Joe Rogan Experience #1368 — Edward Snowden Transcript

Transcript

0:00 And, okay, that'll just be a... we're recording now right my own setup is it possible that you could do a youtube channel era, which in our generation just sort of happened to be growing up during. And I this book existed in case the government leaned harder and harder and harder. We didn't know where But anyway, in the context of that, they were like, well, what about Joe Rogan?

2:59 They're like, well, you can go on all these major network shows. when we're talking about power, when we're talking about technology and how it controls and influences So anyway, they mentioned you. And I remember like after I had just made a Twitter account, for people who are like trying to be like politically serious you know, when you watch what you're doing, it's great stuff, man.

5:33 Fine. I was undercover working at embassies. monitoring. And this is actually like people go, well, isn't that obvious? Isn't that what they're when we had governments of absolute power, they could simply go in your home and go, by this person. You know, like, we shouldn't be afraid of the person who's got, like, a baggie of weed in their dresser or something like that. That is not a threat to national security. That is not

8:37 couple of these other folks. When they talked to the heads of the agency, the NSA and the CIA and the FBI and all this stuff, United States and around the world who they could get access to for links to Al-Qaeda. Because if What if we started using this for stuff that was other than terrorism? And we weren't allowed to know it. But they were only told partially about it.

11:25 did object to this and who wanted something to happen, but because they couldn't tell wrong. They couldn't tell what was happening. So what had happened was that a government class and then the public civil class can't do this. I didn't want to say this is how you guys have to live, because that's not for me publish no story in this archive of information simply because it was

14:25 about being criticized and blamed if something went wrong and an attack did go through. And they surveillance state because they're the ones whose hands were on the lever at the time. They got to whether we're talking about Trump now, all these guys were okay with a constantly growing surveillance That's the whole origin of the program is they want to do something that they're not allowed to do.

16:19 and hopefully what the journalists believed oh no comment. Two, is this gonna cause harm? Is anybody gonna get hurt? Is We're in 2019 now. I came forward, and these Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewan McCaskill. And the government, of course, was trying very hard to change the conversation, your take on the media and everything like that, because can be very misleading. I work hard on that. I try to mislead people. It's good.

20:32 But have you read the book? suburban communities in Maryland, where basically the entire industry of the state is the federal and those are the courts that are trying to throw me in jail for the rest of my life now. And so I spent more and more time focusing on technology, And I think a lot of people have felt that. But I ran into somebody at the trained and certified, all these little industry stamps you've got to get as a technologist to say,

24:36 born in 83, say do this or that? No, no, not for everybody, not for a long time. But at the Because I think they're gonna close the base down and I'm like, this is crazy. It never closes down We don't know what's happening. Then we start checking the news And I enter just this absolute state of pandemonium as I go past K-9 Road, power and so much money and so much authority that if at the moments we need them the most,

28:04 metro area, right? They could hit the White House. dc metro area right they could hit the white I mean, they attacked the Pentagon. the majority of their personnel off the board then, in a chance that you have no sort of grounds for related to who purchased these plane tickets. Do this. You just go full spectrum and go, That's what these people signed up to do. And yet the director goes, no, we're just no.

30:50 People ask about, you know, people I do. There are real conspiracies, but they're not typically, you know, they've got tens of thousands the reason that they weren't prevented is what they call stovepiping, right? other, without basically asking for permission, without getting a sign-off, or and it's because we had too many restrictions on the intelligence community.

34:28 There were people quite quickly who got their heads back on their shoulders the And we went, look, you know, terrorists. oh, well, we shouldn't have been surprised. why are we trading people's information like baseball cards and all of this stuff? This is not an edge case. Because of these restrictions weapons of the NSA sharing information with the CIA in the case of a major terrorist plot.

38:26 because they are very proud of the CIA accomplishing something because you want to get promoted, to each individual agency their solution was mass surveillance Whether they're at your church, whether they're across the ocean, there are people out there Nobody wants to feel like the building's going to come down the next time you go in it. and he changed it all the way until it broke and snapped off,

41:31 This is all hindsight. too much power. He's abusing it against immigrants. He's abusing it against domestic opponents. He's It doesn't matter if they're close at home. But think about that. No one had a future. And so they went, if there's somebody who can lead us out of this, with Donald Trump's White House in the United States. of fear, that typically leads to unfortunate outcomes. So sorry, let me let me turn this back

45:37 But the world's on fire, right? I see it on the news, You probably can't tell from from looking at me, but I'm not going to be at the top of the MMA circuit anytime soon. So it didn't work I got, I was in great shape, you know, in boot camp because I came up really quick because it was, you know, all I could do was gain. something like that. I'm like a towel.

48:49 And so in my memory, you know, it's like I wanted to make sure it was okay. But, you know, everybody says don't go to sick call give out underneath me, and I try to get up, and I just can't get up, and so I go to sick call, where you've got to jump out of a plane. the army to kind of escape. Or you can go out on this special kind of discharge that's called an administrative discharge, right?

51:39 And then then they let you out once the paperwork all finishes. insurance and any of those things. And it was, it was just a funny thing. But anyway, I get out of the army and here, uh, I'm on crutches for a long time and just sort of trying to figure out, all If you have a top-secret security clearance and tech skills, gotten a GED just by going in and taking a test. So for government purposes, it was the same as if

54:07 the table for one of the technical companies. It was a little tiny subcontractor nobody's ever The lights are on motion sensors. It's the creepiest thing in the world Nothing that bad is gonna happen technology they were expecting uh me just to basically make sure the building doesn't burn down, Yeah, exactly. And this has been covered a few times in open source media,

58:18 Yes, you can handle all the computers, but you can also handle the connections for the embassy's power systems, right? And the story's been told many times, I won't go over in full detail here Human intelligence is, you know, all that fun stuff we've heard the CIA doing for decades and decades, willing to destroy somebody's life. Just on the off chance they would get some information that

1:01:05 a radiation poisoning, but in a positive way. It's when you start to realize inconsistencies You know, people, these big companies, they have sales accounts to the CIA. And I'm paired up with this sales guy. and government in the classified space that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. they're just trying to get by. I was supposed to be at a group called the National Threat Operations Center, NDOC.

1:05:31 So I get ambitious, and I come up with this idea for a new system called the Heartbeat. digital ID, basically your sort of ID card that says, this is who I am. I work for this agency. You know, this is what's going on for you there. So it was basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck unless I wanted to get ambitious. This is the reason we don't understand what they're doing. This is why they can get away

1:09:25 the office next to you, right? Because you don't have need to know, right? Again, that thing from privileged access. What this means is you're a kind of super user. You know, most people have all of Somebody has to be able to actually cross these thresholds and get those things. And unless you know what stellar wind is, you don't know how to handle it.

1:12:14 Well, this was the domestic mass surveillance program that I talked about in the very beginning constructed a warrantless wiretapping program, if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal Sulzberger and Bill Keller, then the executive editor of the New York Times, 2005, why did that change? Why did the New York Times suddenly run this story? Well,

1:14:52 telling a very few select members of Congress that this program existed. And they told them just she's a great example in here, a named example everyone knows, of how this process works. simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying, please do this. And so then they go, it's an emergency law. The Bush White House gets off the hook. The Congress that was then sharing in criminal

1:18:48 response to any scandal, and 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 of all of these different intelligence community elements and the director of national intelligence that names names, that says Dick Cheney, that says David Addington, that says Nancy Pelosi,

1:21:09 I realize these guys don't care about the law, these guys don't care about the And what does it mean when, again, in a democracy, in the United States, the public is not partner to government? it's normally the same document. 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 going to lose our jobs.

1:24:23 document that I saw that was unredacted, right? expanded powers. Now, in their defense, they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just the Patriot Act passed, one of the worst came down to one man and the president having this discussion. But when you look at federal regulations, when you look at policies as an employee of government,

1:27:23 Now intersect that with what's good for them politically. We can go, I disagree with this. We can protest it. We need to be in the tightest constraints. We need to be and trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself I'm not saying everybody in the CIA and the. I'm not saying everybody in the CIA and good when it's in the service of something good. If you're loyal to a bad person, if you're loyal

1:31:28 All of this derives from that original sin, sure, you're not going to tell this mobster, when you were a teenager, right? Like, what's the worst thing you ever said? They were ephemeral. because every cell phone tower that you pass is keeping a record of that. AT&T has every phone call they ever made, rather the record that it happened, not necessarily the content that's on

1:35:24 sitting next to you in traffic, you see people looking at phones. You know, you get on a bus, you get on a subway, you know, you see somebody sitting next to you in traffic, you see people looking at phones. These devices are connected with the government have made it legal for them to gather up all of your phone calls, all of your but terrifying in terms of the government's ability to track our movements, track your phone calls, track everything.

1:38:09 And people criticize me for this. Agreed. indications, you don't need a warrant strictly. Although I think they should have warrants for put up the wrong ones. But since I came forward, this foreign intelligence surveillance court that to prove the existence of these programs legally. Because this is our means of last sort of recourse in our system, right? We get the

1:41:54 government responded with this argument that you just saw, saying that, well, it's a state secret The courts go, look, the government could be breaking the law here. okay, the only way to have the courts review the legality of the programs is to establish the programs exist. to journalists for the public interest. And then that's a fundamentally harmful thing, I think.

1:44:40 is the only thing that allows the system to operate in a context where one year before I came forward, we had the NSA saying this kind of stuff didn't happen. This is televised. And Ron Wyden asked him a very specific question about a program, mind you, MR. He actually admitted it was a lie after I came forward three months later. are, you know, they're bullshitters. The system is built on lies that even many people, many experts who have studied this know are lies.

1:48:34 I would imagine. For a long time, too long, the answer was nothing. And I'm ashamed of that. It took me so long to get over that hump because I was waiting for somebody else to do it. When I saw people like Ron Wyden on this, when I saw people I believe, and Ed Loomis. Leave that to them. But somebody somewhere was informing this reporting, right, that got into the New

1:51:15 You can have, like, the Juul versus NSA case that's run by the EFF, Maybe you're a technological specialist. Maybe you're just somebody who reads all the reporting and you the White House. They need these officials to sit down with them and give interviews, right? That's the only way this kind of stuff can happen and the sad fact is the opportunities that

1:54:35 when he was running for office and in his Hope and Change website, Well, Obama also, during his campaign, said he campaigned actively against the warrantless wiretapping, the Bush administration. During the campaign, they get clearances and they get read into stuff. these are all the threats that we're facing. And let's be real, is these guys can undermine you to death. If you've got the IC against you, right,

1:58:11 policy and always has been. That's actually one of the positive things to say about Barack Obama. And so here's the real problem. president. perfect privacy first term. Well, it seems like what you would say if you got caught. Right, right, right, right. they're no longer scared of it. They don't really care. And then they follow it up with their asks, which are really demands, just politely provided.

2:01:55 for all the good that may have been done in that White House, this is an issue where the president It seems completely unrealistic. It's really only the super states, and that may be by design, perhaps that's why they're having a smaller government overall? You know, back in 1776, the federal government, you know, The federal government especially is seen as sort of this small and toothless and weak thing.

2:05:24 Six years? June of 2013. Yeah. I mean, well, actually, I left May. They literally brought down the president of Bolivia, his I live openly. is nice because it just allows people to sort of forget about my face and I can go about And like you can barely see my face. But for me, because I'm a privacy advocate, I would much rather go unrecognized. when there's some kind of technological like locus.

2:09:11 Is that such a – is that even possible? because that's where they draw the jury pool from than what I'm actually requiring have been charged under, Thomas Drake, all these whistleblowers have been charged whistleblower argument, basically saying, we demand the court forbid this guy from breathing stand right now, They're only allowed to consider if you committed a crime.

2:13:05 arguing in the context of whistleblowing, that telling a telling a important truth to the American It's the jury that decides whether they are a whistleblower or not we have no good argument against this live your life you well yeah yeah i mean it's it's one of these things where you know whether Novosti. You guys could probably pull it. It's only in Russian, though. That's saying because I spoke favorably about a member of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny,

2:16:29 And so everyone connected to this, which is like a big civil society body, America when the U.S. government canceled my passport, which trapped me in Russia. And for to be trapped in a country that I did not choose, and people don't remember this, I was actually en route to Latin America, And it's a hard thing, you know. around the Russian president.

2:18:14 The Chinese are afraid of us. I've got an old note that I've signed a billion times. this was published by Scott Chain in the New York Times and both the Washington And then people go, oh, well, you know, you could overthrow Donald Trump. Is there any concern that they would deny you visa? I mean, how are you staying there? welcome here, or I should go home,

2:21:18 What's the alternative? making a hell of a lot of money to spy on all of you, right? and no one did, right? All you have to do is lay down one brick. All you have to do strength. That is the power of civilization. That is the power that shapes the future. That's a beautiful way to put it. unfortunately, are not especially good in protecting your privacy. Think right now.

2:25:40 your phone rings and nobody else's rings? This makes your phone different than all the other phones. and going, all right, I see Joe Rogan's phone. Because you pay for this stuff with your credit card and everything like that. Based on your phone handset and your phone number, they can get your identity, right? And anyway, it's constantly shouting this out, and then it compares notes with the other parts of the network.

2:29:13 And in fact, there's no good argument for it to be kept forever. remember it. But now these things are stored. Now these things are saved. It How is it that Facebook knows where you're at? You know, all of these things, these analytics, identifier in it and Joe's Wi-Fi, but I can also see his neighbor's Wi-Fi here, and the other one in this apartment

2:32:02 Is there a way to mitigate any of this personally? it's not sending anything because you have to get power from somewhere. I don't worry about that stuff, right? And it's because if they're applying that level of effort to me, they can derive from the compromise. And this is how operational security works. You think about How do you know when it's actually not spying on you?

2:35:00 report its own state but physically monitor its state to see if it's spying on you. But for average people, right, this academic, that's not your primary threat. off. You don't know what it's connected to. You don't know how frequently it's doing it. Apple judgment we have, a lot of people might do it. You want it to be able to connect to Facebook's

2:37:10 more visible and understandable to the average person into Facebook, and you can just poke that app, and then boom, But it's not enough to go, you know, we have to lock that capability off from process. It should be obvious. And the fact that it's not, and the fact that we read story after And they can do whatever they want with your device. But we own less and less.

2:40:30 The information then becomes influence. I mean, this is the permanent record, and this is where it came from. Around the desert somewhere, they built a big parabolic collector, if we have any kind of decency. But we were intentionally, this was intentionally concealed from us, right? very first paragraphs in right? And they go, so it's fine. Our perspective as a public should be, well, that's actually the

2:44:14 And when she would pick up, he'd just, I don't know, sit there heavy breathing, whatever, like a classic creeper. And the phone company says, yeah, sure. Some lower standard of legal review. They just want to get him off to jail. and hence no warrant was required because you can give whatever you want And so the company then has absolute proprietary ownership

2:47:02 and they are still relying on this precedent about this one, you know, governments are still pretending they don't understand or disagreeing with this. And this I think when all is said and done, Take care of yourself, man. Stay safe.