tempalski. T-E-M-P-A-L-S-K-I. So where are you located? How do clients get ahold of you? I added your message last minute or I would have asked him.

I usually curate these right before I record. As far as parenting advice, the best gift you can give your kids, I think is your time and attention, right? Focus time with them. Nothing beats that. Play with them. Build memories with them. Do activities with right? Focus time with them. Nothing beats that. Play with them. Build memories with them.

Do activities with them. Start traditions with them, but just be with them and be kind to them, even when you're mad at them. Make yourself such a big part of their world. Hail Nimrod, you two. All right, now Golden Sack, Troy Golden, has some pop culture to share with us

that relates to the mysterious disappearances suck from two weeks ago. He writes, Dan the the man go fuck yourself. I'm just playing you a whipple deal and son of a bitch in regards to episode three Oh three mysterious disappearances. I wanted to tell you about the meaning behind fastballs, 1998 hit single, the way almost everyone knows this song. Listen to it. I've listened to it probably literally hundreds of times. And I love it.

This song is based on the true story of Lila and Raymond Howard, an elderly couple from Salado, Texas, who drove to the annual Pioneer Day Festival 10 miles away in Temple and never returned. She had Alzheimer's and was recovering from brain surgery. Oh, no, she had Alzheimer's. He was recovering from brain surgery.

Hope you found it interesting like I did. Wishing I would be Cummins Law by now so I could have a funny story. So I guess three out of five stars. Wouldn't change a thing. Loyal meet Zach Troy. Well, thank you, Troy. Yeah, again, I have listened to that song so many times. Never really thought what it was about.

But yeah, it makes sense what you're saying, right? They made up their minds and they started packing. It is such a recognizable melody. They left before the sun came up that day And then an exit to eternal summer Slacking It is crazy I'm just kissing your head immediately

Where were they going without ever knowing the way That's fucking sad actually But a beautiful dream about you know How they went out Okay Alright thanks Troy And um Not gonna lie to you guys Gonna end on a sad one But a beautiful dream about, you know, how they went out. Okay. All right. Thanks, Troy. And I'm not going to lie to you guys.

Going to end on a sad one. Hug the ones you love, Meat Sacks. A wonderful sack who needs a lot of extra love right now. David Burton had the courage to write in during a very tough time. David writes, I've been listening for such a long time and have never emailed you guys until now. I was wondering if Dan could do me a huge favor. I'm 33, just had a baby April 4th, 2022, but unfortunately lost my wife and baby's mother on June 13th. She was only 28, lost her due to blood clots from the C-section surgery. If you could please shout out to my late wife, Kendall Burton and tell her I love her so much. I would absolutely break down if I heard that.

If not, I won't change my views on the show. I love you all so much. Keep up your hard work. Whew, damn, David. So sorry for your loss, man. I hope that baby is healthy and the baby is lucky to have a sweet man for a father. And rest in peace, Kendall Burton.

May Nimrod reveal all the secrets of the universe that confound and divide us down here to you. I hope your soul is on an awesome adventure right now. Too beautiful and fantastical for our little meat sack minds to comprehend. I hope you're out there amongst the stars, a warm beam of light that will never hurt or fear or hate, just pure bliss, just warmth and good.

And I hope that light shines down from time to time on David and your baby. So stay strong, David, that baby needs you. And, uh, lucky to have you as a listener, man. All right. I love you guys. That's it for the updates. Next time, suckers. I needed that. We all did. Another bad magic productions podcast is done. Please do not pry into people's personal digital information this week and read text messages and emails and look at pics. They're none of your goddamn

business. Put your fucking headphones on, Uncle Sam. Keep your eyes peeled for foreign threats. Just keep on sucking, you slippery son of a bitch. Bad Magic Productions What could the NSA be looking at that I have? Look through some albums.

Keep private. Oh. Okay, that would be bad.'ll be bad that's uh i don't remember being that flexible that all right that's not that's not flattering uh to put another reminder my i cal i cal do some uh do some waxing uh missing some spots down low uh that that would, that would be, that would be hard to explain. That would be hard to explain. Uh, especially if just the one picture was released out of context. Why I'm wearing that outfit. Yeah, this is scary. This is scary stuff. they already have it so I guess I'll just hold on to all this weird shit be careful out there please don't be listening right now I'm so scared