Joe Rogan Experience #1536 — Edward Snowden Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day I think it's beautiful. But this one is really important because it happened from an appeals court. I do. pro-baby act, they get to look through your email. act this is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in like It happens every single day.

4:02 And they do it, right? there's this idea called end-to-end encryption which what it means is that when you send a encrypted message, right? And Facebook goes, well, here you go, here's our copy, but we can't read it. into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court. anyone would say yes we have to stop child predators but the problem with having the

7:03 and you were someone So we have to, well, do we have motive? All you'd have to do is, and we just have to have motive so we have to well what do we have motive So. Look at your WhatsApp messages. Look at your Facebook messages. critical infrastructure of all the software running on the most popular devices in the world. Now he uses your password to log in. But to actually break into a device is that it's not

10:34 And so these guys go, if they want to target, for example, Android phones, like Google phones, like a Samsung Galaxy or something like that. They've got different chipsets. You know, they sell this stuff to Saudi Arabia. like student disappearances, or it's people like the friends and associates of Jamal Khashoggi, All you need And it'll be like an iMessage or something like that.

14:38 but basically escape the little sandbox that the browser is supposed to play in that's supposed to when they have control of the phone, they've already got your photo roll. They've already got your contact list. They already The benefit is, with that old style of attack, phone and catch it. And this is what the sort of publishing a book about all of this.

17:32 that a warrant man they can go and search your house and this is the kind of thing that we you They were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime, The instrumentalities were the tools that were used, right? Let's say you are throwing cookouts for your local police department, Once you have gained a certain amount of access and you can justify that access, like we're stopping crimes like the Patriot Act and then later the Patriot Act 2, which was even more overreaching.

20:58 If it's got a name like that, you've got to be like, no, there's something doesn't smell new authoritarianism that we see continuing in the United States today, right? And I think we discussed this in the last episode, American Civil Liberties Union, guys could do, and so they protested, and they lost, and this passed, and it went on, and lo and behold,

24:15 years after 2013. They went, guys, that's too much. If your definition of relevance is basically the impacts of these sweeping new technologies that allow governments to see all of these And how much of the brakes do they hit on this? They said, you know, first they said mass surveillance had stopped 54 terrorist attacks in the United States. This invasion of hundreds of millions of Americans' privacy happening

27:43 the question of, okay, like, as you said, but they're happening in a less abusive way. And then it's business as usual. Which means with each generation of government officials, they study this. blows the whistle on it, right? It becomes a scandal. The government, you know, they'll disown And then basically it takes another five years, another ten years for the court to

31:02 If you look at the United States, you know, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, things were objectively worse on basically every measure. the struggle, when you look at all the class conflict and divide and the political partisanship that kind of disproportionality of resources, you have that kind of disproportionality of influence. all they do is manipulate it slightly do it so

34:27 Hope and change. But the hope and change stuff was still there when you were being tried was still there save the puppies act um if you uh if you see government saying all these things or for safety I worked for the NSA. They're fighting for new laws constantly. one of the stories that came out of some kind of uh classified disclosure that i think was from from wiki leaks

38:14 I took a very comfortable life. I did not believe it was going to things would change. I did not believe it was And they really did try to destroy my life. and what they were doing was illegal and you exposed a crime. than who you called, when you called them, with this person at this phone, this place, this area code, this IP address, you know, this version

42:03 another Save the Puppies Act, which was better than the thing it was replacing, but still really bad. rights seven years later as a result. That doesn't mean we save the world. That doesn't mean we I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you have overwhelming support of the general actually was, It's who I am, where I came from, why I did this, how, and what it meant.

45:36 And this is not me publishing things putting them out on the internet or blog or something, which I could have done These documents are false. Or he's not lying. And yes, these are true, but these programs are effective. They're But those arguments stopped being convincing when seven years later, after they told us the sky is falling, the atmosphere never catches fire, right?

47:56 they were playing on character. They were trying to make a drama out of it. And that was just for one clip on YouTube. no one really cares about privacy these days these kids with their facebooks and their instagrams if somebody does the hard work to make them better. this was the question initially that led to this, but I wanted you to expand on what actually went down. But has there been any discussion about you being pardoned or someone using you as, like I said, a political chess piece.

51:06 bargaining chip has actually been used in a different way there was the idea and it's funny A pardon's not a contract. A pardon is not something that you agree to. That's accurate, because it's impossible to get a fair trial under the Espionage Act, circumstance in the United States, either because they're fearful of being criticized, Terry Albury, who revealed problems with racial policies in the FBI, how they were being abused.

55:14 a trial where the jury is not allowed to hear why a defendant did what they did. But this is – you can try to change the law but as we talked about before unless you're unless you're Jeff that have not you know, they're not that controversial, but they are being You know, because... communicate that uh after this conversation i think that would be i literally think that would

59:40 about like, how much does he know about the case?'s it's fair to say not a lot because he's intentionally being misadvised uh by his advisors you've had the attorney general This is why I haven't been advocating for pardon. There are many names. WikiLeaks, right? And he really fell out of favor in 2016 because he published the Hillary emails detainee records in Guantanamo Bay, things that are about explicit war crimes and abuses of power,

1:02:42 I mean, the guy was locked in that embassy What did he do that people disagree with, that people in the United States disagree with in terms of the citizens? under the First Amendment, no protection under the rights of the press. It's so disturbing that there are workarounds for our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, that we all just agree to, just accept that this is happening.

1:05:14 never charged the press outlets. They never charged the New York Times. They never charged He is merely a publisher. publisher of WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act without exposing the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, whoever, Then when he's dragging Clinton, it's not so great. and that propaganda stuck and people who were pro julian assange before now all of a sudden i i've i've seen these people say fuck wiki leaks you know and fuck julian assange like that guy's a

1:08:36 yet here we are in 2016 it turns up on its head and now he's a puppet of Russia It harms your society. mean is that you have to recognize that everyone has the right to their own opinion, even terrible rule of law. Whereas today, you know, we call them public officials and private citizens, And it's tribal. but people are so partisan today And I want to talk to you about that because that seems to be a gigantic issue.

1:13:35 They were banned from Twitter. I mean, it's kind of like we tolerate it. that you have to either vote for trump or biden and trying to get mainstream acceptance of a or someone saying something you vehemently oppose is a better argument. So many people on both sides are in favor of this when it's somebody they don't like, right? reasonable. And a lot of people forget this. And it came from ISIS. If you

1:18:08 Constitutionally, there's no freedom of speech issue implicated there because the Constitution restrains the federal government and the state governments in certain circumstances. Traditionally, the access to broadcast was limited. You had radio, certain people to speak. And if that person's a very unpopular speaker, if that person is broadcasts? What happens when you move to the internet? What happens when everyone everywhere

1:21:16 swastika-bearing, actual freaking Nazi. You have those people out there on the internet calling right? These people never get exposed to counter speech. And this is where things get tricky. madness it's mad because i can call you fuck face and no one has a problem with it yeah you know with a different gender because of today's political climate, that is grounds for banning

1:24:30 that's what it's called so it just shows you dead naming of today you agree with that today that I'm talking about the principle here. And I think civility is not too much to ask people generally. the question I think that's more important here is not so much what should and should not be banned, Right. And we all were. And the thing is, the worst things that we say at any moment today,

1:27:43 I did it myself, right? getting at is that the idea that you can be banned for life for that is it's preposterous I try very hard to only say things online that I would say to someone's face. You know, look, guys, I've had people literally advocating my murder, right? That's hilarious. and I really haven't got a satisfactory answer. I think when it gets as big as Twitter is, I think we've passed into a new realm.

1:32:18 And its ability to shape culture. This gets back to the electoral system, which you talked about earlier. with that in mind. And unfortunately, we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken. in a way that allows us to respond to changes in technology in a meaningful way, the ability to encrypt your communications to make them secret or private as you communicate

1:34:41 to say these kind of things can be done on the Internet, That means if they have caused enough harm that you're willing to put them in prison, You know, Russia's got a telecommunications censorship bureau. whether you can have a public presence complicated question than it appears, because you get into the whole thing of obligation of service. different country. You know, let's say there's a website in belgium that's now bound by

1:38:52 Yeah. Would that be their loophole And I think we have forgotten in many ways just we're not teaching people the golden rule well enough because we are all angry. but their economic circumstances could not be more similar. And about how so many of these ideological perspectives that they so rabidly subscribe to, they've adopted because it allows them to be accepted by their community,

1:40:54 you know, they haven't walked a mile in their shoes, as it were. I think civility should be It doesn't. And I do think it is because there is a massive slippery slope. something they think is think you should make a cake for gay people because there's nothing wrong with being gay I mean, there's an argument that that's, I mean, that's one way Yes. There's things that you've said, things that I've said, things that the person listening right now have said that they believed, that they meant that they said 10 years ago, that they said

1:45:04 that they don't like, And this gets back to those rat holes of extremism on YouTube, on Twitter, on everywhere else, as exploitative, as whatever you don't like, right, as that person, you're not, you're really making some fundamental errors with your life. We're all in this constant everything down to the very last things everything's imperfect and the idea should be that

1:48:40 things that we're struggling with i mean you see this in the context of police and in the middle of it there's this great tower, right, that rises way up and even if we don't recognize it, even if we don't speak to it, But in almost all cases, it's not punished. What has happened is we have broken the chain slightest infraction, immediately is exposed in the press. They go on trial. They go on all this

1:52:31 the laws would change instantly to enshrine the right to privacy In reality, it's a distribution of computers. And the cops are being witnessed for the first time. everyone else is, people start questioning power and how it is used, the basic legitimacy, the way it impacts our lives, what the limits of it should be. But people yet have not realized one of the responses to this should be a limitation on the amount of power that government has, or rather not just government, but institution.

1:56:00 Twitter. It's the power to decide this person who's just a regular human being and i mean this the position of power like that over folks and just to have a regular You know, you give a monkey a stick, When I understand, not just that mass surveillance exists, but I understand the mechanics of it, but I think it's different. I think the reason that I feel this way, the reason that I am okay with seeing how much we fail, seeing how much

1:59:34 or those of us who have not could if they chose to, or if they had guidance, or if they had love or friendship, in terms of how do you deal with these violent encounters training and a more stringent process of elimination, of removing people that aren't of improving this. You get people that are either calling to defund the police or you're calling for people to support police officers.

2:02:06 uh situations where you're you're going over what's the correct protocol and how to handle with the court cases and the government, you know, they get caught doing something wrong, There are cops out there who have abused their authority. There are, you know, really tragic accountability than ordinary people, right? And if we can agree on that, everything else follows

2:05:31 Go up to a dark car in the middle of the night. Well, some of them do. It is the system that is rotten. keep people safe at night. They've done a good job. And they don't want to walk the beat anymore. matter of fact whether we like to or not you gotta admit in most cases cops are bulletproof well i don't know i don't think i agree with that of being a human being in a civilized society. I think it should be treated the same way we

2:09:25 of the most vulnerable people. I mean, I think that across the board. And I mean, that's really of accountability. It's that simple from my perspective. It doesn't have to be a terrible and I think we also both agree that it's not a shock that a disproportionate amount of criminal activity Poverty breeds desperation. which are criminality, right? and trillions of dollars that were allocated to all these various businesses

2:12:47 possibilities, where you're given more access to education, more access to healthcare, more access of redlining laws and Jim Crow laws and all the things that happen after slavery. There's so many and empowered entering into the workforce. that I asked myself, you know, when you look at all the problems of today, and you know, for it's a bipartisan thing, it continued under Obama, it continued under Trump.

2:16:33 we have been generationally diminished, but I would argue long-term probably encouraged more people Imagine if the police did that, if they prevented crime by killing 84% completely innocent people. distant from the person that's holding the remote control they're saying that the people that are is going to bury this man if they get the chance for revealing abuses in the drone program and the

2:20:18 It was published in a declassified version of the FISA reauthorization for last year, where the court goes through every Were the rules broken? background in all but seven cases. I think it was seven cases out of thousands. And this is that sees everything we do and judges us, which is effectively trying to invent God, In this case, there weren't. it's a king class it's someone who could just get away with things what's a law it doesn't make any

2:23:57 that is against the law. We've created human beings that are the governed, there's no repercussions whatsoever for violating laws that can greatly impact people's lives in a needs to be changed as well well thank you uh you know i i guess there's not much more uh But listen, I said it before. And I feel like the time has come. I really do. Because as much as I would like to come home,

2:27:59 But in reality, we have never been as good as what we dreamed. Thanks so much.