With Snowden now in possession of 1,500,000 secret American files, how can he get them in the public eye? Which journalists will he choose to help him? And why does he choose to hole himself up in a hotel room in Hong Kong? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss just how Snowden and the journalists he was working with plan to publish one of the most consequential stories of the 21st century. Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/restisclassified Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ ------------------- 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. ------------------- 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
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I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops, secure communications, normal communications at Decoy, and an air gap, a computer that had never gone and would never go online. I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad, on which I scribbled in pen, got called away for work, I love you.
I signed it with my call letter nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20th arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me. Okay. Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.
And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. And we are now, for those who have been listening to this wonderful series about... Edward Snowden.
We are now at a really a critical kind of turning point in this story because Edward Snowden is taking the plunge and he is going to finally reach out to journalists to get his information out to the world. And I think it's probably worth a little bit of How did we get here? Yep. Snowden, up to this point, he's been a CIA officer, technical officer. He's been a contractor for the NSA.
He has taken really via bulk downloads and some kind of fairly ingenious methods of sneaking information out of his NSA office in Hawaii, this bunker beneath the pineapple field. He's taken out... a trove of about 1.5 million documents, a variety of internal databases. And he's now at a point where he is figuring out how does he get this information out to the world?
That's right. He's decided he doesn't want to publish it himself. He wants to go through journalists. who we think can kind of work through it and make the most of it and decide what to publish. So who's he going to try?
I mean, he actually is wary of one obvious place, which is the New York Times, because he feels that in the past they were leaned on by the government to not publish certain stories about government surveillance and had held back. So instead he wants to look for figures who he thinks I think will be more sympathetic, who he's going to reach out to initially anonymously
to try and persuade them to listen. So the first person he tries, and it's a really interesting character, an important character in our story, is a guy called Glenn Greenwald. Now, Glenn Greenwald, his background is as a civil liberties lawyer. He's become a journalist with the Guardian US, the...
the branch of The Guardian published out of America, but he lives in Brazil and he's been focusing on abuses of power by the US government for some time. He's only just joined The Guardian a previous year. He is quite a radical campaigning figure. Now, it's interesting because in the journalist world, some people say, well, is he a journalist? He's more of an activist.
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