When Edward Snowden Realized Government Spying Had Gone Too Far | Joe Rogan

the Joe Rogan experience I want to bring it back to the initial question so you're working for the NSA when do you realize there's a huge issue and when do you feel this responsibility to let the American people know about this issue like when when do you contact these journalists and what was the thought process regarding this like what what steps did you go through once you realize that this was in violation of the Constitution and that even with the laws of the Patriot Act in the Patriot Act two things had changed so radically that you knew this was wrong and you had to do something about it you felt a responsibility to speak out okay so since we gave so much historical preamble let me just give the the Cliff Notes version okay to get us up to that so after September 11th I'm a little bit lost I'm doing my technical stuff but it doesn't really feel like it matters anymore like I'm making more money I'm becoming more accomplished but the world's on fire right if you remember there was a crazy mood of patriotism in the country because we were all trying to come together get through it you remember like people were sticking Dixie Cups on the top of every chain-link fence on every overpass that was like stand together you know never forget mm-hmm united we stand flags on every car exactly and you know I was a young young guy who is not especially political right and I come from a military background federal family all that stuff and so that means I'm very vulnerable to this kind of stuff I see it on the news and Bush and all his sort of cronies are going look it's al Qaeda it's terrorism terrorist organization they have all these international connections there's Iraq you know dictators weapons of mass destruction they're holding the world of ransom you got Colin Powell at the UN dangling little vials of like fake anthrax and so I felt an obligation to do my part and so I volunteered to join the army yeah you you probably can't tell from from looking at me but I'm not gonna be at the top of the MMA circuit and he's fine soon so it didn't work out I joined a special program that was called the 18 X ray program where they take you in off the street and they actually give you a shot at becoming forces soldier so you train harder and special platoons you go further and I ended up breaking my legs basically so they put me out whoops your legs discharged yeah it was basically what it was when they were shin splints that I was too dumb to get off of right that's why I kept marching under wait I'm a pretty light guy to begin with I had a 24-inch waist when I when I joined the army girls are jealous my way yeah I think I weighed like a hundred and twenty eight pounds III got I was in great shape you know in boot camp because I came up really quick because it was a you know all I could do was gain but it was it was just too much on my frame because I wasn't that that active and so when you keep running on a stress injury right and you're running under weight with like rucksacks and things like that you're running in like boots and then you're doing exercises and the Army's like a whole chapter in the book you you got your battle buddy right because they never allow you to be alone you always got to have somebody watching you they thought it was funny to put me the smallest guy in the platoon that the drill sergeants did with the biggest dude in the platoon who was like an amateur bodybuilders like you know 230 260 something like that he was a big fellow and so you know he would when we're off in the woods doing these these marches and things like that we have to practice but he carries like the fireman's carry and things like that he throws me around his neck you know I'm like a towel he's just skipping down like it's nothing and then I gotta put him on me and I'm just like oh god die and it was it was it was weirdly fun I I enjoyed it but it was no good for my body and so in a land navigation movement I stepped off a log because I was on point and on the other side of the log because it's the woods in Georgia at Sand Hill I see a snake I and so in my memory you know it's like time slows down because North Carolina you know where I grew up you think all snakes are poisonous sorry this mission we're good it's completely fun no we're fine I just there was something that happened on the screen I wanted to make sure it was okay no that's just salt bi joining the chat that's what I was worried about there's a second image opened up here yeah so anyway I try to take a much longer step in midair I land badly and it's it's just one leg is like fire I'm limping I'm limping and limping but you know everybody says don't go to sick call because you go to sick call you lose your slot you'll end up general infantry or regular infantry and so I go back I just tough it out I get my rack in the next morning when I get out of the rack which is the the top bunk bed right I jumped out in my legs they just give out underneath me and I try to get up in and I just can't get up and so I go to sick call and I end up going to the hospital and they end up x-ray and me and they also x-ray my battle buddy because I gotta go there with somebody else and he has a broken hip where they have to bring him to surgery and it's in the book there's a lot more detail about it as kind of dramatic moment but for me they just said I had bilateral tibial fractures right all the way up my legs they said I had spiderwebs and the next phase of the training was jump school right where you gotta jump out of a plane and the doctor you know I was like son if you jump on those legs they're gonna turn into powder he's like I can hold you back you know we can put you for like six months you stay off them then you can go back through through the whole cycle Ryan start basic from scratch but you'll lose your slot in the Special Forces pipeline because of the way these things are scheduled and everything like that and then you'll basically be reassigned to the needs of the army or which probably meant I was going back to IT which was what I joined the army to kind of escape or you can go out on this special kind of discharge that's called an administrative discharge right normally got honorable discharge dishonorable discharge things like that this is something for people who have been in for anything less than six months where it's like annulling a marriage it's as if it never happened is if he never joined and at the time I was like well you know that's very kind of him to do that and I took it you know they dissent me to sit call or sorry the sickbay where you're in like the medical platoon and you do nothing for I think about a month and then then they let you out once the paperwork all finishes but in hindsight I realized that if you take an administrative discharge it exempts the army for liability for your injuries so actually what I thought was a kindness was just you know now if I had future problems with my legs they wouldn't have to cover it or health insurance any of those things anyways it was just a funny thing but anyway I get out of the army and here I'm on crutches for a long time and just sort of trying to figure out all right well what's next in life because I had gotten a basic security clearance just for going through signing up for the military process I applied for a security guard position at the University of Maryland because it said you had to get a top-secret clearance which that's with a higher clearance than I had at the time and I went well that sounds good because I knew if I combined my IT skills which were now suddenly much more relevant again to my future with the top-secret security clearance because of the way it works if you have a top-secret security clearance and tech skills you get paid a ridiculous amount of money for doing very little work so I was like alright well you know I can basically make twice what I would be making in the private sector working for government at this level at this phase because what we talked about earlier with September 11th and how the intelligence community change they no longer cared that I hadn't graduated from college right and I had gotten a GED just by going in and taking a test so for government purposes it was the same as if I was a high school graduate so now suddenly it was like these these doors are open now this University of Maryland facility turned out to be an NSA facility it was called a castle the Center for the Advanced Study of language at the University of Maryland College Park and all I was was literally a security guy walking around with with a walkie-talkie making sure nobody breaks in at night managing the electronic alarm system and things like that but once I had my foot in the door there I could start climbing ladder step by step and I applied for or I went to a job fair actually that was only for people who had security clearances and I ended up going to the table for one of the technical companies it was a little tiny subcontractor nobody's ever heard of and they said you know we've got tons of positions for somebody like you are you comfortable working nights and I was like yeah you know I wake up in the middle of day anyway that's fine with me and suddenly I've gone from working for the NSA through a university in a weird way where it's like the NSA holds the clearance but I'm formerly an employee of the state of Maryland at the the college and this is government man it's all these weird dodges and boondoggles for how people are employed there now suddenly I'm working at CIA headquarters right the place where all the movies show you swoop over the marble seal and everything like that I'm the king of the castle right I'm there at the middle of the night when no one else is there the lights are on motion sensors it's the creepiest thing in the world there's like flags on the wall that are just like gently billowing in the air-conditioning like ghosts the hallway lights up as you walk alongside it because it's like a green building and they disappear behind you and there's there's no one there I can go down to the gym at like 2:00 o'clock in the morning at the CIA and it's like not see a soul on the other side of the building then go all the way back and this kind of thing was was my end because they were like look it's the night shift nothing that bad is gonna happen um but it was on a very senior technical team that was basically handling systems administrator for everybody in the Washington Metropolitan Area right so every basically CIA server this is a computer system that like data is stored on the reporting is stored on that traffic is moved on all of this stuff suddenly me this is a circa 2005 I think I'm in charge of and it's just me and one other guy on the night shift and if you're interested in the book there's a lot of detail on this but I get sort of scouted from this position because they realize I actually know a lot about technology they were expecting me just to basically make sure the building doesn't burn down all these systems don't go down overnight and never come back up but they go well are you willing to go overseas and to a young man at that age that's actually like hey that sounds kind of exciting you know who doesn't want to go work overseas for the CIA and there's a lot of people listening the podcast who are like ah not me wait the CIA's the bad guys right yeah exactly they're like what are you gonna go overthrow a government somewhere but you have to understand that I'm still very much a true believer the government is like the living compressed embodiment of truth and goodness and light you know the shining city on the hill so I want to do my part to spread that to the world I didn't have skepticism is really what I'm trying to establish here and so I sign up and I go through this special training school like people hear in movies about the farm which is down at Camp Peary in Virginia I'm sent that's actually much more sacred facility called the hill which is in Warrenton Virginia and this has been covered a few times and open source media but I think this is one of the few book-length discussions of what happens there in permanent record but yeah so I go through training and then I get assigned overseas and I end up in Geneva Switzerland undercover as a diplomat right I think I'm my formal title for the embassy is this like something super bland like diplomatic attache and what I am is I'm a forward deployed tech guy they send you through this school to make you into kind of a MacGyver right yes you can handle all the computers but you can also handle the connections for the embassies power systems right the actual electrical connections you can handle the HVAC systems right you can handle locks and alarms and security systems basically anything that's got an on button on it at the Embassy that's secure now you're responsible for and I traveled from Geneva to other countries in Europe for sort of assignments and it was like it was an exciting time I actually still enjoyed it but this was where I first working with intelligence started to get doubts and the story's been told many times so I won't go over in full detail here but the CIA does primarily and it's not the only thing they do what's called human intelligence now there are many different types of intelligence than the intelligence community is responsible for the primary ones are human intelligence and signals intelligence you want to think of signals intelligence right as tapping lines hacking computers all of these sort of things that provide electronic information anything that's digital or analog signal that can be intercepted then turned into information human intelligence is you know all that fun stuff we further the CIA doing for for decades and decades which is where they try to turn people basically they say look we'll give you money if you sell out your country they don't it's not even your country a lot of times it's your like organization these guys could be working for a telecommunications provider and they want to sell customer records over they worked at a bank which was the thing that I saw and we wanted records on the bank's customers so he wanted a guy on the inside but anyway that that's sort of how it works and what I saw was they were way more aggressive for the lowest stakes than was reasonable or responsible they were totally willing to destroy somebody's life just on the off chance they would get some information that wouldn't even be a tremendously valuable and so you know ethically that that's struck me as a bit off but I let it pass because what I what I've learned over my life short though it's it's been you know it's that skepticism is something that needs to build up over time it's a skill something that needs to be practiced or you can think of it as something that you developed through exposure well I kind of like radiation poisoning but in a positive way it's when you start to realize inconsistencies or hypocrisy 's Wardlaw it's and you notice them and you know you you give somebody the benefit of the doubt or you trust them or you think it's all right but then over time you see it's not an isolated instance it's a pattern behavior and over time that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds and builds until it's something that you can no longer ignore now after the CIA I went to the NSA in Japan where I was working there in Tokyo and then from there a couple years later I went to the CIA again now I was working as a private employee from Dell but I was the senior technical official on Dells sales account to the CIA you know people these big companies they have sales accounts to the CIA and so this means I'm going in and now it's crazy because I'm still a very young man but I'm sitting across the table from Chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions I'm sitting across from their chief technology officer for the entire agency or the chief intelligent her chief information officer for the entire CIA and these guys are going look here's a problems here's what we want to do and it's my job to pitch them a system right and I've got paired up with this sales guy and the whole thing is just go how much money can we get out of the government right that's the whole goal and we'll build them what we were pitching was a private cloud system right everybody knows about cloud computing now it's like why your Gmail account is available wherever you go it's why Facebook has this massive system of records for everyone everywhere the government wanted to have this these kind of capabilities to Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon people well you know some people aren't familiar with as many of them are but Anna's on runs a secret cloud system for the government I forget what they've rebranded it now but this is just there's this massive connection between industry and government and the classified space that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper but at this point I I was already I had misgivings because of what I'd seen in Japan about government but I was just trying to get by I was trying to ignore the conflicts I was trying to ignore the inconsistencies and I think this is a state that a lot of people in these large institutions not just in our country but around the world I struggle with every day right there they got a job they got a family they got bills that they're just trying to get by and they know that some of the things they're doing are not good things they know some of the things they're doing are actively wrong but they know what happens to people who rock the boat eventually I changed my mind and when I had gone to Hawaii which was the final position in my career with the intelligence community I was because of an accident of history here I wasn't supposed to be in this position at all I was supposed to be at a group called the national threat Operations Center and talk but because of the way contracting works and again this is covered in the book I end up being reassigned to this little rinky-dink office that nobody's ever heard of analyte called the office of information sharing and I'm replacing this old-timer who's about to retire a really really nice guy but he spent most of his days just reading novels and doing nothing and letting people be content to the fact they're letting people forget that his office existed because he was the only one in it there's there's a manager who's like over him but it's actually over a larger group and he just looks over him as sort of a favor so now I come in and now I'm the sole employee of the office of information sharing but I'm not close enough to retirement that I'm okay with just doing nothing at all so I get in business and I come up with this idea for a new system called the heartbeat and what the heartbeat is gonna do is connect to basically every information repository in the intelligence community both at the NSA and across Network boundaries which you normally can't cross but because I've worked at both the CIA and the NSA I knew the network well enough both sides of it sides that normal workers the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other I could actually connect these together I could build bridges across this kind of network space and then draw all of these records into a new kind of system that was supposed to look at your digital ID basically your your sort of ID card that says this is who I am I work for this agency I work in this office these are my assignments these are my group affiliations and because of that the system would be able to eventually aggregate records that were relevant to your job that were related to you and then it could provide them and basically you could hit this site it would be an update of what we used to call read boards which were manually created there we go look you work in network defense right these are all the things that are happening on a network defense you work on I don't know economic takeovers in Guatemala you know if this is what's going on for you there but in my off time I helped the team that sat next to me which was a systems administration team for a for Windows networks because I had been microsoft certified systems engineer' which means basically I knew how to take care of Windows networks and this was all those guys did and they always had way too much work way too much work and I had basically no work that I needed to do at all because all I was supposed to do was share information which was not something that was particularly in demand because most people already knew what they wanted or what they needed so it was basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck unless I wanted to get ambitious and so I did some side gigs for these other guys and one of them was running what were called dirty word searches now dirty word searches are let me let me dial this back because I know we're sort of this is hard to track everything that the NSA does in large part is classified everything the CIA does in large part is classified if I made lunch plans with other people in my office it was classified that was the policy it's dumb they this over classification problem is one of the central flaws in government right now this is the reason we don't understand what they're doing this is why they can get them wrong way this is why they can get away with breaking the law or violating our rights for so long you know five years 10 years 15 50 years before they see before we see what they were doing and it's because of this routine classification right but every system computer system has a limit on what level of classified information is supposed to be stored on it and we've got all these complicated systems for code words and caveats that establish a system of what's called compartment ation and this is the idea when you work at the CIA when you work at the NSA you're not supposed to know what's happening in the office next to you right because you don't have need-to-know right again that thing from the movies and the reason they have this is they don't want one person to be able to go and know everything right and tell everybody everything they don't want anybody to know too much particularly when they're doing lots of bad things because then there's the risk that you realize they're doing so many bad things that it's passed the point that we can justify and they might develop sort of an ideological objection to that well in the office of information sharing and actually and basically every part of my career before that I had access to everything I had what was called a special caveat on my accesses called protec which means privileged access what this means you're kind of super user you know most people have all of these controls on the kind of information that can access but I'm in charge of the system right people who need information they have to get it from somewhere they don't know even the director of the CIA right he says I need to know everything about this well he doesn't know where to get it he's just a manager somebody has to be able to actually cross these thresholds and get those things that guy was me and so dirty word searches were these kind of automated queries that I would set up to go across the whole network and look at all of the different levels of classification and compartment ation and exceptionally controlled information that's kind of you could think of it as above top secret in these special compartments right where you're not even supposed to know what these compartments are for you only know the code word unless you work in them should have access to them unless you read into them one day I get a hit on the dirty word search for a program that I'd never heard of called stellar wind it came back because the the little caveat for they're called handling caveats which is like you know you can think of like Burn After Reading or for your eyes only but this one's called STL w which means stellar wind unless you know what stellar wind is you don't know how to handle it all I knew is it wasn't supposed to be on my system you know what this is a little bit unusual and it turned out this document was placed on the system because one of the employees who had worked on this program years before had come to Hawaii and this person was a lawyer I believe and they had worked in the inspector general's office and they had compiled a report part of the inspector general's report which is when the government is investigating itself into the operations and activities of this program well this was the domestic mass surveillance program that I talked about in the very beginning of our conversation that started under the Bush White House stellar wind was no longer supposed to be really an operation it had been unveiled in a big scandal in December 2005 in the New York Times by a journalist James risin and I I'm not gonna name him cuz I don't want to get it wrong another journalist so you can look at the byline now if you want to see their involvement but and there's there's a lot of history here too but um what they had found was of course the Bush White House had constructed a warrantless wiretapping program if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal that was affecting everyone in the United States well the Bush White House was really put in a difficult position by this scandal they would have lost the election over this scandal because the New York Times actually had this story in October 2004 which was the election year they were they were ready to go with it but at this specific request of the White House talking to the publisher of the New York Times Souls burger and Bill Keller than the executive editor of the New York Times the New York Times said we won't run the story because the president just said if you run this story a month before the election that's very tight margin if you recall you'll have blood on your hands and it was so close to 2001 the New York Times just went you know what fine Americans don't need to know that the kind of sushis being violated they don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think it means if the government says it's alright and it's a secret you shouldn't know about it that's fine now December 2005 why did that change why did the New York Times have suddenly run this story well it's because James Rison the reporter who found this story had written a book and he was about to publish this book and the New York Times was about to be in a very uncomfortable position of having to explain why they didn't run this story and how they got scooped by their own journalists and so they finally did it but it was too late Bush had been reelected and now it was sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights so Congress the Bush White House was very effective and as I said before telling a very few select members of Congress that this program existed and they told them this program existed in ways that they wouldn't object to but made them culpable for hiding the existence from the program the existence of the program from the American people and this is why someone like Nancy Pelosi who you wouldn't exactly think would be buddy-buddy with George Bush was completely okay in defending this kind of program in fact and you know later she said oh well she had objections to the program that she wrote in a letter to the White House but she never showed us the letter she went on well that was that was classified right and this is not to bag on her individually it's just she's a great example in here and not named example everyone knows of how this process works the white house will implicate certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity and so on when then when the white house gets in trouble for it the Congress has to run cover for the white house and so what happened was Congress passed an emergency law in 2007 called the protect America Act now which should have been our first indication this is a very bad thing because they never named a law something like that unless something terrible and what it did was it retroactively ly immunized all of the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day by handing your records over to the government which they weren't allowed to do simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying please do this and these companies went look now that we've been uncovered now that we've been shown that we're breaking her now that these journalists have shown that we've broken the law and violated the rights of Americans and a staggering scale that could bankrupt our companies because we can be sued for this we will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this and so we get the potato protect America Act which diseases you know as an emergency public history - yeah you can look this up on Wikipedia you know and so then they they go it's an emergency law we have to pass this now we have to keep this program active Bush is going to end the warrantless wiretapping program and continue it under this new Authority where it's gonna have some special level of oversight and these kind of things eventually but for now we just have to make sure people are safe again they go to fear they say if we don't have this program terrorist attacks will continue you know people will die blood on your hands blood on your hands blundering hands think of the children protect America Act passes the companies get off the hook the Bush White House gets off the hook the Congress that was then sharing in criminal culpability for authorizing or rather letting these things go by without stopping them then passes in 2008 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 this is called the the FAA 5-minutes Act of 2008 and rather than stopping all of the unlawful and sort of unconstitutional activities that the intelligence agency was doing they continued it in different ways simply by creating a few legal honk hoops for them to jump through now this is not to say you know these things aren't helpful at all it's not say they're not useful at all but it's important to understand when the government's response to any scandal then this applies to any country is not to make the activities of the person who is caught breaking the law comply with the law but instead make the activities of the person who is breaking the law legal right they make the law comply with what the agencies want to do rather than making the agencies comply with the law that's a problem and that's what happened here now the intelligence community's powers actually grew in response to this scandal in 2008 because Congress was on the hook and they just wanted to move on and get this over with there were objections there were people who knew this was a bad idea but it didn't passed on now what the public took away from this because a part of these laws was a requirement that the Inspector General of all of these different intelligence community elements and the Director of National Intelligence submit a report saying this is what happened under that warrantless wiretapping program this is how it complied with the law or how it didn't comply with the law and basically look back at how this program was constituted what it did what the impacts and effects were and that was supposed to be sort of the Truth and Reconciliation Council right now why am I talking about all this ancient history well I'm sitting here in 2012 with a classified inspector general's report draft report from the NSA that names names that says Dick Cheney's it says David Addington this is Nancy Pelosi that says all these people who are involved in the program the tick-tock of how it happens it says the director of the NSA that guy who is evacuating the building at the beginning of our our our podcast here that guy was asked by the President of the United States if he would continue this program after being told by the White House and the Department of Justice that these programs were not lawful but they were not constitutional and the president said would you continue this program on my say-so alone knowing that it's risky knowing that it's unlawful and he said yes sir I will if you think that's what's necessary to keep the country safe and at that moment I realize these guys don't care about the law these guys don't care about the Constitution these guys don't care about the American people they care about the continuity of government they care about this state right and this is something that people have lost we hear this phrase over and over again national security national security national security and were meant to interpret that to mean public safety but national security is a very different thing from public safety national security is a thing that in previous generations we referred to as state security national security was a kind of term that came out of the Bush administration to run cover for the fact that we were elevating a new kind of secret police across the country and what does it mean when again in a democracy in the United States the public is not partner to government the public does not hold the leash of government anymore but we are subject to government right we are subordinate to government and we're not even allowed to know that it happened no not in the book I tell the fact that the I had access to the unclassified version of this report back in Japan and what's interesting is the unclassified version of a report and we've all seen this today with things like the Muller report and all of the intelligence reporting that's happened in the last several years when the government provides a classified report to the public it's normally the same document the unclassified version the classified version of the same thing just the unclassified version has things blacked out or redacted that they say oh you're not allowed to know this sentence for this paragraph or this page or whatever the document that the public had been given about the warrantless wiretapping program was a completely different document it was a document tailor-made to deceive and mislead the Congress and the public of the United States and it was effective in doing that and in 2012 what I realized was this is what real-world conspiracies look like right it doesn't have to be smoking men behind closed doors right it's lawyers and politicians it's ordinary people from the working level to the management level who go if we don't explain this in a certain way we're all gonna lose our jobs or the other way they go we're gonna get something out of this if we all work together civilization is the history of conspiracy right what is civilization but a conspiracy for all all of us to do better by working together right but it's this kind of thing that I think too often we forget because it's boring as hell I want all your listeners right not to go to the Washington Post because this document that I discovered that the real changed me has been published courtesy of the Washington Post it's called the inspector general's report on on stellar wind and you can look at the actual document that I saw that was unredacted right I had no blacked-out pages on mine and what I believe it shows is that some of the most senior officials in the United States elected and unelected worked together to actively undermine the rights of the American people to give themselves expanded powers now in their defense they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just and noble cause right they say they were trying to keep us safe but that's what they always say that's what every government says that's no different than what the Chinese government says or the Russian government says and the question is if they are truly keeping us safe why wouldn't they simply just tell us that oh why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress why wouldn't they put that to a vote because if they were and they could convince us that they were they'd win the vote uh and particularly we all know like the Patriot Act passed one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history passed why didn't we get a vote and I think if you read the report the answer will be clear so I'm sorry Joe I went on for very no is amazing it's act don't don't apologize at all it's just completely fascinating that the continuation of this policy came down to one man and the president having this discussion that is so well it's it's much it's much more much more but right right literally the president at the heart of it yes [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

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Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: gAo8xWSny3g

Length: 41min 36sec (2496 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019