← The Rest Is Classified
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- [00:01]
David
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply. I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman and child on earth who ever dialed a phone or touched a computer.
- [00:47]
Gordon
Ugh.
- [00:48]
David
Alright, well, that was Edward Snowden, also from his memoir, Permanent Record. And we're back with episode two of the Edward Snowden Journey. And despite the fact that I think that line, Gordon, that I just read, that you just made me read, which is actually the better way to say it, is completely fabricated. Deadly sin number one, the Ned Wood Snowden. We're gonna talk a little bit today about really Snowden's journey to getting to a point where he is sitting on top of a trove of massive secrets.
- [01:20]
Gordon
Absolutely. So last time we looked at Edward Snowden, the early years, the young Snowden. The young Snowden, a kind of guy who grew up with computers and the Internet, loved them. A libertarian who goes to work as a contractor, CIA, works in the CIA elsewhere, clearly chafes at some of the restrictions on him, has some difficulties at work, also has an ideology. So one of the kind of key questions which I think we'll come back to is, you know, what explains his journey? How far is it about, you know, about grievance and how far is it about ideology? And we left him in Japan working as a contractor for NSA and having seen some of the really secret programs in there which suggested the NSA was collecting data about American phone records. So after that he does that for a couple of years. Then age 28, 2011, he goes back to the US and he takes another kind of tech role. He's a liaison between the company Dell and the CIA, coming up with cloud computing solutions. So again, another really techy job.
- [02:20]
David
Also in this period I will note that Dell had tried to move him in about September of 2010 to a position where he would support IT systems at CIA. But, but, and for those watching, this is a scattered castles reference. So mark it down. Because of his drog mark, his sort of black mark in scattered castles, the system that manages clearances. Dell couldn't put him in that position. They had to find another spot for him that didn't require the same level of security clearance. And so he ends up kind of back in another role and then eventually in Hawaii.
- [02:57]
Gordon
Yeah, it's quite a place to end up because by age 29, 2012, he's working again as a contractor, but for NSA. So effectively inside the NSA in Hawaii. Nice place to work. He's living with his girlfriend then, Lindsay Mills, she's a photographer and a dancer. Now he's this the place he works. Sounds amazing. He's working deep underground in a kind of tunneled out facility beneath a pineapple field. And this In World War II was an underground aircraft factory designed to be protected from bombing. And I love the way he describes it as being like a Bond villain layer but with crappier lighting.
- [03:35]
David
That's good. I'm gonna steal that for a novel.
- [03:37]
Gordon
Yeah, take it. So here he is, you know, again, within the kind of heart, the secret state fair to say he's remembered by colleagues as being quite eccentric. They remember him as a kind of pale vampiric figure wearing a hoodie and a particular hoodie which actually had a parody of the NSA logo on it. So it had an eagle, which is the kind of normal symbol, but wearing headphones and kind of spying on the world.
- [04:00]
David
Talons across the world.
- [04:01]
Gordon
Talons across the world. And he kept a copy of the Constitution on his desk. So you do get a picture of a man who is perhaps at odds with his institution, which is kind of interesting, isn't it?
- [04:11]
David
Well, and he's also remembered in this period for not being able to show up to work on time, which I'll just mention in my fact, we've all been there, right? And apparently because he's playing video games so late at night, you know, and again, it's this kind of thread of this guy is smart, actually likable in, in many respects he's introverted, but, you know, he's got a long term girlfriend, he's got relationships with people, but he's not really able to kind of function in a normal work environment. And he's bored.
- [04:41]
Gordon
And he's bored. I mean, I think in some ways he's too clever for many of the roles he takes. Ugh. You know, I think that's true. I think, you know, that's the picture I get a bit of him.
- [04:50]
David
There is another feature here which is colleagues from the sort of pineapple bunker. Remember that Snowden was, you know, sort of very, you know, he would come out and say that, okay, well, things like the Stop Online Piracy act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. These are going to lead to online censorship, which is a theme of his. He's very concerned about that. But then he'll admit to having read neither Bill and not understanding really what's in them. So I do think you also see these glimmers in this period and even earlier of somebody who is extremely certain about his beliefs, does have ideological beliefs. Ideological beliefs. He's not just a mercenary, but he jumps to conclusions very quickly, gets to very certain conclusions very quickly about those beliefs.
- [05:35]
Gordon
Yeah, I think that's right. Now, it is at this point in 2012 that he's going to turn into someone who is not just kind of aggrieved and chafing against authority, but who is actually going to collect and steal a ton of secrets. His narrative of it is that he'd seen what the secret State was up to. He'd seen the kind of power of the surveillance state. He been able to look at these documents and he wants to stop it. So I think this is the kind of interesting point where, you know, how far is this being like a whistleblower and how far is this being someone who is trying to kind of damage the state or stealing documents, you know, two quite different interpretations of the same actions. He says he's kind of chasing, you know, look, going down rabbit holes in his spare time, trying to kind of understand what the Secret State is up to. And he wants to stop that because he believes it's against the Constitution in terms of, you know, the collection of Americans data, and he believes it's unethical and against his ideas of the free Internet. Do you buy that, David? I'm guessing you don't.
- [06:44]
David
Well, no, I don't buy it. There's a very kind of critical period in the middle of 2012 that's going to be central to this.
- [06:51]
Gordon
But.
- [06:51]
David
But up until that point, I mean, it is probably worth us talking a little bit about that kind of access he had because he does end up in a unique position to take a massive trove of documents. And he's kind of pulling together it as, you know, because again, in Hawaii, I mean, I think he'll say he had like 30 minutes of work to do. A day of actual work, right?
- [07:14]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [07:14]
David
So he starts kind of pulling together what is this program called Heartbeat, right. Where he's essentially trying to create a centralized repository for a lot of the documents.
- [07:24]
Gordon
He's going to add a kind of reading list. Yeah, a reading list of documents. And it's quite interesting because he does this kind of semi openly at this point he's kind of telling people he's creating this and he's got access to all the systems because he's a systems engineer. And in a sense those people who keep the systems running by definition have, you know, privileged high level access to all the files because they need to in order to be able to manage them. So it does mean he is able to do stuff which maybe a normal spy wouldn't have been able to do in terms of collect and collate all the data that's here. And so, yeah, he starts to collect this material. It's an interesting point to look at here is, is he a whistleblower? Because I think that is how he is framed very much by his supporters, that he is someone who has seen the bad stuff in the secret state and he wants to expose it and therefore he's a whistleblower. Being a whistleblower is obviously something which also gets you certain kinds of protections. You know, it's very different from being a, if you like a spy or someone who's stealing stuff or out to damage an institution.
- [08:20]
David
Well, if you enter Edward Snowden on Google, his tagline will say NSA whistleblower. And that's how he pops up. But I think this is deadly sin number two. Okay, so this is impure motives. Okay? This is critical to understand because lost in all of the memoirs, a lot of the very positive reception that Snowden's leaks received is a very critical piece of the timeline, which is you get to June of 2012, he's in Hawaii and Snowden has a massive fight with his supervisors over what else? A software patch that gets deployed, it fails, right? And there is a fight on his team between supervisors over why this happened. And essentially what Snowden does, which is similar to what he did in his very kind of first months at CIA, is in this back and forth fight. He sends a note like three or four levels above the chain to a senior NSA employee at Fort Meade, right? And keep in mind, Snowden is a contractor working for Dell. So rightly or wrongly, he's not a blue badge NSA employee working at the fort, right? So he's elevated this issue massively. This obviously doesn't go well for him. There's a note that comes back, he gets a quick rebuke from Washington. His behavior is, quote, totally unacceptable, unacceptable in all caps. And so you can only imagine what's going on in the cubicle farm out under that, you know, pineapple where he's working. And it is two weeks after this June 2012 incident that he starts these bulk downloads. So I think the recipe of sort of the sauce here of Snowden's decision I think really matters a lot. And my view is that it's kind of three things, right. Number one, you have a guy who has this incredible certainty in his own beliefs, his own kind of worldview that feels like he's been put down by the system, wronged by the system, that he should be way ahead of where he is. He should probably have his boss's job or his boss's boss's job. And so I think you do at the base level have this kind of revengers tale that has the ideology, this kind of, you know, free Internet privacy thing layered on top. But in, in my view, the facts, the chronology of sort of when he starts down this journey show it to be very much motivated by revenge.
- [11:07]
Gordon
Yeah, it is a matter of interpretation, but I think ideology does play a role. You are right that there may be triggers to do with what happens in the workplace. And I think he's kind of, his views are dismissed by a supervisor because he's a contractor. Actually. He's kind of told, you know, come back as staff if you want to talk to me like that. And he's kind of flamed out in front of colleagues. I accept that there's, there is grievance.
- [11:27]
David
There and that grievance really powerful in the, in the espionage business too.
- [11:32]
Gordon
But I also think there's ideology there. He's decided he wants to do something and he's going to start collecting files and we'll look in a minute at how he does that. He doesn't go through, if you like, whistleblower channels because there are supposed to be channels. Now some people have said, oh, well, you know, there's no evidence he did that and he should have done that. I think that's half true. But I also, in Snowden's defense will say, you know, the evidence was people who had tried to blow the whistle about some of these programs had been shut up. I mean, you know, there were cases of people like Thomas Drake who'd been in the NSA and had talked about some of this attitude and he'd basically tried to blow the whistle internally. It had failed. He'd gone out and gone to a newspaper and told them about it and then he got arrested. And so it is true that Snowden doesn't go through, if you like the formal channels to go, put it, put your hand up and go. I think these programs are wrong. But I don't think he feels he would have been listened to or that there was that option to actually have any difference or make any difference about these programmes by going through the formal channels.
- [12:24]
David
Well, I think that's my third deadly sin, Gordon, is that he doesn't avail himself of these channels. And I agree with you that you could look at Thomas Drake, you could look at these case studies of NSA folks who had tried and it had not gone well for them. But what I find interesting is that Snowden is perfectly willing, throughout his career, to go to the ig, the Inspector General.
- [12:48]
Gordon
Inspector General of the site. Yeah.
- [12:50]
David
To go to superiors with all manner of grievances, complaints, issues that have been detrimental to his career.
- [12:59]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [13:00]
David
And so, number one, I think, given the nature of the information that he's going to leak, there are protections for this. There's. There's a 1998 whistleblower protection act that would have covered contractors. There are DoD regs that cover this. He could have gone to any number of House intel or Senate Intel Committee staffs with specific documents and brought them to their attention. Right. But he doesn't. For someone who has shown himself willing to go to those authorities in the past, I think there's a level of irresponsibility. Right. With this material. This is material that is funded by the US taxpayer. So to not go through some of those channels, I just think, man, you know, that's an irresponsible decision.
- [13:42]
Gordon
And I think, you know, it gets to a question of motive, which maybe we'll come back to when we get to the very end of the series, which is, what is he seeking to do at this point? Is he trying to. To place greater oversight on these programs and have a debate about them? Is he trying to stop the surveillance and the programs? Is he trying to damage the NSA and the intelligence community? And that's a kind of big question. It's quite hard because, you know, the answer is in Edward Snowden's head, and I'm not sure even he would be able to verbalize it even if he was here and be honest about it. But those are the different kind of levels of what's going on. But what is, I think, significant is that rather than take just a few documents, and I think this is one of the big questions I have, is if he was really aggrieved by, say, Stellar Wynne, the program collecting American phone records, and a few other surveillance programs, he could have just picked 10 files to take. But what he's about to do and what we're going to see is he's not going to take 10 parts. He's going to take almost everything he can lay his hands on about what the NSA and its allies do. And I think that to me is one of the question marks is why does he take so much to expose what they do rather than, if you like, the kind of narrow things where he's got an issue about the kind of, and I think a legitimate issue about the constitutionality or the ethics of it.
- [14:53]
David
Well, and I'll just again add to my deadly sin number one on Edward Snowden's track record of fabrication, because one of the documents that he's going to take, or one set of documents he's going to take in this 2012 period, mid-2012, he's going to steal the test. And the answer key for a job inside a group at NSA called TAO Tailored Access Operations, which is essentially in that ERA is the NSA's elite hackers. Elite hackers, the guys and girls who go out and try to access really hard to access networks of our foreign adversaries. And Snowden applies for this job, but he's already, I mean, this is, this is where you, I think you do get this kind of jumbled set of motives for why he's taking all these documents because I guess he could have chanced upon this and then thought, well, I've got the test, I might as well apply. But he's also does have some very mercenary potential motives for some of these document thefts. But he takes this test and of course passes it with flying colors. Right, because he's got all the answers. And then he gets offered. And again, I think this is a great insight into his personality because he gets offered a job working inside TAO, which by the way, is a premier inside NSA, is a premier job to have, gets offered a GS12 government scale 12 role inside TAO and turns it down because he felt he should have been offered a GS15 salary. And this again, it's absolutely fascinating because you just let's, you know, get into some of these facts around how this guy behaved and who he is. He's 29 at that point. And I mean, that's a little bit different, kind of depending on the agency, but it would probably have taken a really competent. No, he joins when he's 23, he gets into the secret world. It would have taken 14, 15 years, something like that, for a competent person to rise to the level of GS15. Yeah, he's been in for six and he's already thinking, well, I should have my 15. Anyway, he turns down the Tao role and stays in Hawaii. But there's some really interesting aspects to this guy's character that I think get left out of the geography.
- [17:05]
Gordon
One interesting thing though about not taking that job though is that, you know, people have said, was he working for the Russians or the Chinese? I don't think that's true. In fact, I'm sure that's not true. And one of the reasons, and we'll come back to a few other reasons, but one of the reasons here is that if you were a spy, you'd go take the job at TAO even for a lower pay because that gets you access to the really hardcore secrets. So it is interesting, but it is does suggest you're back to either grievance or ideology. But that's his motivation not being a spy. So here he is, he's angry. He's angry at the system, angry at his employers it looks like, and he's going to do something about it. After the break, we'll come back and look at how he takes those secrets and what he does with them.
- [17:45]
David
From Wondery I'm Raza Jaffrey and this.
- [17:49]
Gordon
Is the Spy who this series we.
- [17:52]
David
Open the file on Amon Dean, the spy who betrayed bin Laden in 1994. 16 year old Ayman wants to die. He heads to war torn Bosnia to join the Mujahideen and save his fellow Muslims. He hopes to become a martyr so that he can be reunited with his dead parents in paradise. Instead, he's about to be confronted by a cruel and bloody reality. A reality that'll lead him to take turn his back on terrorism and become the West's top spy inside Al Qaeda. Follow the spy who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts or you can binge the full season of the Spy who Betrayed Bin Laden early and ad free with Wondery plus. All right, well, welcome back. We are with Edward Snowden. He is bunkered under a pineapple field in Hawaii with headphones on. Probably looking quite vampiric after a night of playing video games and arriving late to work. Edward Snowden has now moved in his sort of ongoing odyssey through the United States secret state. He has moved and he is now an analyst working for another contractor. Right, Booz Allen Hamilton, still in Hawaii. Yeah, still in Hawaii, still working under contract for nsa, but at this other contractor, Booz Allen and it is 2012, he has started these kind of bulk downloads off of his computer and out of these internal databases at nsa. And despite his sort of sunlight deprived looks, Edward Snowden has a tremendous amount of access inside this world and is starting to really harvest it.
- [19:46]
Gordon
Yeah. I mean, he's working as something called an infrastructure analyst at Booz Allen. Only 120k. 120,000 seems like quite a lot of money for me, but maybe that's the contractor world in the US Intelligence community. There we go. But he says the key thing here is he had access to something called X Key Score, which is one of the systems used to search through all the different streams of data that NSA collects. And, you know, as we'll kind of explore, I think in, you know, as we go through the series, there are huge amounts of streams of different ways in which NSA was able to grab different types of data and different types of record and electronic communications. And X Key School was the kind of search tool, if you like, to kind of put an email address in that and see what you could bring.
- [20:27]
David
Up when I suppose, you know, that wonderful quote you made me read at the beginning of this episode, Gordon, about Snowden having access to every communication on planet Earth. It's total garbage. Right. I mean, it's not true. But I think his access to like a sort of a search like X Key Score, a tool like that, gave him, you know, I think in his own kind of serial fabricator mind, the willingness to say that because he does have access. It's true. Right. He has access to a tremendous amount of information. Yeah.
- [20:57]
Gordon
And I think if you or I or our audience were sitting at X keyscore, I think we'd be astonished at the kind of, you know, what you could pull up if you went into it. So I think there is a lot, you know, let's not, you know, the exact who you, you know, whether you could wiretap the President, I don't know. But the idea that there's a lot of data there that you could use, I think that's true.
- [21:14]
David
Well, I've seen that the PowerPoint documents that have leaked, the complexity makes me wonder if I would be able to operate XT Score, because I think I would stare befuddled at the screen for a while without being able to use it. And Snowden even, I mean, and we'll, I'm sure, come to this a little bit later, he did claim to have wiretapped a bunch of Congress people and Supreme Court judges.
- [21:38]
Gordon
Yeah. And it's not entirely clear to me what that means.
- [21:41]
David
We'll come to that. Deadly sin number one. It's a theme, Gordon, theme through the series.
- [21:47]
Gordon
But here's the thing. He's seeing all this stuff. He's In a job where he's got access, he's decided he wants to blow the whistle or cause damage, however we want to put it. That's his view. So he's decided he's going to download this material. And it's fascinating how, how he does it. So he starts to copy the files that he has access to from his reading list system, which is called Heartbeat. And what's interesting is he transfers it onto old legacy PCs, so really old computers left in the office. So these are not Internet connected in a way you'd normally expect. So again, that just stops the trail being clear about what he's doing and stops leaving a digital trail to it. He then takes the material and transferred it onto tiny SD cards. It's really interesting. He doesn't want to use thumb drives, you know, kind of USB flash drives. He wants to use tiny SD cards. Cards, because one of the reasons is you can smuggle them out much more easily. He can put them in a sock. They're not going to set off metal detectors because they're so small. I mean, at one point, he hides one of the cards in his cheek. You know, they're small enough, you put it his cheek. So if someone stops him or asks him something, he could just swallow it. The problem is it's very slow transferring this anytime. They're pretty slow, but on probably old computers and old SD cards. So he spends hours overnight on the night shift kind of copying and compressing the files so that you can fit them onto the SD cards. And it sounds like it is literally like those old movies where the spy is trying to steal something. It's like in the original Mission Impossible film with Tom Cruise, where you're seeing the bar move across the screen, like 81%, 82% slowly moving across the screen as he's trying to move those files around. That's the process initially for stealing them. And then he also has got this thing about Rubik's Cubes. Yeah. And this is, I guess, the thing he loves doing.
- [23:25]
David
I find this entirely unsurprising, by the way.
- [23:28]
Gordon
It is a bit of a hacker trope, I think, the Rubik's Cube. And he's definitely got it. And so he starts kind of carrying them around the office. And it's quite useful to do that every day because people get used to him carrying them, and they know him as the Rubik Cube guy. And then what he does is he kind of peels off the square on the Rubik's Cube and he hides the SD cards underneath. So that he can just carry them past the armed guards who are there at the door. Because there's a fair bit of security there. There's, you know, there's armed guards. There's, you know, you've got to scan your badges. There's, you know, those kind of airlocked security doors you got to swipe through. But he's able to get this data out. I guess he understands the system. That's the point.
- [24:04]
David
I think most, maybe outsiders who are kind of looking at intelligence community buildings or sites through the lens of Hollywood would probably be surprised to know that there are basically no checks.
- [24:16]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [24:17]
David
Once you're in the system. Right. Once you're kind of inside, you're cleared.
- [24:20]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [24:21]
David
Obviously, if you were carrying a garbage bag of documents out.
- [24:23]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [24:24]
David
Someone might stop him. But if you're carrying an NSD card or if you have, you know, 30 pages of documents or something in a briefcase or a bag, no one's checking stuff, you could just walk out, you know, and it actually, I mean, I remember every day leaving CIA, kind of going through this process and it was a little stressful, actually, of trying to check all of my bags and stuff to make sure that I wasn't carrying anything out on accident.
- [24:53]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [24:53]
David
That was highly classified and that. That kind of thing happened all the time. I had friends who. And analysts actually tend to sweat this more than the. Than the case officers because the case officers are out there in the world, you know, recruiting people and kind of dealing with classified stuff. Outside of a scif, you know, secure apartment and information facility or vaults. I had a friend who would walk out, and he walked out one time with. With a document he shouldn't have.
- [25:18]
Gordon
Yeah.
- [25:18]
David
He was about to have a heart attack.
- [25:19]
Gordon
Yeah. You know, I mean, people.
- [25:20]
David
The point is, it's easy.
- [25:21]
Gordon
People in Britain have done it. They've left them on trains and, you know, made mistakes about it. He takes them home and then he transfers them onto a kind of large storage device and encrypts them. He puts a hood over his head in case there's a camera in his house. You know, classic spy stuff. Now, what's so interesting is it's not entirely clear how many documents he's able to take, but some accounts are up to 1.5 million. I mean, there are different accounts and there's the smaller figures, but it's astonishing how much. And I guess this is also the reality of the digital world because 50 years ago or 30 years ago, these documents would have been on paper basically, rather than electronic. You were not going to carry 1.5 million documents out of a secret facility and then hide them in your room at home, whereas he can do it and stick them on a hard drive. And that has changed, you know, intelligence. It's changed security. It's changed what people call the insider threat. It's changed what you can do with spying and stealing secrets. Now, even though Edward Soddens, you know, as we said, is not a spy because of the ability to kind of collect large amounts of information in a tiny place.
- [26:22]
David
Well, and you've just teed up my fourth deadly sin of Edward Snowden Gordon, which is completely indiscriminate leaking, right? So 1.5 million documents are what he takes. The vast majority, of course, unrelated to any of the domestic kind of surveillance programs that so angered him. How high, Gordon, do you think those documents would reach into the sky if they were stacked?
- [26:49]
Gordon
I don't know. But you're going to tell me.
- [26:51]
David
I am going to tell you to the moon. I'm going to tell you in kilometers.
- [26:55]
Gordon
Okay, go for it.
- [26:55]
David
So measure that, you will understand, five kilometers high.
- [26:59]
Gordon
Okay.
- [26:59]
David
If you stack those up, okay, He's a system administrator, so he's got access to massive databases. Kind of read, write, delete, access, right? So he can see all this stuff. So the scraping tools that he uses to do these downloads are more or less completely indiscriminate. Now, he does do some specific searches, right? But he's scraping through these databases. He has no idea what's even on these. And there's an interesting kind of techie reason for some of this, which is that when senior NSA officials would come from around the world, come from Fort Meade, and would log onto computers out at Hawaii, essentially their hard drive, what was on their system, really their user profile, rather, in D.C. at Fort Meade, would replicate out in Hawaii. And so a lot of the flashier, sexier PowerPoints that end up getting leaked initially are because senior NSA policy people had come out not to meet with Snowden, right. But for other meetings, and their files have been downloaded. His files are downloaded there, and he pulls them, okay, unknowingly, in many cases, off of these databases. So totally indiscriminate.
- [28:11]
Gordon
Yeah. Your point about indiscriminate is taking to what he takes. But here's the interesting thing. The question is, what is he going to do with them? Okay, that is the big question for him. He is not indiscriminate in what he wants to do with them. And I think this is important because one option for him, if he'd simply wanted to do as much damage as possible. If that had been his motivation, he could have self published onto the Internet these files.
- [28:34]
David
That's true.
- [28:35]
Gordon
And you know, that is if you like the WikiLeaks option. And we should say WikiLeaks. Julian Assange had really just emerged in, I think 2010, I mean, a few years before, but particularly at that time there'd been this huge leak of diplomatic cables which were kind of State Department cables, which WikiLeaks had got hold of, and they just put them out on the Internet. And the WikiLeaks Julian Assange attitude was information must be free, you know, doesn't matter, classification, doesn't matter. Risk, just put it all out there, you know, that's what it's for. Now at this point, if Snowden had been seeking maximum damage, he could have given them to WikiLeaks or he could have put themself onto the Internet. And he was capable of doing that. And he does not want to do that. So I think that, you know, goes back to this point where the complexity of his motives, it's not as simple as just wanting to do damage. He says he wants people who can, if you like, work through the documents, validate them, explain them and publicize them. That's what he wants to do rather than just take indiscriminately and publish them.
- [29:34]
David
And I do agree with that, and I'm grateful that Edward Snowden did not go the WikiLeaks route. It also bears mentioning that if he had gone the WikiLeaks route and just pushed them out, he would have given Assange and his organization or something like it, the credit. I think at his core, Edward Snowden, good, bad and ugly, is a narcissist. It would have been almost unthinkable for him to just push this stuff out there and not be the face of it. It's actually more strategic for someone who wants to be the face of this thing and to kind of ride this, to have journalists or somebody else writing stories that you can sort of catapult yourself.
- [30:16]
Gordon
Yeah. And it is also true that I think working through journalists, he thinks will give him a bit more protection in a sense, because you can go through kind of First Amendment and the freedom of the press and that that will give him a bit of institutional protection, if you like, as he seeks to kind of expose what he sees as the surveillance state. So certainly that is a decision that he's kind of consciously taken, that this is the best route to try and get this information out there. So here he is, he's decided he wants to reach out for journalists. But how, I mean, how do you do that without being spotted? So he sets up a series of anonymous or at least pseudonymous email accounts to try and contact people using kind of particularly interesting encrypted email services. Encrypted. So it's hard to trace, you know, who owns the account. And actually the NSA and FBI will try and trace that eventually and they go through lots of efforts to do that. It's interesting, he comes up with names for these accounts. Cincinnatus, a Roman who voluntarily relinquished power.
- [31:16]
David
Tell me you're a narcissist without telling me you're a narcissist.
- [31:19]
Gordon
And he uses another one, okay, Virax Truth Teller. He's coming up with these email accounts which he's going to use to reach out to journalists to say, I've got this stuff for you. Now he's worried about using the Internet and being traced, obviously, because he knows, he knows a fair bit about what can be done. So he used something called war driving around Hawaii. It's really interesting. So war driving is basically where you drive a car around with your antenna looking for WI fi and hotspots and Internet access that you can just kind of jump onto. So it's someone else's, you know, kind of WI fi or network that you can connect to and then use so that you can use that to send your email and then move on. And then obviously if someone comes to try and trace which IP address or where the email passed through in terms of the network, it'll just be some, you know, cafe or something like that. So, you know, he drives around doing this kind of war driving thing, trying to send these emails to check whether he's it's been replied to on this special account. He then has to go back and find another network. So it's not an easy process but, but this is the moment where he thinks, I've got something for the journalists. They're bound to want to listen and to hear what I've got to say because he's sitting on a stack of 1.5 million top secret documents.
- [32:27]
David
He has a 5 kilometer high stack, 3 miles for our American listeners of documents, 1.5 million documents, and he's going to try to give them to journalists. And so I guess, I mean the question here is, well, who is he going to reach out to, which journalist is he going to try and who's really going to help him tell this story? I think as he sees it this fantastic story, this lewd story about the surveillance state, NSA spying on Americans. And it's all going to lead into an absolutely insane encounter and really a chase, I think, in a most unusual place.
- [33:04]
Gordon
That's right. And it's going to lead to what was the biggest story of the year in news terms back in 2013. Join us next week for that. But if you join the Declassified Club, you can hear the whole series right now. Our first bonus, where David and I answer the questions you've sent in, will be out this Friday. But in the weeks to come, our bonuses will include interviews with former CIA chiefs, the former head of MI5, and other people from the spy world. So to join, just sign up@therealDisclassified.com and take advantage of our launch discount.
- [33:37]
David
And we may also finally give me an opportunity, Gordon, to watch War Games. Right. And discuss it with you. Thus completing my delayed entry into American manhood. So thank you for listening and we will see you next time.
- [33:50]
Gordon
See you next time. I'm Indravama and in the latest season of the Spy who we open the file on the spies who invaded suburbia. The illegals weren't just blending in. They were the embodiment of the American dream. Nine to five jobs, dropping the kids off at soccer practice and just the right amount of charm to slide into the orbits of the powerful. But behind closed doors, they were Russian operatives meticulously crafting coded messages and feeding Moscow everything it needed to stay one step ahead of the US When a powerful mole reveals the names and locations of the undercover spies, the FBI finds itself walking a tightrope protect its most crucial informant whilst avoiding a catastrophic diplomatic fire. Strike storm. Follow the spy who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts or you can binge the full season of the Spies who Invaded Suburbia early and ad free with Wondery Plus.