Title: S2E8 Snowden
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2026-07-06
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6a485ef404fac73b24f25696/media.mp3
Duration: 0:43:59

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[06:41] put Ed inside a covert NSA facility on the university's campus. The center worked closely with the US intelligence community, providing advanced language training. For Ed, with his unequaled IT skills, it was all right place, right time. He wrote this, quote, the degree thing is crap, at least domestically. If you really have 10 years of solid, provable IT experience, you can get a very well-paying IT job, unquote. As Ed discovered,

[07:11] one could pretty much name one's own price or feel like they had. Ed named his at the CIA in 2006, where they made him a telecommunications information systems officer. In 2007, the CIA sent Ed to Geneva, Switzerland to oversee security for the CIA's computer network and computer security for US diplomats. For what it's worth, the embassy's heating and air conditioning also were within his purview, oddly enough. At that point, Ed was 24 years old,

[07:42] leaning libertarian. He liked John McCain, didn't support Obama, but wasn't against him either. That changed once Obama became president and sought to ban assault weapons. Ed's displeasure deepened when the New York Times, using leaked classified information, published a report about a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran. Interesting in retrospect, isn't it? We had no idea how innocent we were back then. Ed wrote in ours Technica, quote, WTF New York Times. Are they trying to start a war? They're reporting classified shit. Moreover,

[08:16] who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this? Those people should be shot in the balls. That shit is classified for a reason, unquote. Ironically, even as Ed was stewing in that us versus them vibe, he was wrestling with the us. He wrote later, quote, Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good, unquote. Plenty of people get disillusioned by life, by their relationships, by their jobs, and perhaps

[08:52] they rationalize it away. Ed couldn't rationalize away his disillusionment. Once it set in, it took root. In February 2009, Ed quit the CIA and went to work as a contractor for Dell computers at an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan. He got the job because of his outstanding computer skills and top secret security clearance, except now those attributes were sharing headspace with Ed's conscience. Between 2009 and 2012, Ed grew increasingly concerned about the NSA's aggressive

[09:25] surveillance activities. Ed had hoped and expected that under Obama's leadership, the NSA's overreach would diminish or go away, except it didn't. It increased and it got worse. Ed wrote this, quote, I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in. They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them, unquote. All the checks that had been built into the US system, all designed to keep the NSA from abusing

[09:59] its power, had failed. Ed wrote, quote, you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act, unquote. Ed would later articulate it this way, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Ed began to appreciate that undefended rights can easily become vulnerable rights or no longer rights at all. In 2012, still a Dell contractor. Ed left

[11:06] with far reaching implications that already had impacted ordinary law-abiding Americans and others. I had anecdotal truth based on information I had learned and documents I had seen. Ed had the actual documents in his hand and he intended to expose them in order to tell America some terrible truths that it needed to hear. The challenge facing Ed Snowden, how exactly to do it? The NSA would later characterize Ed as a malicious hacker who cheated on an NSA entrance exam and whose work computers had to be destroyed after his departure for fear that he had infected them

[11:41] with some sort of malware. That's entirely inaccurate. But the mischaracterization isn't a bug here. As it was in my own case, mischaracterization is very much the point. If Ed isn't the person the NSA says he is, then it's likely his crime isn't what they say it is either. Was Ed a malicious hacker who stole access to the NSA computers? Hardly. Ed can hack a computer of course, but that was a gross mischaracterization. Andy Greenberg in Forbes magazine pointed out that Ed didn't dupe his co-workers or anybody else into handing over their passwords,

[12:14] nor did he fabricate SSH keys to gain unauthorized access. No, everyone gave Ed full access. Willingly. Because he knew the system better than anyone else. As malware was never part of what Ed was doing, then we have to ask what was the real reason the NSA had to destroy Ed's computers. If it wasn't malware making them dangerous, what was? To the worried folks at the NSA. You see, that's the problem with lying. Looking at you, NSA, you don't get to control how other people perceive you. Like for instance, if they perceive you as dishonest, none of us

[12:49] gets to control whether or not we have integrity. That's for other people to judge. And when we lose our integrity, it's just gone. I suspect something like that was roiling Ed Snowden's conscience in early 2013. He'd learned things that had changed his worldview, changed what he was willing to do to stop the thing he'd learned about. The question of how to pull it off remained a question. According to Luke Harding, writing in The Guardian, in early 2013, Ed turned down an offer from the CIA to join its tailored access operations. A group of elite hackers opting instead to take a new job

[13:25] with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. His new salary was $122,000 a year plus a housing allowance. By all rights, he should have felt like the king of the world. But on April 4th, he seemed preoccupied, as Luke Harding put it, quote, as if he was nursing a burden, unquote. That was according to Ed's father, Lon. The two had just had dinner. Ed had flown to the US mainland to attend training sessions at Booz Allen's office near Fort Meade Maryland. Ed told the South China Morning Post, quote, my position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted

[13:58] me access to lists of machines all over the world that the NSA hacked, unquote. That, he pointed out, was exactly why he had accepted the job. This from Luke Harding's Guardian coverage, quote, Ed was one of around 1000 NSA sysadmins allowed to look at many parts of this system. Other users with top secret clearance weren't allowed to see all classified files. He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a ghost user able to haunt the agency's hallowed places. He may also

[14:34] have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him, unquote. Ed was a man on a mission. He knew the system he had to exploit to accomplish his goal, and he exploited it fully. Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff, but a sysadmin, like Ed, could say that he was fixing a computer. He was fixing a user profile and needed backup. While most NSA staff back in DC had already gone home for the night, Ed in Hawaii would start logging on for the day. There, from his cozy remote perch, he would reach deep inside NSA's

[15:10] servers. Four weeks into his new job, Ed told his bosses that he was unwell. He wanted some time off and requested unpaid leave. When they checked back with him, he told them that he had epilepsy, a condition that affects his mother. And then, on May 20th, Ed vanished. Enter then-Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald regularly received emails with tips of one kind or another. That was part of the job. But in December of 2012, one of Greenwald's readers, a mystery correspondent, told him that they had, quote,

[15:41] some stuff you might be interested in, unquote. At the time, if you remember, Ed was a Dell contractor working at the NSA's Regional Cryptological Center in Hawaii, and he was wrestling with his conscience. Late January 2013, having failed to connect with Greenwald, Ed reached out to a friend of Greenwald's, the documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras. Ed suspected that she would be sympathetic to him and his story. For six years, between 2006 and 2012, every time Poitras entered the U.S., agents from the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security,

[16:15] would detain her, interrogate her, confiscate her laptops, cameras, notebooks, and mobile phones, and demand to know with whom she was meeting. Ed emailed Poitras, quote, I am a senior member of the intelligence community. This won't be a waste of your time, unquote. He asked for her encryption key, which she gave to him. As she later explained, she was intrigued, quote, at that point, my thought was either it's legit or it's entrapment, unquote. It's worth noting to me anyway, that Poitras described Ed as, quote, an amazing writer,

[16:51] everything I got read like a thriller, unquote. That's when Ed dropped a bombshell. He had a copy of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a top secret 18-page document issued in October 2012, that showed the agency was tapping fiber optic cables, intercepting telephone landing points, and bugging on a global scale. And Ed could prove all of it. Summertime and the living is easy, am I right, John? That is one of the best parts of Summer Allen. Living really does feel easier.

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[25:05] asylum and then later Russian citizenship. I had been in prison for three months and a few days when Dave woke me up in the middle of the night and whispered excitedly that someone had gone public with explosive information about the CIA and NSA spying on Americans. Dave was having trouble sleeping that night and he was listening to this national AM show

[25:36] called Coast to Coast AM. Usually they talk about conspiracies and UFOs and things like that, but the Snowden story was breaking. Middle of the night, I turn on my own radio to try to get updates. Now at night, that's when a lot of stations on AM go to 50,000 watts. Even in Laredo, Pennsylvania, I could hear news stations from New York, Chicago, Toronto, even Dallas, KRLD in Dallas. So I start hearing about this whistleblower. Nobody knows who it is,

[26:12] but he released all this incredible information. It was a violation of this law and that law and the other law and oh my god, the CIA and NSA are spying on us. Well, within just a few hours, it became clear that this whistleblower was a contractor who had been a CIA employee and was now working for Booz Allen at NSA. His name was Edward Snowden. Of course, every news outlet then attempted a deep dive into who Ed Snowden was and every hour the story is being updated.

[26:47] It was Dave that said, you know what, you should write a letter to this guy. Clearly, you guys operate in the same circles. You could write him a public letter through Firedog Lake and the Huffington Post, but you should write him a private letter too. Certainly, you have friends in common. Well, he was right. But the time Dave was still claiming to be a CIA employee or a former CIA employee, I later was able to determine he had been very, very briefly a CIA contractor

[27:19] for a minute. But he knew enough and was insightful enough that, you know, he thought this was a good idea and lo and behold, it was. I emailed my friend and attorney, the whistleblower activist Jess Lynn Radak at the Government Accountability Project. Then I said, Jess, do you have a path to this Ed Snowden? She said, I have several paths to Ed Snowden. First of all, my dear friend and attorney, Bruce Fine, ended up representing Ed Snowden. Secondly, my dear friend and former CIA

[27:52] colleague Ray McGovern immediately reached out to Snowden and visited him. In the meantime, Snowden was on the run. He had gone to Hawaii and then from Hawaii to Hong Kong. He was able to escape to Hong Kong. He bought a ticket to Ecuador. The Ecuadorians offered him asylum. So he was transiting Moscow Airport when Secretary of State John Kerry disingenuously invalidated his passport and stranded him permanently, as it turned out,

[28:26] in Moscow. I especially hate it when I hear people say that Snowden defected to Russia. Oh no, he didn't. John Kerry put him in Russia. This is all on John Kerry. In retrospect, it was a stroke of luck that Snowden didn't get to Ecuador. You might recall that the Obama administration forced a private jet carrying the president of Ecuador to land in Vienna,

[28:59] Austria, forced using two F-16s to land in Vienna, Austria, because there was a rumor that Snowden was on board the plane. That's an act of war. You can't force a sovereign's plane down and then search it. Snowden was not on the plane. He was in the transit lounge at Moscow Airport. Well, Julian Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and was there for years, something like nine years. The US government, really the CIA,

[29:34] was successful in removing the left-wing government of Ecuador and installing a right-wing pro-American government in Ecuador. The Ecuadorians gleefully gave up Julian Assange. Ed Snowden would likely be in a maximum security penitentiary today if he had made it to Ecuador. Instead, he has become a Russian citizen. He's a coder at a Russian social media company. His girlfriend moved from the United States to Moscow. They got married there,

[30:09] and they have two little boys. He's a Russian citizen living his best life right now. I decided, based on Dave's prodding, to write two letters, a public one and a private one, to Ed Snowden. The first one I just called an open letter to Ed Snowden, and I wrote this. Dear Ed, thank you for your revelations of government wrongdoing over the past week. You have done the country a great public service. I know that it feels like the weight of the world is on

[30:40] your shoulders right now, but as Americans begin to realize that we are devolving into a police state with the loss of civil liberties that entails, they will see your actions for what they are. Heroic. Remember the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln. Quote, America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Unquote. That is what's happening to our country right now. Your whistleblowing will help to save us. I wanted to offer you the benefit of my own whistleblowing experience and

[31:13] aftermath so that you don't make the same mistakes that I made. First, find the best national security attorneys money can buy. I was blessed to be represented by legal titans, and although I was forced to take a plea in the end, the shortness of my sentence is a testament to their expertise. Second, establish a website so that your supporters can follow your case, get your side of the story, and most importantly make donations to support your defense. Third, you're going to need the support of prominent Americans and groups who can explain to the public why what

[31:46] you did is so important. Although most members of Congress are mindless lemmings following our national security leadership over a cliff, there are several clear thinkers on the Hill who could be important sources of support. Cultivate them. Reach out to the American Civil Liberties Union, the government accountability project, and others like them who value our individual freedoms and who can advise you. Finally, and this is the most important advice that I can offer, do not under any circumstances cooperate with the FBI. FBI agents

[32:17] will lie, trick, and deceive you. They'll twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not. Supporters, well-wishers, and friends, all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy. It's a part of the problem, not the solution. I wish you the very best of luck. I hope you can get to Iceland quickly and safely. There you will find a people and a government who care about the freedoms that we hold dear and for which our forefathers and veterans fought

[32:51] and died. Sincerely, John Kiriakou. Now I said Iceland in that original letter because for a day, and it just happened to be the day that I wrote this letter, there were reports that the government of Iceland was willing to take him in. That would have been very difficult because Iceland is a member of NATO. It's also a member of the European Union, and the Icelandic government likely could not have withstood the pressure that the U.S. was willing to put on it.

[33:30] I followed this up with a private letter that I sent to Reh Magovran. Reh flew to Moscow,

[34:01] which he has done several times and hand delivered the letter to Ed. Now I'm proud to say that Ed later told the New York Times that he followed my case and he followed especially the case of NSA whistleblower Tom Drake. And we inspired him to go public with his revelations. Now Tom Drake's case was very, very important. And in this most recent war on whistleblowers, Tom's really was the first case. Tom was a member of the senior executive service at NSA,

[34:35] the National Security Agency. His first day on the job just happened to be September 11th, 2001. As soon as he checked in for his first day, planes began hitting buildings. And Tom said that what unfolded before his very eyes made his hair stand up on the back of his neck. NSA was already ready to go with a computer program that would intercept every phone call,

[35:13] every text message, and every email made or sent by every American. Period. That's clearly illegal. Tom knew because he had been briefed that there was a competing program that was written in such a way as to only target the communications of foreign nationals and would protect the civil liberties of Americans. He went to his boss and made a complaint.

[35:44] Nobody's going to listen on September 11th, 2001. They told him to mind his own business. He didn't know what he was talking about. So he went to the Inspector General. Well, guess what? This program was so over top secret that the Inspector General wasn't read into the compartment and didn't have any idea what in the world Tom was talking about. So he went to the General Council and the General Council said, buddy, you're in over your head. You need to stop talking. Continuing through the chain of command, he then went to the Pentagon Inspector General.

[36:18] NSA is an agency within the Defense Department. The Pentagon Inspector General ratted him out to NSA security and said, you've got a problem over there. When he didn't get any relief from the Pentagon Inspector General, he did exactly as we're all taught to do. And he went to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And for his trouble, he was rewarded with nine felony counts, seven counts of espionage,

[36:49] and two counts of theft of government property, with the property being the information which he walked out of the building with in his head. He hadn't done anything wrong. He knew he hadn't done anything wrong. Well, they were demanding 35 years in prison. It was a death sentence. It was the White House that was behind this prosecutorial zeal. You know, we blame, and I'm guilty of this, I blame so much of this on Barack Obama and

[37:21] the Obama administration, but it really did start with George W. Bush, not to the extent that we saw under Obama, but it started, this case started with George W. Bush. There was finally a proffer meeting between Tom and his lawyers and the prosecutors at the Justice Department in which they specifically said, you have the blood of American soldiers on your hands. And he said, whose blood? Name one soldier whose blood I have on my hands. And they offered him a deal, 10 years, 20 years, whatever it was.

[37:56] He said, forget it. I'm going to trial. They said, you're going to die in prison. And he said, I don't care. I'm going to fight you. 60 minutes did an expose that ran the day before the trial began. And that night, the judge dismissed all the charges. He said, there's no case here. This is bona fide whistle blowing. There's no blood of American soldiers on his hands. But Ed Stone said, look how brave this man is. He lost literally everything. His wife was also an NSA employee,

[38:33] and on the morning of his arrest, they went to her and they said, we have just arrested your husband and we're raiding your house right now. You are either with him or you're with us. And she said, I'm with you. He lost his five children. He's only now after two decades rebuilding his relationship with his family. He lost everything. He ended up working for the next 10 years in the Apple store in Bethesda, Maryland. And Snowden said, what a brave and selfless thing that this

[39:05] man did. And then just as the case is coming to a head, I make my revelations. He knew that I was headed straight for prison, but I did it anyway. And so he told the New York Times that we had inspired him. I think I won't reveal what I told him in the private letter, just because it was private. But his father came to Loretto to meet with me. It was quite controversial. Guards took sides.
