Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower and the Global Surveillance Disclosures

Transcript

So today we're opening a file that honestly >> it kind of defines the modern era of the internet. >> It really does. It's a foundational story. >> It's a story that has everything. I mean you've got a Rubik's cube, a a pole dancing girlfriend, a frantic flight to Hong Kong.

>> And look, the single largest I mean it's the largest theft of classified secrets in the history of the United States. >> We are looking at the Edward Snowden archives. And when you say archives, we really do need to emphasize the sheer weight of what we're diving into. Yeah. This isn't just about the man.

It's about >> the mountain of documents he walked out of a facility in Hawaii with. >> So for our sources today, what are we looking at? >> We're looking at uh the comprehensive Wikipedia records, which are incredibly detailed. We're also pulling from the original investigative reports from the Guardian, right? and the declassified assessments from the House Intelligence Committee, plus the court rulings that came years later. It's a huge pile of material. >> It is a massive data set.

>> And our mission today really is to cut through all the noise. You know, the endless hero versus traitor shouting mash that's been going on for a decade. >> Yeah. >> And to actually look at the mechanics of it. >> Yes.

>> How did a community college dropout get what they call god mode access to the NSA? What specific technologies did he actually reveal? And how did he end up trapped in a Russian airport for over a month? >> That's the key. We want to understand the system he revealed and just as importantly, the system that hunted him down, right? >> Because look, >> regardless of how you feel about him personally, the internet you're using right now, >> the encryption on your phone, the little lock icon in your browser, that is a direct result of what happened in 2013. So, let's start with the scale of it because I think people remember Snowden leaked stuff, but when you look at the source material, the actual numbers are >> they're all over the place. >> They are. And that discrepancy tells a story in itself.

The NSA director at the time, Keith Alexander, he initially panicked, >> understandably, >> he estimated Snowden took anywhere from uh 50,000 to maybe 200,000 documents, >> which is already a disaster for them. >> It's a catastrophe. But then you look at the report that came out later from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They put the number at 1.5 million documents. >> Wow.

1.5 million. >> And it gets worse. The Department of Defense did their own audit and added another 900,000 of their specific files to that estimate. >> That is just a staggering variance. Yeah.

>> It goes from, like you said, a briefcase full of secrets to an entire library. >> It is. And it suggests something that must have been absolutely terrifying for the intelligence community. >> What's that? >> They didn't actually know what he took. >> They couldn't track it.

>> They couldn't audit their own systems well enough to see what had been copied. They were just guessing. They were guessing based on what he could have accessed. >> Which brings us right to the central tension of this whole story, doesn't it? >> It does. >> On one hand, you have the government arguing this was just a smash and grab that endangered lives.

And on the other, you have Snowden arguing that he didn't just dump all this data online, >> right? He was very clear on that. He gave it to journalists to curate to decide what was in the public interest. >> So before we get into the leak itself, we have to understand the leaker >> because when you look at his early life, he just doesn't fit the profile of some kind of radical anti-government activist. >> Not at all. Not even close.

If you look at the biographical data, Edward Snowden >> is he's practically a legacy hire for the federal government. >> A legacy hire. Yeah. Like >> he was born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His grandfather was a rear admiral in the Coast Guard.

>> A rear admiral >> and later a senior FBI official. He was literally at the Pentagon on 911. His father was in the Coast Guard. His mother worked for the US District Court in Maryland. >> So he was a child of the Beltway through and through, >> deeply embedded in it.

They moved to Fort me, Maryland in the '90s. And Fort Me is basically the company town for the NSA, >> right? It's right there. It's the kind of place where your neighbor is probably a cryptographer and the guy at the grocery store might have a top secret clearance, >> but Snowden himself, his path was different. He didn't go the, you know, Ivy League officer training route. He uh he dropped out of high school.

>> And this is one of those details that his critics always always latch on to, the high school dropout, >> right? They use it to paint him as undisiplined or unqualified. >> But the context is really important here. It wasn't about delinquency or bad grades. It was a medical issue. >> Yeah.

A mono >> a really severe case of monucleiosis. It knocked him out for nearly nine months of school. >> Wow. >> But what's so interesting is how he recovered. He didn't just go back to high school to finish up.

He sort of he hacked the education system. >> Awesome. >> He just took the GED and passed it. Then he went straight to Anna Rundle Community College. The sources all paint a picture of someone who was clearly very bright but just impatient with traditional structures.

And culturally, he was very much a product of that early 2000s internet generation. >> Oh, absolutely. The sources list his interests as, you know, anime, Japanese popular culture, martial arts. >> He even put down his religion as Buddhism on some of his personnel forms later. >> He was a classic otaku.

He learned some Japanese. He even worked for a small anime company for a bit called Ryuana Press. It's a very relatable profile for anyone who grew up on the internet in that era. >> Living half your life on message boards. >> Exactly.

But then 9/11 happens and this is a pivot point that I think gets overlooked a lot. He didn't run away from the government after that. He ran directly toward it. >> He enlisted in 2004. >> Yep.

And he didn't sign up to, you know, fix computers or work in logistics. He signed up for the 18X program, >> which is that's a direct pipeline to special forces, >> right? He wanted to be a Green Beret. He explicitly said he wanted to free people from oppression. He was buying into the narrative of the Iraq war completely. >> So he was a true believer at that point.

>> He wanted to go overseas and fight for what he believed were American ideals, but uh the physical reality of that kind of training caught up with him. >> The sources say he broke both his legs. Is that right? >> Bilateral tibial stress fractures. It's a common injury when you push your body too hard, too fast in that kind of intense training. >> So that was it for his military career.

He was administratively discharged a few months later. So the door to physical combat closes for him, but because of his background, his family, his aptitude for tech, the door to digital combat swings wide open. >> He gets a job as a security specialist at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland. >> Right >> now, security specialist sounds pretty fancy, but from what I gather, he was basically a guard. Technically, yes, he was guarding the building, but this facility was an NSA sponsored research center.

So to work security there, even just to guard the door, he needed a top secret security clearance >> and a polygraph. >> And a polygraph. And that right there, that clearance, that's the golden ticket, >> right? >> Once you have that clearance, you are an incredibly valuable commodity in that world. In the intelligence community, the clearance is often worth more than the college degree. >> And that ticket gets him into the CIA in 2006.

He goes to a job fair and they just scoop him up. >> Of course they do. They see this computer wizard who already has a top secret clearance. It's a no-brainer for them. >> So, they send him off to training.

>> They send him to what they call the Hill, which is the CIA's secret training school for technology specialists. He lived in a hotel for 6 months, just training day and night. And by March of 2007, he's on a plane. He's stationed in Geneva, Switzerland with full diplomatic cover. Okay, so this Geneva period is fascinating because it's his first real taste of how the sausage is actually made.

It is >> Geneva is this global hub for banking, diplomacy, and obviously espionage. >> And there's this one anecdote that Snowden tells the Swiss banker incident that really seems to be a turning point for him. >> It's a scene straight out of a spa movie. Honestly, >> lay it out for us. So, Snowden claims that some CIA operatives he was working with wanted to recruit a particular Swiss banker to get access to secret financial records.

>> Okay, standard stuff. >> But it was the method. He alleges they deliberately got the banker drunk, encouraged him to drive home, and when he inevitably got arrested for a DUI. >> The CIA swoops in to save the day. >> Exactly.

A CIA operative swoops in and offers to fix the problem with the local police in exchange for his cooperation. In other words, in exchange for becoming an informant. >> It's straight up blackmail or at least leveraged recruitment. >> It's manipulation. Now, we have to be rigorous with the sources here.

This is Snowden's account. The Swiss president at the time, Wheelie Murr, he publicly disputed this story later on. >> On what grounds? >> He basically said it was highly unlikely the CIA could just bribe or manipulate the Geneva police or their judiciary to make a DUI charge just disappear, >> which is fair. Swiss bureaucracy is famously rigid. >> Exactly.

But here's the thing. Whether the event happened exactly as Snowden described it or not, the impact on him was real. >> It planted a seed of doubt. >> It was the beginning of his disillusionment. He felt the agency was more interested in manipulating people for its own ends than in actually protecting them.

He started to see the human intelligence side of the business as well as morally corrosive. >> So, he resigns from the CIA in 2009, >> but he doesn't leave the game. >> Not at all. He just changes teams in a sense. as he jumps over to the private sector to Dell.

>> And this is a distinction that I think is absolutely critical for you to understand if you want to get this story. He's now working for the NSA, but he is employed by Dell. >> This is the era of massive outsourcing in the intelligence community. Post 9/11, the surveillance state just grew so fast the government couldn't hire people fast enough. >> So they turned to contractors.

>> They turned to contractors like Dell and later booze Allen Hamilton. So Snowden is at Dell from 2009 to 2013. He's assigned to NSA facilities first in Japan and then back in Maryland. And he is not some low-level tech support guy. No, his title is cyber strategist.

>> He described his role as literally sitting down with the CIO of the central intelligence agency to solve their hardest technical problems. He had what they call privilege access >> or god mode, >> cisadmin access. As a systems administrator, you have to be able to see everything to fix everything. You're the custodian of the entire network. >> You have keys that the generals and the agency directors don't have.

You can see the file structures, the user directories, the raw data streams, everything. >> So, he's in this position of immense power and trust. He's seeing the raw data. He's already disillusioned. But what was the final catalyst? What turns him from a disillusioned employee into a whistleblower who is willing to literally burn his entire life to the ground? Snowden himself points to a very specific date, March 12, 2013.

>> Okay. >> He's watching a televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, and Senator Ron Weiden asks James Clapper, who is the director of national intelligence, a very direct and actually a prepared question. >> I remember this clip so vividly. Weiden asks, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" >> And you can see Clapper just squirm. He rubs his forehead.

He leans back and he replies, "No, sir." And then he adds the weasel words. >> He pauses and then he adds, "Not wittingly." >> Which Snowden knew for a fact was an outright lie. >> He knew because he was one of the people looking at the systems that did exactly that every single day. Snowden said later that seeing the highest intelligence official in the entire country lie under oath to the Congressional Oversight Committee. That meant the entire system of checks and balances was broken.

>> There was no internal channel to report this to. How could there be? The people at the very top were in on the deception. If the oversight committee is being lied to, then oversight doesn't exist. It's a sham. >> So that's it.

He decides to act. And this move he makes in early 2013 is very, very calculated. He leaves his job at Dell, >> a job he apparently liked and was paid very well for. >> And he takes a pay cut to go and join Booze Allen Hamilton. Why that specific switch? >> It was a tactical move.

Booze Allen Hamilton had a specific contract at the NSA's regional operations center in Hawaii. the place they call the Couna tunnel, >> right? >> And this specific position gave him access to a different set of lists and directories that he needed to complete his collection. He explicitly sought out that job to get that specific data. He was positioning himself for the heist. >> Let's talk about the heist itself.

So, Hawaii, paradise on the outside, a subterranean intelligence bunker on the inside. How does one person move potentially 1.5 million classified documents out of a secure facility like that? >> The reality is surprisingly mundane. >> No Mission Impossible style acrobatics. >> No, we know he started downloading some documents while he was still at Dell, but the bulk of it happened in Hawaii. And he used thumb drives.

>> Thumb drives. >> Mini SD cards. Things you could easily conceal. >> But thumb drives? >> Yeah. >> In a top secret NSA facility.

Don't they check your pockets when you leave? Well, it highlights a massive security gap at the time. The NSA's systems were all designed to keep people out. They weren't very good at monitoring the people who were already inside. >> Insider threat, >> the ultimate insider threat. But there was also this social engineering element that has been debated heavily ever since.

>> What's that about? >> Reuters reported on this, citing anonymous government officials. They claimed that Snowden persuaded somewhere between 20 and 25 of his co-workers to give him their login credentials. >> The classic IT move. Hey, I just need your login to run a system update real quick. >> That's exactly the alleged pretext.

He told them he needed their credentials to perform his duties as a systems administrator to do maintenance on the servers. >> And if that's true, it would have allowed him to access parts of the network his own clearance might not have covered. >> Or perhaps more importantly to mask his activities to make it look like other people were accessing these files, not just one guy downloading the entire library. >> But Snowden denies this. He denies it vehemently.

His quote is, "I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers." >> So, what's his argument? >> His argument is simple. Why would I need their passwords? I was the system admin. I already had the keys to the kingdom. >> It's possible both things are true. In a way, he had the access, but maybe he used their credentials to cover his tracks.

>> It's certainly possible, but regardless of the exact method, by May of 2013, he has the data. He's already made contact with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Pitus. He's using code names. >> You use Catis, right? >> Catis and also Verax, which is Latin for trutht teller. >> Catis is a really telling choice, though.

>> It's so specific. >> For those who don't know, Cenatis was the Roman farmer who was granted absolute dictatorial power to save Rome from an invasion. He won the war, saved the republic, and then immediately gave up all that power and went back to his farm. >> It shows you exactly how Snowden viewed himself. Not as a new ruler, not as someone who wanted to decide what happens next, >> but as a citizen stepping in during a crisis to fix a problem and then handing the power, the information back to the public.

>> Precisely. >> So May 20th, 2013, he tells his supervisor at Booze Allen that he needs to take some medical leave. He says he needs treatment for epilepsy, a condition he had been diagnosed with, which made the story credible. >> So, he packs a bag, heads to the airport, but he's not going to a doctor's appointment. >> No, he gets on a plane and flies to Hong Kong.

>> Then why Hong Kong? >> He chose it very carefully. He said he believed it had a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political disscent and crucially a legal system that was at the time still seen as independent from both mainland China and the US. He thought he could fight extradition there. >> He checks into the Mera Hotel and this is where the story really takes on that spy thriller vibe. He's holed up in his room and he's paranoid about surveillance.

>> But it's a practical paranoia. The details are incredible. He lined the crack under his hotel room door with pillows to stop people from eavesdropping from the hallway. Okay. >> And when he entered his passwords into his laptop, he put a large red hood over his head and the screen.

>> A hood [clears throat] like a blanket. >> It's called a magic mantle. It's a specialized hood usually used by photographers to see their screens in bright sunlight. But in the Intel world, it's used to prevent hidden cameras from seeing what you're typing. >> Like a camera in a smoke detector or vent.

>> Exactly. Or even a longrange camera from a window across the street. If they can record your keystrokes, they can get your password and then all your encryption is useless. So he's sitting there under this red hood communicating with the journalists. And then early June 2013, the first articles drop.

>> The Guardian and the Washington Post start publishing. The bomb goes off. The world finds out about this massive surveillance state. >> And the US government's reaction is swift. >> It's nuclear.

They immediately revoke his passport. They charge him with multiple counts under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. The manhunt begins. He needs to get out of Hong Kong. >> And this is where the plan starts to fall apart, isn't it? >> Yeah.

He wasn't trying to stay in Hong Kong forever, and he certainly was not trying to end up in Russia. >> No, absolutely not. His intended destination, his goal was Ecuador. >> Ecuador? That seems a bit random. >> Not really.

At the time, Ecuador had been granting asylum to Julian Assange, who was living in their London embassy. So, it was seen as a safe harbor for whistleblowers. >> So, he had a plan to get there. >> He had a whole plan. He had actually secured an emergency travel document from Ecuador.

The flight path was supposed to be a multi-leg journey. Hong Kong to Moscow, Moscow to Havana, Cuba, and then Havana to Ecuador. >> So on June 23rd, he boards the Aeroflot flight to Moscow. He lands at Sheratvo airport. He walks off the plane ready to go to the gate for his connecting flight to Havana.

And then what happens? >> Nothing. The computer says no. >> What do you mean? While he was in the air flying from Hong Kong to Moscow, the US State Department officially canceled his passport. So the moment he landed in Moscow, he was technically stateless. He couldn't legally enter Russia because he didn't have a Russian visa.

And he couldn't board the next plane to Cuba because he no longer had a valid travel document. >> And there are reports that it wasn't just a passport issue, that there was immense geopolitical pressure being put on Cuba. >> Oh, almost certainly. Sources suggest the US basically threatened Cuba with severe consequences if they allowed that Aeroflot plane to land in Havana with Snowden on it. >> So the flight leaves without him.

>> The Havana flight leaves without him. And Edward Snowden is stuck. He is physically and legally trapped in the transit zone of Sher Matibo airport, >> which is a kind of legal limbo, right? It's not technically Russian soy. >> It's a no man's land between borders. >> And he stays there for 39 days.

>> 39 days. Just imagine that for a second. Living in an airport terminal, >> sleeping on benches, >> eating whatever you can get from vending machines or what the airport staff might bring you, all the while not knowing if a US SEAL team is going to raid the terminal or if the FSB is going to hand you over. >> And while he's sitting there probably watching the news on the airport TVs, the US is becoming so desperate to catch him that they cause this massive international diplomatic crisis. >> The Evo Morales incident.

This story is just wild. >> It is absolutely insane. And it's a story that I think got a bit buried in the US media at the time, but it was a huge deal globally. >> So, what happened? >> Evo Morales, who was the president of Bolivia, was in Moscow for a conference. He gets on his presidential plane to fly back to Bolivia.

Mid-flight, France, Spain, and Italy all suddenly deny his plane access to their airspace. >> They grounded a sovereign president's plane. That's that's practically an act of aggression. It is virtually unheard of in modern diplomacy. And they did it because of a tip or pressure from the US who suspected that Snowden was hiding on board.

>> So the plane was forced to land. >> It was forced to land in Vienna, Austria. The Spanish ambassador allegedly tried to invite himself onto the plane to drink coffee and, you know, take a look around. Morales was furious. He called it a kidnapping and a violation of international law.

>> And of course, Stoden wasn't on the plane. >> No, he was still sitting in the airport terminal. probably eating a bag of chips. But the incident proved to Snowden and his lawyers that there was a global drag net out for him. >> Right? >> If the US could pressure its European allies to ground a head of states plane, Snowden had zero chance of ever getting on a commercial flight to Latin America without being intercepted.

>> It effectively sealed his fate. Russia was the only place he could be. >> Eventually, Russia granted him temporary asylum, which allowed him to finally leave the airport. And just like that, the whistleblower who wanted to expose the American surveillance state and flee to Latin America was stranded in Moscow. >> So he's in exile, >> but the files are out.

And I want to shift gears to the what part three, the revelations because I think a lot of people get the different programs confused. You hear Prism, XCORE, Muscular. Let's break down what these actually were. Let's start with Prism. >> Prism was the first big headline grabber.

It was the program that showed the NSA was collecting user data directly from the servers of US service providers. >> We're talking Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, >> all of them, all the big names. >> Now, the tech companies pushed back on this really hard. They came out and said, "We do not give the government a back door to our systems." >> And that's a crucial nuance that's important to understand. It wasn't a back door in the sense that the NSA could just hack in whenever they wanted.

It was more like a a forced front door. A front door that was opened by secret courts. >> Exactly. The NSA would go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FISA court, get a secret order, serve it to Google, and Google was legally compelled to hand over the data. >> What kind of data? >> Emails, photos, chat logs, videos, stored data, pretty much anything associated with a specific target.

>> So, it was a legal process, but a secret legal process, >> right? The big controversy was about the scope. The NSA was only supposed to target foreigners reasonably believed to be outside the United States. But if that foreigner was emailing an American citizen, >> their data gets swept up too. >> It gets swept up in the collection. They called it incidental collection.

But given how interconnected the world is, that's a lot of incidental data on American. >> So Prism is the legal front door collection. But then there's Muscular. And this is the one that really really angered the engineers in Silicon Valley. >> Well, they were furious.

Muscular is a completely different beast. This was a joint program between the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ. >> And what was it doing? >> They basically realized that while they could ask Google and Yahoo for data through the Prism front door, that legal process was sometimes slow and bureaucratic. So they just decided to take the data instead. >> They hacked the infrastructure between the company's own data centers.

>> So not from the public internet, but the private links. >> Exactly. So Google has these massive data centers all over the world. When you send an email, the data might move from a server in Dublin to a server in Finland for backup. That data travels over private leased fiber optic cables.

The NSA found the physical spots, often outside the US, where those cables were unencrypted, and they tapped them. >> They were just copying the entire data stream as it flowed by. They were literally copying the data as it flowed through the pipes, completely bypassing the company's legal teams, their encryption, everything. >> And there was that slide in the leaks that showed this. Yeah, the famous smiley face slide.

>> Yes. It's this handdrawn diagram showing the public internet and the Google cloud. And right in the middle on the link connecting them, some NSA analyst had drawn a little smiley face. >> That's unbelievably arrogant. That smiley face represented the point where the NSA was secretly siphoning off all their data.

When Google engineers saw that slide, they were apoplelectic. >> I can imagine >> one senior engineer posted on Google plus a just f these guys. It felt like such a profound violation of the basic trust of the internet. They were working so hard to encrypt the front door and the spies were just breaking in through the basement window. Okay, so you have Prism pulling data from the front door, Muscular from the back, and then you have the tool that brings it all together, Xkeycore.

>> Xkeycore is you can think of it as Google for spies. >> Okay, >> all that data from Prism, from Muscular, from other collection programs like Upstream, it all goes into these massive databases. >> But WA data is useless if you can't search it. X Keycore is the search bar for all of it. >> Snowden made a claim about this program that at the time people called hyperbole.

>> They did. He said, "I sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the president if I had a personal email address." >> And the government immediately denied that capability. They called it a wild exaggeration. But the X Keycore training manuals that were in the leaks, they basically confirmed it. >> So, how did it work? An analyst could sit at their terminal and with just an email address or a phone number or an IP address, they could pull up a user's entire internet history, their chats, their metadata, their browsing activity.

It didn't require a specific warrant for every single search. It was an analyst driven query system. >> So, an analyst could just type in an email address and hit enter. >> Effectively, yes. Now, there were internal auditing logs and rules about what you could search for, but the technical capability to do so without prior judicial approval was there >> and it wasn't just used for hunting terrorists.

That's the argument we always hear, right? We need these tools to stop the bad guys, right? >> But the leaks show that the targets of this surveillance went far far beyond that. >> Absolutely. We saw clear evidence of economic espionage. They were spying on Petrorast, the state-owned Brazilian oil company, to get an edge in oil contract negotiations to understand Brazil's energy strategy. That's not counterterrorism.

They were spying on Wain Elmunia, who was the EU's competition commissioner. And most famously, they were monitoring the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, >> which caused a massive diplomatic rift, spying on your closest allies. >> It destroyed a lot of trust. But maybe the most disturbing aspect for the average person was the revelation of the love scandal. >> Lovevent like sign for signals intelligence or human for human intelligence.

>> Exactly. It's a dark play on those acronyms. Levvent was the internal slang term for NSA employees using these incredibly powerful surveillance tools to stalk their own love interest. >> You're kidding me. >> No.

Girlfriends, boyfriends, ex- spouses. There were multiple documented cases. >> So, is my husband cheating on me? And you just check X key score >> precisely. Or who was that cute person I met at the bar? Let me run their email. It showed that without strict independent external oversight, these tools were being abused for petty personal reasons.

Now, it wasn't widespread systemic abuse, but the fact that it happened at all showed the internal controls were just not sufficient. >> And then there was that other tactic tracking the pornography habits of people they considered radicalizers. >> Yes. The idea there was that if someone was preaching radical views online, the NSA could dig up embarrassing personal details, like their specific porn habits, and then leak that information to destroy their reputation and their moral authority. >> It's a weaponization of privacy.

They weren't trying to arrest them. They were just trying to ruin them publicly. >> Exactly. >> So, if the files are out, the world is changing. Let's look at the aftermath, part four.

How did the US government respond officially? >> Aggressively. the narrative from the top from President Obama, from James Clapper, from Secretary of State John Kerry, it was very consistent. >> What was that narrative? >> They argued that Snowden had caused grave and serious damage to national security. They argued that by revealing the how the methods we use to track terrorists, he had essentially taught them how to hide. >> They said he put troops at risk.

>> They did. Though it's worth noting that in the decades since, the government has never publicly identified a specific individual who was killed or a specific military operation that was botched as a direct result of the Snowden leaks. But the potential for harm was their main argument. >> Dan Donald Trump back in 2013 before he was president was even more blunt about it. >> Oh yeah.

He tweeted multiple times that Snowden was a traitor and implied he should be executed. He called him a spy who should be executed. But ironically, years later, when he was president in 2020, she actually floated the idea of pardoning him. >> He did. It was a complete reversal.

He said, "I'm going to look at it." And noted that a lot of people think he's not being treated fairly. His attorney general, Bill Bar, apparently shut that down very quickly. >> It just shows you how the political winds had shifted on the issue. But the real vindication for Snowden didn't come from politicians. It came from the courts.

Yes, this is the part of the story that often gets left out of the traitor narrative. In September of 2020, 7 years after the leak, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling. >> In what case? >> The case was United States v. Mullen. And they reviewed the legality of the bulk collection of American telephone metadata, the very first program Snowden exposed.

>> And what did the court find? >> They ruled that the program was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. They stated that the program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. >> That is a mic drop moment, isn't it? >> It is. >> The program that started this whole thing was illegal. >> The court essentially confirmed that the intelligence leaders who had defended the program publicly and under oath to Congress had not been telling the truth about its legality.

>> And we saw legislative change, too. >> We did. The USA Freedom Act passed in 2015 formally ended that specific type of bulk collection of phone records. So the law changed, >> but I would argue the Snowden effect on technology itself was even bigger than the laws. >> 100%.

It was a sea change. Before Snowden, the vast majority of the internet was unencrypted. HTTP was the standard. Your your emails were basically sent like postcards. Anyone handling them along the way could read them.

>> And after Snowden, >> after Snowden, Silicon Valley panicked. They realized they couldn't trust the pipes, the basic infrastructure of the internet. >> They realized their entire business model depended on user trust. And that trust was gone. >> Exactly.

So they raced to roll out endto-end encryption. WhatsApp, iMessage, signal these became the standard. Websites rapidly moved to HTTPS by default. If you look at a graph of encrypted internet traffic worldwide, there is just this massive vertical spike right after 2013. >> So the internet became hardened against surveillance because of the leaks, >> without a doubt.

>> So we've changed the internet. We've changed the laws. But Snowden himself, he's still in Russia. Let's talk about part five. Life in exile.

What is his life actually like over there? >> It's a very strange frozen existence that has slowly over a decade thawed into a new reality. >> He lives in Moscow. >> He lives in Moscow. He isn't in a goolog or some safe house. He has an apartment.

And critically, he isn't alone. his longtime girlfriend, Lindseay Mills, >> the woman he left behind in Hawaii without a word. >> That's the one. She actually moved to Russia in 2014 to be with him. >> That is a serious testament to loyalty.

I mean, moving to Moscow to be with the most wanted man in the world. >> It really is. They got married in a private ceremony in 2017, and they now have two sons, both born in Russia. So, he is raising a family there. He's learning the language, though he admits he's not very good at it.

>> And how is he making a living? He's not on the Russian payroll according to him. >> No, he's become a prominent figure on the global speaker circuit. He beams into conferences, universities, and tech events via video link. >> Now, he gets paid for that. >> He gets paid well.

He has reportedly earned over $1.2 million from speaking fees alone. He's a very popular speaker on topics like privacy and cyber security. >> And then there's his book, Permanent Record, >> a huge bestseller, published in 2019. But there's a big catch with the book. >> What's that? The US government sued him for all the proceeds.

Not for the content. They couldn't stop the book from being published under the First Amendment, but because he had violated the non-disclosure agreements he signed when he joined the CIA and NSA. >> He didn't submit the manuscript for pre-publication review. >> He didn't. And a judge ruled that the US government is therefore entitled to seize every dollar he made from it, over $5 million.

So, he wrote the book, he told his story, but he didn't get rich off it. Okay, we have to address the elephant in the room here. He is in Russia. He is living there as a guest of Vladimir Putin. >> It is the great glaring irony of his entire narrative.

>> Right? He sacrificed his life to expose state surveillance. And now he lives under a regime that is notorious for state surveillance, for suppressing disscent, and for jailing journalists. >> It's a fundamental contradiction he has to live with every day. >> Has he been critical of Russia at all? >> He has, but carefully. He's called the Russian government problematic.

He's criticized some of their big brother laws like the Uravioa law which requires telecom companies to store user data. >> But he walks a tightroppe. >> He has to. He can't push too hard or he risks losing his sanctuary. There's nowhere else for him to go.

>> And in September of 2022, that relationship was formalized. Vladimir Putin granted Edward Snowden full Russian citizenship. >> He swore the oath of allegiance. Snowden's reasoning was that it was to ensure stability for his family. He didn't want to be separated from his Russian-born sons if his asylum status was ever revoked.

He didn't want to be stateless anymore. >> But for his critics, >> for his critics, seeing the American whistleblower accept a Russian passport from Putin was the final confirmation of his traitor status. The optics were terrible for him. >> And his stance on the Ukraine invasion has complicated things even further. >> It really has.

In the weeks leading up to the 2022 invasion, Snowden was very publicly skeptical of the US intelligence reports that said Russia was about to attack. He tweeted that he thought the warnings were a disinformation campaign. >> He didn't trust the US intelligence agencies. >> Fundamentally, no. His default position is to assume the CIA is lying.

He thought they were crying wolf again like they did with WMDs in Iraq. But this time they were right. >> And he was wrong. >> And he was very publicly wrong. When the invasion actually happened, he faced a massive backlash for having, even if unintentionally, echoed the Kremlin's line that they weren't the aggressors.

He later walked it back and said he lost confidence in his own skepticism, but the damage to his reputation was done. >> It shows that even a world famous whistleblower can have blind spots, especially when their personal survival depends on the goodwill of their host country. >> It just it muddies the water. It makes him an incredibly complex and compromised figure. But I think it's important that we try to separate the man from the revelation.

The man is in a very difficult geopolitical position. The revelations themselves, however, are facts. Facts that change the world we live in. >> So, we wrap up with this fundamental question. Is there any way back for him? Can he ever come home? >> He says he would return tomorrow if he could be guaranteed a fair trial.

But under the law he was charged with the Espionage Act of 1917, a fair trial is basically impossible for him. >> Explain that to the listener. What does that mean? >> If you are charged under the Espionage Act, you are not allowed to make a public interest defense. >> So, you can't tell the jury why you leaked the documents. >> Correct.

You cannot stand up in court and say, "I did this to save the Constitution," or, "I did this because the government was lying to the American people." The court will not allow that testimony. The only question the jury is allowed to consider is did you or did you not take the documents and give them to an unauthorized person? >> And since he freely admits he did that, >> the trial will be over in 10 minutes. He would be found guilty and would be facing decades, potentially the rest of his life in a federal prison. So unless that law changes or a future president decides to pardon him, he is a Russian citizen for life. >> Which leaves us with a really provocative thought to end on.

think the US judicial system years later eventually agreed with Snowden the mass surveillance program was illegal. The system corrected itself, but only because of his leak, >> right? >> So, if the catalyst for that correction is treated as a criminal who can't even get a fair trial, what does that say about our system of checks and balances? Does it mean it only works when someone is willing to break the law to trigger it? And to take that one step further, if you look at it from a pure cold geopolitical perspective by revoking his passport and forcing him into the arms of an adversary, did the US intelligence community accidentally create the very thing they feared? Did they hand a permanent high-value intelligence asset to Russia on a silver platter? Was trapping him in that airport the greatest strategic failure of this entire saga? >> That is a heavy question. Thanks for diving deep with us on the Snowden Files. Stay curious >> and stay encrypted.