The Rest Is Classified
44. The Leak That Changed The World: Stealing State Secrets (Ep 2)
Tue, 06 May 2025
Edward Snowden has decided he is going to leak some of America's biggest secrets, but first he needs to steal them. How do you steal from some of America's most secure facilities? Does he have the access he needs? And is he working alone? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera share how Edward Snowden stole 1,500,000 files from the American system. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com or click this link. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/therestisclassified Email: [email protected] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What access did Edward Snowden have to state secrets?
I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. All right. Well, that was Edward Snowden, also from his memoir, Permanent Record. And we're back with episode two of the Edward Snowden journey.
And despite the fact that I think that line, Gordon, that I just read, that you just made me read, which is actually the better way to say it, is completely fabricated. Deadly sin number one from Edward Snowden. We're going to talk a little bit today about really Snowden's journey to getting to a point where he is sitting on top of a trove of massive secrets.
Absolutely. So last time we looked at Edward Snowden's the early years. Him, the young Snowden, a kind of guy who grew up with computers and the internet, loved them. A libertarian who goes to work as a contractor, CIA, works in the CIA elsewhere, clearly chafes at some of the restrictions on him, has some difficulties at work, also has an ideology.
So one of the kind of key questions, which I think we'll come back to is, you know, what explains his journey? How far is it about about grievance and how far is it about ideology. And we left him in Japan working as a contractor for NSA and having seen some of the really secret programs in there, which suggested the NSA was collecting data about American phone records.
So after that, he does that for a couple of years. Then age 28, 2011, he goes back to the US and he takes another kind of tech role. He's a liaison between the company Dell and the CIA coming up with cloud computing solutions. So again, another really techie job.
Also in this period, I will note that Dell had tried to move him in about September of 2010 to a position where he would support IT systems at CIA. But... But, and for those watching, this is a Scattered Castles reference, so mark it down. Because of his DROG mark, his sort of black flag mark, in Scattered Castles, the system that manages clearances, Dell couldn't put him in that position.
They had to find another spot for him that didn't require the same level of security clearance. And so he ends up kind of back in another role and then eventually in Hawaii. Yeah.
Yeah, it's quite a place to end up because by age 29, 2012, he's working again as a contractor, but for NSA. So effectively inside the NSA in Hawaii. Nice place to work. He's living with his girlfriend then, Lindsay Mills. She's a photographer and a dancer. Now the place he works sounds amazing. He's working deep underground in a kind of tunneled out facility beneath a pineapple field.
And this in World War II was an underground aircraft factory designed to be protected from bombing. And I love the way he describes it as being like a Bond villain layer, but with crappier lighting.
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Chapter 2: How did Edward Snowden's career path lead to his decision to leak?
And that's a kind of big question. It's quite hard because, you know, the answer is in Edward Snowden's head, and I'm not sure even... He would be able to verbalize it even if he was here and be honest about it. But those are the different kind of levels of what's going on.
But what is, I think, significant is that rather than take just a few documents, and I think this is one of the big questions I have, is if he was really aggrieved by, say, Stella Wynne, the program collecting American phone records and a few other surveillance programs,
he could have just picked 10 files to take, but what he's about to do and what we're going to see is he's not going to take 10 files. He's going to take almost everything he can lay his hands on about what the NSA and its allies do.
And I think that to me is one of the question marks is why does he take so much to expose what they do rather than if you like the kind of narrow things where he's got an issue about the kind of, and I think a legitimate issue about the constitutionality or the ethics of it.
Well, and I'll just again, add to my, Deadly sin number one on Edward Snowden's track record of fabrication was one of the documents that he's going to take or one set of documents he's going to take in this 2012 period, mid 2012. He's going to steal the test and the answer key for a job inside a group at NSA called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, which is essentially in that era.
is the NSA's elite hackers, the guys and girls who go out and try to access, really hard to access networks of our foreign adversaries. And Snowden applies for this job, but he's already, I mean, this is where I think you do get this kind of jumbled set of motives
for why he's taking all these documents because I guess he could have chanced upon this and then thought, well, I've got the test, I might as well apply. But he also does have some very mercenary potential motives for some of these document thefts. But he takes this test and... of course, passes it with flying colors, right? Because he's got all the answers.
And then he gets offered, and again, I think this is a great insight into his personality, because he gets offered a job working inside TAO, which by the way is a premier, inside NSA is a premier job to have. Gets offered a GS-12, government scale 12 role inside TAO and turns it down Because he felt he should have been offered a GS-15 salary.
And this, again, it's absolutely fascinating because you just... Let's get into some of these facts around how this guy behaved and who he is. He's 29 at that point. And I mean, it's a little bit different kind of depending on the agency. But... It would probably have taken a really competent – no, he joins when he's 23. He gets into the secret world.
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