47. The Leak That Changed The World: Spying on the World (Ep 5)

Summary

The Rest Is Classified – Episode 47: "The Leak That Changed The World: Spying on the World (Ep 5)"

Release Date: May 18, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 47 of "The Rest Is Classified," hosts David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst and spy novelist, and Gordon Corera, a veteran security correspondent, delve deep into the ramifications of Edward Snowden's leaks. This episode, titled "The Leak That Changed The World: Spying on the World," explores the intricate web of espionage, intelligence operations, and the subsequent global power dynamics reshaped by one of the most significant leaks in history.

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Edward Snowden's Detainment in Moscow

The episode opens with McCloskey recounting Snowden's infamous detainment at Moscow Airport in June 2013. Snowden's intention to transit to Ecuador was thwarted when Russian authorities, particularly the Federal Security Service (FSB), detained him for questioning.

David McCloskey [02:45]: "It doesn't matter because my name's Ed Snowden and I've flown to Moscow after releasing a documentary film about my NSA leaks."

Upon presenting his passport, Snowden found himself swiftly ushered into a meeting with FSB officers, marking the beginning of his prolonged stay in Russia.

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The FSB's Approach and Snowden's Response

Corera provides a vivid narration of the interrogation Snowden faced, highlighting the FSB's attempt to recruit him as a double agent.

Gordon Corera [04:28]: "At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others... 'Listen, I understand who you are and what this is. Please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with you.'"

Snowden's firm rejection underscored his unwillingness to collaborate, despite his vulnerable position.

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Theories on Snowden's Data Security

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the uncertainty surrounding whether Snowden brought any sensitive data into Russia. The hosts ponder the possibility of a "dead man switch," a mechanism that would release information if Snowden were incapacitated.

Gordon Corera [07:56]: "Some people have theorized that he uploaded the material somewhere and hid the key to decrypt it or to use it as a form of protection."

However, both hosts acknowledge that this remains speculative, with no concrete evidence to support such claims.

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Impact on US and Global Intelligence Agencies

The episode transitions to assess the damage inflicted by the leaks on intelligence agencies worldwide. The NSA's extensive surveillance programs, often in collaboration with the British GCHQ, faced immense scrutiny and backlash.

David McCloskey [12:46]: "The House Intel Committee report on Snowden... it's a bit of a mystery still. It is what exactly Moscow got access to."

The ambiguity surrounding the extent of compromised data fuels ongoing debates about the true impact of the leaks.

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GCHQ and the Tempora Program

Corera delves into the Tempora program, GCHQ's ambitious initiative to tap into global fiber optic cables, enabling the collection of vast amounts of internet data.

Gordon Corera [20:35]: "Mastering the Internet is basically them thinking we need to be able to master Internet traffic in order to keep doing our job."

McCloskey elaborates on the legal complexities surrounding Tempora, revealing that its authorization stems from obscure legislation, specifically Section 94 of the 1984 Telecoms Act.

David McCloskey [24:31]: "The legal basis was secret. We later learned it was Section 94 of the 1984 Telecoms Act."

This secrecy poses significant accountability challenges, as even high-ranking officials remain unaware of the program's precise legal underpinnings.

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Surveillance on Foreign Leaders

One of the most explosive revelations discussed is the NSA's surveillance of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, dating back to 2002. This breach of trust between allies underscores the pervasive nature of intelligence operations.

Gordon Corera [33:07]: "This was the fun one was after a few months and Snowden had parceled out his information in an interesting way... the NSA had been tapping the cell phone of Angela Merkel."

McCloskey reflects on the ethical dilemmas this presents, especially considering the Five Eyes alliance, which supposedly prevents member countries from spying on each other without overarching justifications.

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Ethical and Legal Implications

The hosts engage in a profound discussion about the legality and morality of mass surveillance. While some programs like Tempora operate within the bounds of national laws, the opacity and lack of transparency raise questions about their ethical standing.

Gordon Corera [25:30]: "The issue was more about accountability... they are not in a position to explain this at the time because these programmes are secret."

McCloskey cites Bart Gellman from the Washington Post, emphasizing that sometimes, "a scandal is what's legal," highlighting the distinction between legality and ethicality.

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Conclusion and Future Directions

As the episode concludes, McCloskey and Corera acknowledge the enduring legacy of Snowden's leaks. Despite his prolonged stay in Russia, Snowden's revelations continue to influence global intelligence practices and public perceptions of privacy and surveillance.

Gordon Corera [38:38]: "Even though he's in Russia, the stories and the revelations are gonna go on with some very dramatic ones still to come."

The hosts tease future episodes that will explore the UK's governmental responses and the broader geopolitical repercussions of the leaks.

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Notable Quotes

• David McCloskey [02:46]: "This, Gordon, is the first of these terrible... Ed Snowden's essentially his entrapment by the Russian security services in Moscow."

• Gordon Corera [04:31]: "I'll read. The center of the table sat an older man... 'Please come with.'"

• David McCloskey [12:12]: "A key or a sample of the documents. Now, I will note, though, that the House Intel Committee report on Snowden... it's a bit of a mystery still."

• Gordon Corera [20:29]: "Everything we do is legal and authorized. I asked, 'Under which law is it authorized and legal?' And there was this silence."

• David McCloskey [27:35]: "Interestingly, Bart Gellman... 'Sometimes a scandal is what's legal.'"

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Final Thoughts

Episode 47 of "The Rest Is Classified" provides an in-depth exploration of the multifaceted impact of Edward Snowden's leaks. Through nuanced discussions and expert insights, McCloskey and Corera shed light on the shadowy corridors of global espionage, the ethical quandaries of mass surveillance, and the enduring mysteries surrounding one of the most pivotal moments in modern intelligence history.

For those fascinated by the clandestine world of spies, espionage, and covert operations, this episode offers a comprehensive and engaging analysis that bridges the gap between historical events and their contemporary implications.

Transcript

[David McCloskey]

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[David McCloskey]

In the CIA in particular, you get a lot of training on how not to get into trouble at customs. You have to think about how you dress, how you act. You have to think about the things in your bag and the things in your pockets and the tales they tell about you. Your goal is to be the most boring person in line with the most perfectly forgettable face. But none of that really matters when the name on your passport is all over the news. I handed my little blue book to the bearish guy in the passport control booth who scanned it and rifled through its pages. Then the guy picked up his phone, grumbled some words in Russian, and almost immediately, far too quickly, two security officers in suits approached. They must have been waiting. The officer in front took my little blue book from the guy in the booth and leaned in close to me. There is problem with Passports. He said, please come with. Welcome back to. The Rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

[David McCloskey]

And that, Gordon, is the first of these terrible. Edwards note in quotes that you have forced me to read this entire series that I've been, I would say, moderately pleased to read because it concerns Ed Snowden's essentially his entrapment by the Russian security services in Moscow.

[Gordon Carrera]

This is him arriving at Moscow Airport, June 2013. And that moment. That moment. You ever had it.

[David McCloskey]

Well, I appreciated all of the wonderful tradecraft that Ed provides early in that quote. And then he says, it doesn't matter because my name's Ed Snowden and I've flown to Moscow after released a documentary film about my NSA leaks.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, he's not exactly.

[David McCloskey]

I've taken an Aeroflot flight, I land in Moscow, and now I've got a bunch of big Russian guys who are going to have a word with me, which seems, let's say, fairly obvious. Unsurprising and a little bit unsurprising.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

That the Russians would not wave him through on his eventual path to Ecuador. Now, where we left him last, there was a bit of a mystery about where in the world is Ed Snowden.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Because he had a flight booked to go to Ecuador, but he did not take that flight.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And he is now essentially stuck in.

[Gordon Carrera]

Moscow in what appears to be the kind of transit area of Moscow. So he's not actually, and it's very interesting, they don't actually let him technically go into Russian territory. They kind of detain him in a kind of halfway place. And these people come to see him and that they.

[David McCloskey]

Here, we should be clear, are the fsb, the Russian Federal Security Service. The fsb. Notable alums include Vladimir Putin.

[Gordon Carrera]

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

[David McCloskey]

Oh, you won't go. Yes. You're being generous here.

[Gordon Carrera]

I'll read. At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others, the white of his hair shining like a halo of authority. He cleared his throat. Stop it. Spy novelist. And gave me indecent English, what the CIA calls a cold pitch, which is basically an offer by a foreign intelligence service that can be summarized as come and work for us. I knew I had to cut him off. Listen, I understand who you are and what this is. Please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with You. So they're pitching him. He's open about that. They're saying, we know you got a bunch of secrets. Come be a spy for us or come be our man.

[David McCloskey]

Yes.

[Gordon Carrera]

And he's saying no.

[David McCloskey]

And he's saying no. Yes. Good for him. He's really putting his foot down here in Moscow's airport in front of the FSB with absolutely no leverage.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, it's true. He has got a problem. He has got a problem. He's US Passports, cancel. You know, this FSB guy points to this massive media scrum, which I guess they can see through a window, and he says to him, life for. I'll do my Russian accent. Life for a. I can't do it. Life for a person in your situation can be very difficult without friends who can help.

[David McCloskey]

Gordon, as someone who's written a book about Russian, your title is Russians Among Us. You need a better Russian accent.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I gotta work on it. I'll work on it. I work on it.

[David McCloskey]

There'll be lots of opportunities in our show to do this.

[Gordon Carrera]

This guy says, life can be difficult without friends.

[David McCloskey]

That just sounds like deep. You've had a few cigarettes.

[Gordon Carrera]

He let the words linger. If there is some information, perhaps some small thing you could share with us. And so they want his stuff.

[David McCloskey]

The Russian angle here is interesting because I think it's very possible that when Snowden arrives, that the Russians are at first very suspicious and that the mindset very much could be, is this a setup?

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Is this guy being sort of dangled in front of us by the Americans? Now, you obviously had the leaks come out and all of that, so there's a very strong counter argument to that. But I have to think that initially when the Russians sit down with this guy, they're doing the case officer thing right off the bat of, who is this guy? What's his motivation? Is he. Is he legit? Yeah, because there would be a very strong kind of undercurrent in the fsb, I'd imagine. There's also probably some behind the scenes jockeying with the svr, Russia's foreign intelligence service, over who's going to have access to this guy and who's going to interview him. Every Russian security service is probably going to want to sit down with him at some point during his little stay at SRI Matevo. But, you know, they're going to be assessing him for his foreign intelligence value. They're going to be conducting really deep psychological analysis on him over the course of this time to try to understand how they could sort of Work with him or through him. And we should also note, I think this is a really important little detail that good old Ed kind of is a little bit vague about, I would say, in his memoir, is what did he bring? Or did he bring anything with him to Moscow? Because certainly if he brought any electronic device, any memory card, any SD card, any USB stick, whatever, regardless of the encryption, the assumption has got to be that the Russians are going to image it, get access to it pretty quickly.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, let's hit that question. I mean, you know, he's there in the airport, and I mean, leave the airport, but he's not going to leave Russia. He stalled there while a lawyer, you know, provided, I think, by WikiLeaks. Well, he's got one lawyer linked to WikiLeaks. He's got another one linked to the.

[David McCloskey]

FSB, who's now forgotten about the more objectionable lawyer.

[Gordon Carrera]

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

[David McCloskey]

I've had a good deal of fun with sort of mocking in the last episode, his suspicions about the US using sort of triads to sort of render him. But it was, I think, a legitimate concern on his part that when he left Hong Kong, any airspace he traversed where the United States would have access or allies was at risk of exactly this happening.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And it's not that he would be illegally rendered. It's literally that they'll force him to claim the land and then he'll be arrested. Arrested and extradited back.

[Gordon Carrera]

Let's go back to your question, which you raised, which I think is a really important one, which is the material, because that's what the Russians at this border are saying. Is there something you can share with us? What have you got? Now, we should say here Snowden is very clear that he says he made sure it was not accessible to the Russians. And the implication, I think, is that he did not bring it with him to Russia, that he basically handed it off to the journalists, people like Ewan McCaskill. We met previous episodes from the Guardian to Laura Poitras to Glenn Greenwald, you know, maybe to others as well. But he did not carry with him at this point the archive. I mean, in his view, he's given it to journalists, their job to do their work. He hasn't got it.

[David McCloskey]

Cincinnatus. Right?

[Gordon Carrera]

Yes.

[David McCloskey]

To go back to his absurd, I'm.

[Gordon Carrera]

Relinquishing the Roman who relinquished power.

[David McCloskey]

But there probably is something to be said for that. He doesn't see himself in his own sort of heroic worldview as the guy who's going to carry this whole thing forward.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, he's given it to the journalists now. I mean, there are some other kind of questions about where it was in China. I mean, there are people who still think that he might have either carried it with him at some points or that he uploaded it somewhere. So one of the interesting theories you come across, you know, people who were in the US intelligence community raised it, is that he uploaded the material somewhere and hid the key to decrypt it or to find it and to be able to use it somewhere else. I mean, the phrase dead man switch, you know, a dead man switch comes from like suicide bombs, doesn't it? Is that if you've got a bomb and if you're killed, then the bomb goes off, you know, so you're kind of holding the switch and the kind of the electronic version is you upload it somewhere and you have a trigger where if you are taken out of action, rendered, put in prison, killed, effectively the trigger is released and the stuff emerges into the public. So that's been one of the question marks is whether he kind of hid the material somewhere as a kind of form of protection. With the idea if he was arrested or stopped, you know, the dead man switch would operate and then the material would be released. Now, he's never said that.

[David McCloskey]

That's just speculation.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's speculation. But that some people have. But it's an interesting theory and it is just a theory. And the other one is that this material was just very well encrypted on hard drives and taken by people to other places.

[David McCloskey]

Well, the other angle here is that he did this actually as he was taking the information originally from nsa. A lot of the documents essentially have his own digital imprint on them to show that he was the one who downloaded them and took them out of the National Security Agency. And I think that from a Russian standpoint, or frankly from Snowden's standpoint, as he's thinking about potentially needing to deal with the Russians or with the Chinese or with any other sort of foreign security service. Having those documents sort of demonstrate that I'm the guy who took them immediately makes you valuable.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And frankly, the WikiLeaks minders would have been insane for him to not come to Russia with something, something to show that he is who he says he.

[Gordon Carrera]

Is or something like that.

[David McCloskey]

A key or a sample of the documents. Now, I will note, though, that the House Intel Committee report on Snowden, which takes a very dark view of the man, says straight out that the US is not clear on what Russia or China have eventually gotten access to. Now, it's safe to assume that anything the journalists had access to, the Russians or Chinese probably could have gotten. But again, from this whole trove, it is a bit of a mystery still. It is what exactly Moscow got access to.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, you're right. It is a mystery which is still there. And I've been asking people about it as we prepared for this, and at the time, there was a lot of world Russians and Chinese have definitely got it. You know, they must have got it. They'll be able to break any encryption he's got, which is probably true, given their capable intelligence agencies.

[David McCloskey]

And that assumes he brought it with.

[Gordon Carrera]

Him, but that assumes they brought it with him and they had access to him and, you know, he's always been clear. They didn't. And so I think people genuinely now will say they don't know, they don't know. And there is an element of mystery to that. And I think it's worth saying that because people at the time were very much like that. They've got it.

[David McCloskey]

Well, and I think this is the final deadly sin. And David Flasky, sort of five deadly sins that Snowden, it's not that he is a Russian or was a Russian asset.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

It's that he has allowed himself and allows himself through the process to become a Russian stooge. Yeah, right. To become the stooge of a foreign adversary. Because what I think the Russian play here becomes is actually a very subtle one in some ways that I think really reflects Snowden's psychology, which I think the Russian pitch to him becomes. Let us help you tell your story. And I think this tracks with his sort of experience in Moscow since is he becomes a kind of conduit for conspiratorial, very anti American worldview that sort of seeks to undermine confidence in our security institutions, our democracy, that kind of thing. So what, Snowden becomes the mouthpiece yeah.

[Gordon Carrera]

No, I think, I think, I think that's a bit too strong. I think he's not a Russian agent. That's obvious in terms of what he was doing. But they opportunistically use him. They've got him, they give him political asylum. He's stuck there. You know, this is the Russian way, information operations. They think how they can take advantage of this. And so here we are. Edward Snowden's got political asylum. He thought he was there for a 24 hour stopover. He's never gonna leave. He's still there now. Will he ever leave? Who knows? Well, it's a big question for him, I guess he must ask himself every day. But the stories are not gonna stop because the archive is out there. And so even though he's in Russia, the stories and the revelations are gonna go on with some very dramatic ones still to come.

[David McCloskey]

And so maybe there with more ridiculous news about to break and Ed Snowden's stuck in Moscow. We'll take a break. When we come back, we'll see what those stories tell us. This episode is sponsored by Incogni.

[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

Plus there's a 30 day money back guarantee. No risk, no trace, no loose ends. The link is in the episode Description this episode is brought to you by Factor Optimize your nutrition this year with Factor America's number one ready to eat meal service. Factor's fresh Never Frozen meals are dietitian approved. Ready to eat in just two minutes. Choose from 40 weekly options across eight dietary preferences like calorie smart, protein plus and keto. Eat smarter at FactorMeals.com listen50 and use code listen50 for 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. FactorMeals.com listen50 code listen50 t's and c's apply well, welcome back. Edward Snowden is still ensconced in Moscow and there is now kind of a rolling tide of stories that are breaking. And now Snowden, of course, American contractor, all this stuff coming from his NSA leaks. But because of the very interesting connections between America's Signals Intelligence Agency, the NSA and the GCHQ Britons, through this kind of five eyes agreement in which there's a tremendous amount of information sharing, a lot of these stories are really going to start to reverberate across the Atlantic in the uk.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's right, yeah. Lots of them are about Britain. And I just remember this kind of tide of stories that came out and was coming out in this period which is now in the hands of journalists. And I can't even remember it very much as a journalist covering it, where you just every day you would wake up not knowing what amazing revelation would come and that you'd be following up on. It's not easy as a journalist when you're not doing the story yourself.

[David McCloskey]

It was a bad June.

[Gordon Carrera]

It was a busy agency.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, yeah, it was rough.

[Gordon Carrera]

Bad June. It was rough. And you know, the Guardian is certainly leading the way of this, you know, and the editor at the time was a man called Alan Rusbridger, kind of veteran editor of the Guardian, kind of owlish intellectual piano Playing figure, very well known in Britain.

[David McCloskey]

Americans will recognize that as their caricature of every editor of any British.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, but interesting man. And he'd also thought through this very carefully about what they were going to reveal from the archive because there's so many documents. And, you know, his instructions to his journalists were focus on mass surveillance and not other stories, even if they were interesting. You can see what he's thinking, that this is a kind of public interest journalism. We're going to do a certain category of stories. We're not going to do stories about, for instance, the NSA hunting Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, because there's not a kind of public interest in terms of revealing surveillance. But of course, it does mean that all the stories are about, on the whole, maybe with one or two small exceptions, about the kind of darker side of surveillance rather than, if you like, what else they're doing and the other side of things. But. But that was the kind of decision. And you get a big one even, you know, while Snowden is there in Moscow kind of waiting for his asylum, you get one of the big ones, which is something called tempura.

[David McCloskey]

This is 21 June 2013.

[Gordon Carrera]

21St of June 2013. So very early still, just a few weeks in. And I remember this was a particularly big one because it was about gchq, Britain's version of the NSA tapping the fiber optic cables through which data travels. And it was part of something called Mastering the Internet. Again, it's one of those, you know, names which if they knew the slides were going to be revealed, they might not have called it Mastering the Internet because it sounds quite ominous.

[David McCloskey]

How did it get it code name that sounds like a shrimp roll?

[Gordon Carrera]

What must. Oh, tempura. Sorry. I was thinking Mastering the Internet. Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Your code names are worse than ours.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Story stellar.

[Gordon Carrera]

We got Stellar Wind and Muscular.

[David McCloskey]

There's a few others we haven't talked about on the American side, like Boundless Informant.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And Byzantine Hades.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And you guys have tempura.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I think it's quite British in its own way. The phrase mastering the Internet was actually born out of an insecurity in the intelligence community, because in the Cold War, gchq, NSA were basically monitoring Soviet communications, particularly Soviet radio, military traffic and, you know, leadership traffic, to kind of understand military instructions. Then in the 90s, you get two things happening. One is the Cold War ends. You get the arrival of things like terrorism, and you get the Internet arriving. And of course, what's different is the targets are now things like terrorists and Organised criminals. And they are not using a kind of discreet radio traffic. They are using this very public global communication system which is just emerging, which is the Internet. And their messages and communications are hidden amongst the communications of everyone else. And so there is this point in the 90s where I think the intelligence agencies worried that they would not be able to cope with this. You know, that you've got this kind of flood of information, but their targets hiding within it. There's kind of encryption which is making it harder to read the traffic. And so they basically think, well, this could be game over for us. And we're going to use the intelligence phrase, we're going to go dark, we're going to lose the ability to monitor our targets. And so mastering the Internet is basically them thinking we need to be able to master Internet traffic in order to keep doing our job.

[David McCloskey]

To find the needle, you essentially have to hoover up the whole haystack.

[Gordon Carrera]

And that's one of the questions is do you need access to the haystack? And so they start to basically tap these fiber optic cables through which the world's data is flowing. And Tempora, amongst other things, buffers and filters that to extract what they want so that they can search through it. It's a big ambitious project, but it does mean you are sitting these, these intercept points at global cable traffic to try and extract the information you need and to look for the people who are hiding in that traffic. But it does mean filtering through the Internet and the world's traffic to look.

[David McCloskey]

For stuff when that story breaks here now, I mean, I realize that you guys have not gotten around to writing a constitution yet despite your country existing for a very long time, but what's the reception? Because GCHQ is actually operating with fewer restrictions. I think it is right, than your American counterparts at nsa.

[Gordon Carrera]

So I'll tell you a funny story actually, which is still very vivid in my mind about when Tempora comes out. I remember calling someone from GCHQ and I said, what could you tell me about the story? Of course they go, we can't comment on any of our classified operations. Which was their line. I said, well is this legal? How is it legal? And they said to me, everything we do is legal and authorized. I remember this asking the kind of obvious journalistic follow up question, which is under which law is it authorized and legal? And there was this silence and what you realize was it was legal, but they couldn't even tell me publicly under what law it was legal. So the legal basis for it was secret. And I can now tell you what it was because we learned later it was Section 94 of the 1984 Telecoms act, which is fair to say was pretty obscure and written before the Internet era. But that was being used as the kind of secret legal justification.

[David McCloskey]

British school children don't recite that.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, it's not quite like the Constitution. And that was the problem they had, which is they could say to themselves, well, this is all legal. Got an authorization here from the minister which, you know, says that we're allowed to do this. But it was so obscure that they couldn't even publicly say under what law it was legal. And that was the kind of problem they had, is that they'd built this massive capability at gchq. Massive capability, but in secret, you know, from this culture of secrecy which came from Bletchley park and where they assumed it would continue to be secret and that it would never be revealed. And they never thought they'd have to kind of justify it or explain it. Yes, they went to, you know, ministers, the foreign Secretary to say, please authorize this capability. Would the foreign secretaries even have understood what they were, what it was they were authorizing in the scale of the data? Because a lot of this stuff, frankly is really technical. The kind of how many gigabytes a particular bearer can extract from a fiber optic cable and how the filtering is done. I mean, that stuff is complicated.

[David McCloskey]

Right? Well, if you look at the slide decks, one of my former lives I used to make slide decks with some regularity. And this is a how to class and how not to make slide decks because I mean, these things are extremely hard to understand. Even the ones that have been used as kind of front page sort of news. Right. Tend to be quite technical and really hard to dig into. I mean, in this case, though, GCHQ though, is not operating with the same restrictions as NSA in terms of what it collects on British citizens, is that right?

[Gordon Carrera]

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

[David McCloskey]

That is a critical piece of this because you will, I think, frequently see articles written in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations that will call a lot of these programs illegal. And I think Bart Gelman, the Washington Post journalist who has written a book on this called Dark Mirror, which I think is a great read on a lot of these technical. The technical aspects of this says, and he's got a great line in there, it says, basically, sometimes a scandal is what's legal, you know, and calling these things illegal is factually incorrect. The question is, should they be legal at all if they were? And the intelligence agencies that were doing this collection, NSA in the States, GCHQ in Britain, were doing so with legal mandate and authorization from political masters to collect this information.

[Gordon Carrera]

And, I mean, there were some later, some legal challenges where certain aspects of them were challenged in the kind of European courts, for instance, you know, about some of the data sharing agreements. And certainly there were some bits which were, you know, shown to be against, you know, some pieces of law. But fundamentally the issue was more about accountability, I think, than legality. But the problem is that they are not in a position to explain this at the time. Because these programmes are secret, they feel they can't comment about them. And so all of this stuff is just coming out in a kind of, you know, a flow of stories about gchq. And there's some other, you know, really interesting ones. I mean, I don't think we've got time to do all of them, but there's ones about, you know, the efforts to defeat encryption. So people rely on encryption to kind of communicate secretly. Now, in a way, defeating encryption is something spy agencies have done. I mean, you know, if you think what Bletchley park did In World War II, it broke codes, it decrypted German communications. And so it's maybe not a surprise that they're still trying to decrypt communications in the modern day. But the problem is the types of encryption are types of encryption used by all of us to communicate over the Internet, rather than it being the German Enigma machine, you're trying to decrypt. So you're. You're effectively trying to defeat or undermine a general form of encryption, because that's the form being used by terrorists, for instance, or other states. And they have these programs and again, you were talking about codenames. They call them Bull Run and Edgehill. Bull Run and Edge Hill were civil war battles in the US and uk and they call their programs to defeat encryption after civil war battles. Now, I would suggest that's a poor choice of names. Whoever came up with that.

[David McCloskey]

It's a poor one. It's a poor one. And also there were a couple other codenames I forgot to mention earlier.

[Gordon Carrera]

Go on.

[David McCloskey]

That I wanted to. Egotistical Giraffe was another one used inside the nsa, which I call you.

[Gordon Carrera]

I'm going to surprise.

[David McCloskey]

That was actually my CIA codename. I'm revealing it now for the first time.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Those are poor choices. And a lot of this. We called this at CIA, Gordon, whether things would pass the Washington Post test. I'm sorry, we didn't use the Daily Mail, BBC or the Daily Mail test. And I think a lot of these stories, I mean, these code names are great example, the logos of all of those tech companies on that slide you mentioned, sharing information with the nsa. All of this is not illegal, but it. It fundamentally fails that Washington Post test. There's going to be outrage as soon as these things hit the press. Yeah, right. I would imagine inside GCHQ at this time, morale is pretty low. Yeah. And I think you were. You're actually covering a lot.

[Gordon Carrera]

I was covering a lot and talking to people. And I mean, I remember I was doing a documentary about cyberspace at the time and it meant I'd actually been in G THQ a few months earlier and I'd be one of the only journalists who'd been in, which was part of the problem for them because most journalists and most people didn't know what they were like. They hadn't had a. Didn't have a feel for the people in the place. Whereas I'd been in for these, you know, documentaries.

[David McCloskey]

Headquarters is the Donut.

[Gordon Carrera]

The Donut in Cheltenham. And when you meet the people, they don't come across as the kind of people who are there desperately rubbing their hands, going, how am I going to spy on the local community in Cheltenham and carry out mass surveillance? But because it was a. No one knew anything about them. They were so secret. It was quite easy to think that. And I mean, it was really interesting talking to people and talking to people now, just how scarring it was for these people. I mean, I remember Ian Lobbin, the director, was kind of angry at it and I think there was this sense in which they were people who felt we've been working in secret to try and defend the country. And we're being told actually we're carrying out mass surveillance and we're like the Stasi. And, you know, they found that disjuncture between how they thought of themselves and how they were portrayed as some kind of rogue agency, really difficult. Someone said the parents of other kids at school sometimes would be like, oh, these are. You work for gchq Or I think you work for gchq. You're one of those spies. And the irony is, most of the people there were Guardian readers. I think if you would have done a poll of GCHQ prior to the Snowden leaks and did, which is the most popular newspaper, I guarantee you it would be the Guardian. You know, these were not secret state denizens out to kind of smile on everyone.

[David McCloskey]

What is the US Equivalent of the Guardian for our American?

[Gordon Carrera]

I don't know. In these days, it's probably the New York Times. Slightly more liberal end of the spectrum, would you say?

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, that would be the.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, it is a kind of liberal campaigning newspaper. I think it was traumatic for them. You know, it was really traumatic. You also get a kind of some revelations which are awkward and which I think do raise some questions. And we talked about the mass surveillance ones, but there were a few others which edged into different areas as well. And so you get to ones which are about the kind of diplomatic spying or espionage. There was one in which GCHQ was accused of spying on diplomats who'd attended a G20 summit in London in 2009, including the kind of South African Turkish delegations, and they'd used fake Internet cafes to hoover up their passwords. It's a kind of classic spy thing.

[David McCloskey]

Right. And is anyone surprised by this? You know, I'm shocked that people are surprised.

[Gordon Carrera]

And this is what's so interesting is some people are surprised by that and some people are like, well, isn't that what spies do?

[David McCloskey]

Right. You know, just to be clear, I mean, just to center this, this is basically GCHQ spying on foreign diplomats. Yes. Right. So this, this is an effort to collect foreign intelligence from a foreign national. Yeah, Using sigit signals.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I remember that was part. Some of the people in the public were like, this is outrageous. And other people were like, isn't that what we pay spies to do? And you could see a kind of bifurcation of the debate around that. I mean, the one that got really.

[David McCloskey]

Hot, though, this is the fun one.

[Gordon Carrera]

This was. The fun one was after a few months and Snowden had parceled out his information in an interesting way, to lots of different countries. As well as the Guardian, he'd also given it to kind of Brazilian journalists, and he also gave it to German journalists. And they would find one particular story, which I think became one of the more damaging ones, which was that the NSA had been tapping the cell phone of Angela Merkel, who was then the Chancellor of Germany, possibly as far back as 2002.

[David McCloskey]

Which, again, are we shocked by this?

[Gordon Carrera]

I guess a close ally being spied on by the Americans. I think people are a little bit shocked by that.

[David McCloskey]

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

[Gordon Carrera]

Friends spy. Even dying on friends is okay in your view?

[David McCloskey]

Absolutely. Absolutely. What's embarrassing is that it leaked.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. First rule of spying is don't get caught, you know?

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. It's not embarrassing that it was happening.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I. I mean, I think she was supposed to be one of, I think, 35 leaders. Brazil and Mexico, maybe, I find less surprising. But sure, maybe a close ally. I mean, as. As we said earlier, there is this thing called the five eyes, which is the, you know, us, uk, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. They don't spy on each other, supposedly. I think there might be, you know.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, no, but.

[Gordon Carrera]

But that's a kind of deal. They. They share stuff, but there's nothing like.

[David McCloskey]

Formally written down in terms of no spies, I think. I think it's a bit more of.

[Gordon Carrera]

A wink, I think. No, I think it is a. Unless there is an overriding reason you don't spy each other. That's the kind of general, general rule. And anyway, there's some interesting stories about when that might have happened.

[David McCloskey]

But this is back to deadly sin number four of the indiscriminate, complete lack of sort of proportion in the Snowden leagues. And this is where I do think we should think of him as a privacy jihadist, because he is provided this information on Angela Merkel's phone, on these other foreign leaders, on GCHQ spying on foreign diplomats. This is all completely outside of the conversation on domestic surveillance, be it in the UK or in the US this is not about surveillance on British citizens, American citizens. This is about whether signals intelligence agencies or spy agencies more General should or could spy on foreign nationals to provide their home government with an information advantage over that other country, be it sort of friendly or not. And I think this is where, among other sort of themes over the course of these episodes, I very much part ways with what good old Eddie Snowden did, because he knowingly provided these documents to journalists, knowing that there's going to be a massive scoop in Germany and Brazil and Mexico about spying on their leaders. And from the standpoint of the American Constitution. Yeah, right. Which he claims to defend, there's absolutely no justification for this.

[Gordon Carrera]

You do raise an interesting question, which is he's parceled stuff out to the kind of Hong Kong media, now to the German media, I think, Brazilian, you know, lots of different countries. And it is interesting because it is slightly at variance with the idea he is blowing the whistle on mass surveillance by the United States, within the United States. Whether it's him driving this or whether it's the journalists or whether he's quite hard to know exactly. But it seems to be more about let's expose the global surveillance capabilities of the nsa. And his view seems to be that any surveillance of people, so it's not just American people, is something to be exposed and to shown. And I think that that is slightly at variance with his original kind of claims about the kind of constitutionalist stuff. And it does seem to be more about undermining the principle of surveillance, of the idea that traffic and data should be scooped up about people from the Internet. It's again, more to that kind of purist idea he has, as opposed to the very domestic American.

[David McCloskey]

And we should say that these types of collection platforms and capabilities, when they're targeted. Let's just take the stuff targeted at foreigners. Yeah, they're extremely expensive to develop and maintain. After Snowden, much of that goes offline. From the standpoint of taxpayers, Britain, America, it's a massive loss. Right. It is essentially a theft.

[Gordon Carrera]

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

[David McCloskey]

Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so there's a little bit of the outrage which I think is performative for the public because they're outraged that their leaders are being spied on. But beneath the surface.

[David McCloskey]

Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

I think there's a bit more realism about it.

[David McCloskey]

And I'm sure Merkel's just pissed that her cell phone. Yeah, no one wants listened to anyway. And so we'll be there with the UK Government just overwhelmed by this massive tide of stories. Let's end. And when we come back next time, we'll see how the UK government starts to strike back where they literally threaten the Guardian with being shut down unless they turn over that archive.

[Gordon Carrera]

Join us on Wednesday for that. Although members of the Declassified club, of course, have access to access to the episodes right now. And you can also access our two bonus episodes and here this Friday from a top US Government official who was right at the heart of the Edward Snowden affair. To sign up, go to therestisclassified.com and take advantage of our launch discount.

[David McCloskey]

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

[Gordon Carrera]

See you next time.