The Rest Is Classified
44. The Leak That Changed The World: Stealing State Secrets (Ep 2)
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
Full Episode
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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