He is probably the most famous whistleblower in the world after having leaked vast amounts of sensitive US government information back in 2013.
In this episode, we'll be telling the story of Edward Snowden, asking ourselves whether he is a great American patriot or a traitor.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Edward Snowden.
[00:00:25] He is probably the most famous whistleblower in the world, after having leaked vast amounts of sensitive US government information back in 2013. And he has been on the run ever since.
[00:00:37] So in this episode we are going to tell his story, asking ourselves whether he is a great American patriot or a traitor.
[00:00:46] OK then, Edward Snowden.
[00:00:51] In May of 2013, a 29-year-old American asked his boss to take some medical leave. He had epilepsy, he said, and he needed a few weeks of absence to get treatment.
[00:01:05] He had a respectable job, working as a contractor for the National Security Agency in Hawaii.
[00:01:12] He had a good life, a house, a girlfriend, a salary he would later say amounted to $200,000 a year.
[00:01:21] The man, Edward Snowden, had suffered from epilepsy in the past, but he wasn’t planning on getting treatment; he had bigger plans for his leave of absence.
[00:01:33] And on May 10th, 2013, he got on a flight, never again to return to his home country.
[00:01:42] His chosen destination was Hong Kong.
[00:01:45] He packed light, a few personal belongings, but he brought with him an item that would turn him into one of the greatest fugitives in American history: a treasure trove of data that he had taken from the organisation that he had been working at, the National Security Agency.
[00:02:03] The exact size of this haul would be debated, with the American security services claiming it contained 1.7 million classified files, and Snowden later claiming it wasn’t quite that many.
[00:02:18] Whatever the true number was, it was very large, and Snowden had big plans for the files.
[00:02:26] He wanted to share them with the world, to shine a light on what he believed to be illegal and unconstitutional behaviour that was being performed by the US government.
[00:02:39] And less than a month after landing in Hong Kong, the first revelation was unleashed.
[00:02:46] This was jointly published, both in the American newspaper The Washington Post and the British newspaper The Guardian, which printed its bombshell headline on June 6th, 2013, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily”.
[00:03:06] This report linked to a top-secret document ordering the telecommunications company Verizon to hand over personal information about its customers to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[00:03:22] It was a bombshell revelation, but it was just the start.
[00:03:28] Over the weeks and months that followed, revelation after revelation would be published in The Guardian and The Washington Post about the true extent that the US government was spying on the American people, without their knowledge and brazenly denying it at the same time.
[00:03:46] And these revelations would turn Edward Snowden into one of the most wanted people in the world, forcing him into hiding, constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure that a pack of men in dark suits didn’t approach him, wrestle him to the ground and extradite him to the United States, where he would almost certainly face the rest of his life in prison and perhaps…worse.
[00:04:12] Now, to understand why Edward Snowden took the actions that he took, it’s helpful to learn a bit more about his early life and his character, so that's where we’ll start.
[00:04:24] He was born in 1983, to a family with a long history of government service. A grandfather was a senior navy official and worked at the FBI, his father worked at the coast guard and his mother in the US justice system. His older sister went to work for the government, and that was where Snowden figured he would probably end up too.
[00:04:50] He tried out for the army, feeling a patriotic duty to serve in the Iraq War, but broke his legs during training and had to drop out.
[00:05:01] It wasn’t long before he found his way into intelligence work, working for the CIA as a systems administrator.
[00:05:10] He had, from a young age, been very interested in computing, and would later write that he easily got a job because he was a “computer wizard”.
[00:05:21] This was in 2006, when he was 23 years old.
[00:05:26] He was posted to Geneva, in Switzerland, where he was given a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment. Almost immediately, his eyes were opened to the modus operandi of the CIA, to the way in which his government conducted its business.
[00:05:43] In one account, he reported seeing a CIA operative trying to get a senior Swiss banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home, knowing full well he was over the alcohol limit.
[00:05:57] When the Swiss banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA intervened, saying they would help him get off the charges but only if he became an informant, he gave up secrets on his banking clients to the CIA.
[00:06:14] Now, the Swiss authorities would deny this, saying it was extremely unlikely, but it was just one of a plethora of examples of what Snowden said he saw of the CIA and the security services overstepping the mark, behaving in a way that infringed on the civil liberties of members of the public.
[00:06:37] He became disillusioned, and to quote a later interview, “I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
[00:06:48] He resigned from the CIA shortly after, in February of 2009, but he continued to work for companies that contract for the government.
[00:06:58] In other words, he was no longer working for the government, but he was working for a company that worked for the government. As you may know, the US government in particular uses a large number of these outsourcing companies, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on these outsourced contracting companies every year.
[00:07:19] He worked for a couple of companies, first Dell and then one called Booz Allen Hamilton, but doing similar kinds of work: cyber security, systems administration and so on.
[00:07:33] He was, by all accounts, a talented and successful employee, and would even be called “a genius among geniuses” by a former colleague.
[00:07:43] But he had a secret.
[00:07:47] After starting working at Dell, he had been downloading large caches of sensitive information, classified files from the NSA that showed the extent of the spying the government was doing on its citizens.
[00:08:01] For several years, in fact, he was carefully, meticulously, accessing files and information that he was planning to use to out the government, to finally shine a light on what he believed to be a crime that the United States government was committing against its citizens.
[00:08:21] In fact, he steered his career in a direction so that he was able to access more and more sensitive information; the reason he moved from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton was because he would be able to access even more top secret information there. He had to take a large pay cut with the job switch, but by this point Edward Snowden had no interest in money.
[00:08:47] He had one thing on his mind, and that was making the truth known, whatever the cost.
[00:08:55] He continued to download more and more classified information, but the straw that broke the camel’s back came on the 13th of March, 2013.
[00:09:07] He was sitting at his desk, and reading a story on the news. The director of National Intelligence, a man called James Clapper, had stood in front of the Senate committee and sworn on oath that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans.
[00:09:29] Snowden knew this was a complete lie. I mean, a large part of his job was to deal with the information that was collected on millions of Americans without their knowledge. And everyone who worked at the NSA knew this, and of course James Clapper, as the Director of National Intelligence, he didn’t just know this, he practically oversaw the entire operation.
[00:09:56] Snowden turned to his colleagues, and said “can you believe this shit?”, but their reaction was more of a “huh, yeah of course he’s going to lie”.
[00:10:08] And it was at that moment that he knew he had to come clean, it was time. To Snowden, the entire security apparatus of his country was rotten to the core.
[00:10:21] There was one of the most senior US government officials happily lying to the American people, and everyone within the security services, from the NSA employees to the hundreds of government contractors who worked with them, just accepted it as the way that things needed to be.
[00:10:41] Snowden didn’t, and decided that now was the time to tell the truth.
[00:10:48] Fortunately, he had been putting out feelers for several years; he had been in touch with journalists that he felt could be interested in revealing the truth.
[00:10:59] In fact, going back to his time in Geneva, he had been in contact anonymously with a journalist from the Guardian newspaper, but it hadn’t really gone anywhere.
[00:11:10] Snowden was incredibly security conscious, as you might expect, and the Guardian journalist had found his security demands “too annoying”.
[00:11:20] But at the start of 2013, he had got back in touch with this Guardian journalist, a man called Glenn Greenwald, as well as a documentary filmmaker called Laura Poitras.
[00:11:32] He was still incredibly security conscious - he used the code name “Verax”, he asked not to be quoted at length, in case the NSA could identify him by his writing style, and of course all files were encrypted.
[00:11:47] Snowden knew how far the tentacles of the US government could stretch, because he had seen these firsthand, and he was not going to be taking any chances.
[00:11:59] After all, the information that he had was highly sensitive, if he was caught, he could be put on trial for treason and executed; he knew he would be committing a capital crime.
[00:12:14] Shortly after seeing James Clapper lie under oath, he requested medical leave and fled to Hong Kong, where he barricaded himself inside a hotel room with Poitras and Greenwald, who were now face to face with the whistleblower they had previously known only as “Verax”.
[00:12:33] Snowden handed over his huge cache of documents, entrusting the journalists to use their publications to tell the truth to the world.
[00:12:43] There were nail biting moments, not just for Snowden but for the journalists, who were fighting with their newspapers for the permission to publish. After all, this was no mere scandal about a footballer or a pop star or a misbehaving politician; these were revelations about the very mechanics of government.
[00:13:06] And it wasn’t only the US government. In the data treasure trove that Snowden had provided, there was information on the spying activities of a wide variety of governments all over the world.
[00:13:19] The newspapers had to be very careful about what they published, to ensure that it wasn’t going to compromise the safety of any individuals or missions around the world.
[00:13:30] Negotiations with lawyers went on through the night, but on June 5th, 2013, that first damning article appeared jointly in The Guardian and The Washington Post.
[00:13:44] Snowden wasn’t quoted directly in the article; after all, the story wasn’t about him.
[00:13:51] But a few days later, he publicly came forward as the source of the leaks.
[00:13:57] His face was all over the global news, interviews with him being broadcast 24/7 on cable news all over the world.
[00:14:06] At the time, he was still in Hong Kong, which he had chosen specifically because of its, and I'm quoting directly, “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Understandably, there were some raised eyebrows at this description, but clearly Hong Kong, under the control of China, was not going to hand over Snowden to the United States.
[00:14:31] On June 21st, a couple of weeks after the revelations, the United States government announced that Snowden would be charged with violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. He was ordered to return to the United States to face trial, and to make life harder for him to leave Hong Kong and flee to another country, his US passport was revoked.
[00:14:57] He was now a fugitive without a nationality, a whistleblower lost in a diplomatic vacuum.
[00:15:05] Fortunately, for Snowden at least, there was another country that was willing to help, a country that had no love lost with the United States.
[00:15:15] He arrived in Russia a couple of days later, which granted him asylum, allowing him in without a passport. Snowden knew that the Russian government was unlikely to hand him over to the American authorities, so that was his next best bet.
[00:15:32] In fact, and this is to fast forward a few years, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship in 2022, so if we are being truly accurate, we should refer to him as Russian, not American.
[00:15:47] Now, to move on to discuss the impact of these leaks, of these revelations, and the content of them, the scale of the leak was staggering.
[00:15:58] The exact number of documents that was leaked, as you heard, is still debated, with some reports suggesting that there were 1.7 million documents, while others suggesting it is in the hundreds of thousands.
[00:16:12] Whatever the true number, it was vast, far too much for Snowden to have known exactly what was in every document, and so much that it has taken a long time for the journalists to trawl through and carefully decide which information to release and when.
[00:16:31] In terms of the content, the documents Snowden took exposed evidence of NSA spying on the communications of foreign leaders, like the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. It exposed the bulk collection of phone records in the Verizon leak. It showed that the NSA had direct access to the servers of major tech companies, which allowed it to collect personal data such as emails, photos and videos.
[00:17:00] Essentially, Snowden showed that many of the activities that we might consider to be private, from the messages we send our friends and family to the websites we visit to the people we have called, these are not private at all, and can be accessed by Snowden’s former colleagues and friends at the government.
[00:17:23] Now, as to the reaction to these revelations, there are clearly two very different sides to be taken.
[00:17:32] To some, he was considered a hero, someone who was prepared to stand up against a huge invasion of privacy and a breach of civil liberties. He was a true American patriot, someone who was prepared to put the safety of the American people and the sanctity of the US constitution above his own personal comfort, safety and happiness. After all, he's been on the run ever since, utterly unable to live any semblance of a normal life ever since the first story was published.
[00:18:06] But to others, he was the opposite, someone who had been entrusted with sensitive information about the workings of government, information that existed to protect citizens, and by choosing to go public with this, he was doing great damage to the security services and endangering the lives of millions of Americans.
[00:18:28] After all, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter if the government can see the message you sent your friend or partner that you are running late for the cinema or asking if they could pick up some milk on their way home.
[00:18:41] He was a traitor.
[00:18:44] Snowden, as you will probably know, has never returned to the United States to face trial, instead living in Russia as a sort of “digital dissident”, speaking at conferences through a video link, writing his memoirs, standing up for civil liberties and championing personal freedoms.
[00:19:04] And his revelations and constant campaigning have led to some important changes. There have been various cases filed against the NSA contesting the legality of this bulk collection of personal data, and in 2015 Barack Obama signed something called the Freedom Act, which was a modified version of a previous security and surveillance law called the Patriot Act.
[00:19:29] These changes, although important, have not brought about the sea change that Snowden no doubt hoped for.
[00:19:38] But perhaps the most important legacy from Edward Snowden is that he ignited a global debate on where we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:19:50] How far should the government be able to encroach on our private lives in the interests of national security?
[00:19:57] As far as they see fit, or should there be important lines that they should never be able to cross, no matter the circumstances?
[00:20:06] And his revelations have also raised important questions about the role of the 21st century whistleblower.
[00:20:14] As you might know, whistleblowers are typically granted special protections, for obvious reasons.
[00:20:22] If you find out about criminal activity in a company or an organisation, most countries have laws that allow you to reveal it and receive protection and immunity.
[00:20:35] But if you are a whistleblower against the government, as Snowden’s case shows, things are not always so clear cut, and you can find yourself charged as a traitor, your passport revoked, with no prospect of ever returning to your home country.
[00:20:52] Why is it, that the government seems to be in a completely different category when it comes to whistleblowing, and what are the consequences of this?
[00:21:02] So, to wrap things up, the story of Edward Snowden has no easy answers.
[00:21:08] He believes he was acting in the best interests of his country; his government believes he caused huge damage to his country.
[00:21:16] He believes he is a patriot; his government believes he is a traitor.
[00:21:22] His story is a reminder that the line between one and the other is not always as clear as we might think.
[00:21:31] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Edward Snowden.
[00:21:36] I’m sure you knew a little bit about him before, but I hope that this episode has allowed you to go a little deeper.
[00:21:42] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:45] Was Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?
[00:21:48] And where do you think we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:21:53] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:57] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:05] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:10] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Edward Snowden.
[00:00:25] He is probably the most famous whistleblower in the world, after having leaked vast amounts of sensitive US government information back in 2013. And he has been on the run ever since.
[00:00:37] So in this episode we are going to tell his story, asking ourselves whether he is a great American patriot or a traitor.
[00:00:46] OK then, Edward Snowden.
[00:00:51] In May of 2013, a 29-year-old American asked his boss to take some medical leave. He had epilepsy, he said, and he needed a few weeks of absence to get treatment.
[00:01:05] He had a respectable job, working as a contractor for the National Security Agency in Hawaii.
[00:01:12] He had a good life, a house, a girlfriend, a salary he would later say amounted to $200,000 a year.
[00:01:21] The man, Edward Snowden, had suffered from epilepsy in the past, but he wasn’t planning on getting treatment; he had bigger plans for his leave of absence.
[00:01:33] And on May 10th, 2013, he got on a flight, never again to return to his home country.
[00:01:42] His chosen destination was Hong Kong.
[00:01:45] He packed light, a few personal belongings, but he brought with him an item that would turn him into one of the greatest fugitives in American history: a treasure trove of data that he had taken from the organisation that he had been working at, the National Security Agency.
[00:02:03] The exact size of this haul would be debated, with the American security services claiming it contained 1.7 million classified files, and Snowden later claiming it wasn’t quite that many.
[00:02:18] Whatever the true number was, it was very large, and Snowden had big plans for the files.
[00:02:26] He wanted to share them with the world, to shine a light on what he believed to be illegal and unconstitutional behaviour that was being performed by the US government.
[00:02:39] And less than a month after landing in Hong Kong, the first revelation was unleashed.
[00:02:46] This was jointly published, both in the American newspaper The Washington Post and the British newspaper The Guardian, which printed its bombshell headline on June 6th, 2013, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily”.
[00:03:06] This report linked to a top-secret document ordering the telecommunications company Verizon to hand over personal information about its customers to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[00:03:22] It was a bombshell revelation, but it was just the start.
[00:03:28] Over the weeks and months that followed, revelation after revelation would be published in The Guardian and The Washington Post about the true extent that the US government was spying on the American people, without their knowledge and brazenly denying it at the same time.
[00:03:46] And these revelations would turn Edward Snowden into one of the most wanted people in the world, forcing him into hiding, constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure that a pack of men in dark suits didn’t approach him, wrestle him to the ground and extradite him to the United States, where he would almost certainly face the rest of his life in prison and perhaps…worse.
[00:04:12] Now, to understand why Edward Snowden took the actions that he took, it’s helpful to learn a bit more about his early life and his character, so that's where we’ll start.
[00:04:24] He was born in 1983, to a family with a long history of government service. A grandfather was a senior navy official and worked at the FBI, his father worked at the coast guard and his mother in the US justice system. His older sister went to work for the government, and that was where Snowden figured he would probably end up too.
[00:04:50] He tried out for the army, feeling a patriotic duty to serve in the Iraq War, but broke his legs during training and had to drop out.
[00:05:01] It wasn’t long before he found his way into intelligence work, working for the CIA as a systems administrator.
[00:05:10] He had, from a young age, been very interested in computing, and would later write that he easily got a job because he was a “computer wizard”.
[00:05:21] This was in 2006, when he was 23 years old.
[00:05:26] He was posted to Geneva, in Switzerland, where he was given a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment. Almost immediately, his eyes were opened to the modus operandi of the CIA, to the way in which his government conducted its business.
[00:05:43] In one account, he reported seeing a CIA operative trying to get a senior Swiss banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home, knowing full well he was over the alcohol limit.
[00:05:57] When the Swiss banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA intervened, saying they would help him get off the charges but only if he became an informant, he gave up secrets on his banking clients to the CIA.
[00:06:14] Now, the Swiss authorities would deny this, saying it was extremely unlikely, but it was just one of a plethora of examples of what Snowden said he saw of the CIA and the security services overstepping the mark, behaving in a way that infringed on the civil liberties of members of the public.
[00:06:37] He became disillusioned, and to quote a later interview, “I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
[00:06:48] He resigned from the CIA shortly after, in February of 2009, but he continued to work for companies that contract for the government.
[00:06:58] In other words, he was no longer working for the government, but he was working for a company that worked for the government. As you may know, the US government in particular uses a large number of these outsourcing companies, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on these outsourced contracting companies every year.
[00:07:19] He worked for a couple of companies, first Dell and then one called Booz Allen Hamilton, but doing similar kinds of work: cyber security, systems administration and so on.
[00:07:33] He was, by all accounts, a talented and successful employee, and would even be called “a genius among geniuses” by a former colleague.
[00:07:43] But he had a secret.
[00:07:47] After starting working at Dell, he had been downloading large caches of sensitive information, classified files from the NSA that showed the extent of the spying the government was doing on its citizens.
[00:08:01] For several years, in fact, he was carefully, meticulously, accessing files and information that he was planning to use to out the government, to finally shine a light on what he believed to be a crime that the United States government was committing against its citizens.
[00:08:21] In fact, he steered his career in a direction so that he was able to access more and more sensitive information; the reason he moved from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton was because he would be able to access even more top secret information there. He had to take a large pay cut with the job switch, but by this point Edward Snowden had no interest in money.
[00:08:47] He had one thing on his mind, and that was making the truth known, whatever the cost.
[00:08:55] He continued to download more and more classified information, but the straw that broke the camel’s back came on the 13th of March, 2013.
[00:09:07] He was sitting at his desk, and reading a story on the news. The director of National Intelligence, a man called James Clapper, had stood in front of the Senate committee and sworn on oath that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans.
[00:09:29] Snowden knew this was a complete lie. I mean, a large part of his job was to deal with the information that was collected on millions of Americans without their knowledge. And everyone who worked at the NSA knew this, and of course James Clapper, as the Director of National Intelligence, he didn’t just know this, he practically oversaw the entire operation.
[00:09:56] Snowden turned to his colleagues, and said “can you believe this shit?”, but their reaction was more of a “huh, yeah of course he’s going to lie”.
[00:10:08] And it was at that moment that he knew he had to come clean, it was time. To Snowden, the entire security apparatus of his country was rotten to the core.
[00:10:21] There was one of the most senior US government officials happily lying to the American people, and everyone within the security services, from the NSA employees to the hundreds of government contractors who worked with them, just accepted it as the way that things needed to be.
[00:10:41] Snowden didn’t, and decided that now was the time to tell the truth.
[00:10:48] Fortunately, he had been putting out feelers for several years; he had been in touch with journalists that he felt could be interested in revealing the truth.
[00:10:59] In fact, going back to his time in Geneva, he had been in contact anonymously with a journalist from the Guardian newspaper, but it hadn’t really gone anywhere.
[00:11:10] Snowden was incredibly security conscious, as you might expect, and the Guardian journalist had found his security demands “too annoying”.
[00:11:20] But at the start of 2013, he had got back in touch with this Guardian journalist, a man called Glenn Greenwald, as well as a documentary filmmaker called Laura Poitras.
[00:11:32] He was still incredibly security conscious - he used the code name “Verax”, he asked not to be quoted at length, in case the NSA could identify him by his writing style, and of course all files were encrypted.
[00:11:47] Snowden knew how far the tentacles of the US government could stretch, because he had seen these firsthand, and he was not going to be taking any chances.
[00:11:59] After all, the information that he had was highly sensitive, if he was caught, he could be put on trial for treason and executed; he knew he would be committing a capital crime.
[00:12:14] Shortly after seeing James Clapper lie under oath, he requested medical leave and fled to Hong Kong, where he barricaded himself inside a hotel room with Poitras and Greenwald, who were now face to face with the whistleblower they had previously known only as “Verax”.
[00:12:33] Snowden handed over his huge cache of documents, entrusting the journalists to use their publications to tell the truth to the world.
[00:12:43] There were nail biting moments, not just for Snowden but for the journalists, who were fighting with their newspapers for the permission to publish. After all, this was no mere scandal about a footballer or a pop star or a misbehaving politician; these were revelations about the very mechanics of government.
[00:13:06] And it wasn’t only the US government. In the data treasure trove that Snowden had provided, there was information on the spying activities of a wide variety of governments all over the world.
[00:13:19] The newspapers had to be very careful about what they published, to ensure that it wasn’t going to compromise the safety of any individuals or missions around the world.
[00:13:30] Negotiations with lawyers went on through the night, but on June 5th, 2013, that first damning article appeared jointly in The Guardian and The Washington Post.
[00:13:44] Snowden wasn’t quoted directly in the article; after all, the story wasn’t about him.
[00:13:51] But a few days later, he publicly came forward as the source of the leaks.
[00:13:57] His face was all over the global news, interviews with him being broadcast 24/7 on cable news all over the world.
[00:14:06] At the time, he was still in Hong Kong, which he had chosen specifically because of its, and I'm quoting directly, “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Understandably, there were some raised eyebrows at this description, but clearly Hong Kong, under the control of China, was not going to hand over Snowden to the United States.
[00:14:31] On June 21st, a couple of weeks after the revelations, the United States government announced that Snowden would be charged with violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. He was ordered to return to the United States to face trial, and to make life harder for him to leave Hong Kong and flee to another country, his US passport was revoked.
[00:14:57] He was now a fugitive without a nationality, a whistleblower lost in a diplomatic vacuum.
[00:15:05] Fortunately, for Snowden at least, there was another country that was willing to help, a country that had no love lost with the United States.
[00:15:15] He arrived in Russia a couple of days later, which granted him asylum, allowing him in without a passport. Snowden knew that the Russian government was unlikely to hand him over to the American authorities, so that was his next best bet.
[00:15:32] In fact, and this is to fast forward a few years, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship in 2022, so if we are being truly accurate, we should refer to him as Russian, not American.
[00:15:47] Now, to move on to discuss the impact of these leaks, of these revelations, and the content of them, the scale of the leak was staggering.
[00:15:58] The exact number of documents that was leaked, as you heard, is still debated, with some reports suggesting that there were 1.7 million documents, while others suggesting it is in the hundreds of thousands.
[00:16:12] Whatever the true number, it was vast, far too much for Snowden to have known exactly what was in every document, and so much that it has taken a long time for the journalists to trawl through and carefully decide which information to release and when.
[00:16:31] In terms of the content, the documents Snowden took exposed evidence of NSA spying on the communications of foreign leaders, like the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. It exposed the bulk collection of phone records in the Verizon leak. It showed that the NSA had direct access to the servers of major tech companies, which allowed it to collect personal data such as emails, photos and videos.
[00:17:00] Essentially, Snowden showed that many of the activities that we might consider to be private, from the messages we send our friends and family to the websites we visit to the people we have called, these are not private at all, and can be accessed by Snowden’s former colleagues and friends at the government.
[00:17:23] Now, as to the reaction to these revelations, there are clearly two very different sides to be taken.
[00:17:32] To some, he was considered a hero, someone who was prepared to stand up against a huge invasion of privacy and a breach of civil liberties. He was a true American patriot, someone who was prepared to put the safety of the American people and the sanctity of the US constitution above his own personal comfort, safety and happiness. After all, he's been on the run ever since, utterly unable to live any semblance of a normal life ever since the first story was published.
[00:18:06] But to others, he was the opposite, someone who had been entrusted with sensitive information about the workings of government, information that existed to protect citizens, and by choosing to go public with this, he was doing great damage to the security services and endangering the lives of millions of Americans.
[00:18:28] After all, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter if the government can see the message you sent your friend or partner that you are running late for the cinema or asking if they could pick up some milk on their way home.
[00:18:41] He was a traitor.
[00:18:44] Snowden, as you will probably know, has never returned to the United States to face trial, instead living in Russia as a sort of “digital dissident”, speaking at conferences through a video link, writing his memoirs, standing up for civil liberties and championing personal freedoms.
[00:19:04] And his revelations and constant campaigning have led to some important changes. There have been various cases filed against the NSA contesting the legality of this bulk collection of personal data, and in 2015 Barack Obama signed something called the Freedom Act, which was a modified version of a previous security and surveillance law called the Patriot Act.
[00:19:29] These changes, although important, have not brought about the sea change that Snowden no doubt hoped for.
[00:19:38] But perhaps the most important legacy from Edward Snowden is that he ignited a global debate on where we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:19:50] How far should the government be able to encroach on our private lives in the interests of national security?
[00:19:57] As far as they see fit, or should there be important lines that they should never be able to cross, no matter the circumstances?
[00:20:06] And his revelations have also raised important questions about the role of the 21st century whistleblower.
[00:20:14] As you might know, whistleblowers are typically granted special protections, for obvious reasons.
[00:20:22] If you find out about criminal activity in a company or an organisation, most countries have laws that allow you to reveal it and receive protection and immunity.
[00:20:35] But if you are a whistleblower against the government, as Snowden’s case shows, things are not always so clear cut, and you can find yourself charged as a traitor, your passport revoked, with no prospect of ever returning to your home country.
[00:20:52] Why is it, that the government seems to be in a completely different category when it comes to whistleblowing, and what are the consequences of this?
[00:21:02] So, to wrap things up, the story of Edward Snowden has no easy answers.
[00:21:08] He believes he was acting in the best interests of his country; his government believes he caused huge damage to his country.
[00:21:16] He believes he is a patriot; his government believes he is a traitor.
[00:21:22] His story is a reminder that the line between one and the other is not always as clear as we might think.
[00:21:31] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Edward Snowden.
[00:21:36] I’m sure you knew a little bit about him before, but I hope that this episode has allowed you to go a little deeper.
[00:21:42] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:45] Was Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?
[00:21:48] And where do you think we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:21:53] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:57] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:05] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:10] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:19] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Edward Snowden.
[00:00:25] He is probably the most famous whistleblower in the world, after having leaked vast amounts of sensitive US government information back in 2013. And he has been on the run ever since.
[00:00:37] So in this episode we are going to tell his story, asking ourselves whether he is a great American patriot or a traitor.
[00:00:46] OK then, Edward Snowden.
[00:00:51] In May of 2013, a 29-year-old American asked his boss to take some medical leave. He had epilepsy, he said, and he needed a few weeks of absence to get treatment.
[00:01:05] He had a respectable job, working as a contractor for the National Security Agency in Hawaii.
[00:01:12] He had a good life, a house, a girlfriend, a salary he would later say amounted to $200,000 a year.
[00:01:21] The man, Edward Snowden, had suffered from epilepsy in the past, but he wasn’t planning on getting treatment; he had bigger plans for his leave of absence.
[00:01:33] And on May 10th, 2013, he got on a flight, never again to return to his home country.
[00:01:42] His chosen destination was Hong Kong.
[00:01:45] He packed light, a few personal belongings, but he brought with him an item that would turn him into one of the greatest fugitives in American history: a treasure trove of data that he had taken from the organisation that he had been working at, the National Security Agency.
[00:02:03] The exact size of this haul would be debated, with the American security services claiming it contained 1.7 million classified files, and Snowden later claiming it wasn’t quite that many.
[00:02:18] Whatever the true number was, it was very large, and Snowden had big plans for the files.
[00:02:26] He wanted to share them with the world, to shine a light on what he believed to be illegal and unconstitutional behaviour that was being performed by the US government.
[00:02:39] And less than a month after landing in Hong Kong, the first revelation was unleashed.
[00:02:46] This was jointly published, both in the American newspaper The Washington Post and the British newspaper The Guardian, which printed its bombshell headline on June 6th, 2013, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily”.
[00:03:06] This report linked to a top-secret document ordering the telecommunications company Verizon to hand over personal information about its customers to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[00:03:22] It was a bombshell revelation, but it was just the start.
[00:03:28] Over the weeks and months that followed, revelation after revelation would be published in The Guardian and The Washington Post about the true extent that the US government was spying on the American people, without their knowledge and brazenly denying it at the same time.
[00:03:46] And these revelations would turn Edward Snowden into one of the most wanted people in the world, forcing him into hiding, constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure that a pack of men in dark suits didn’t approach him, wrestle him to the ground and extradite him to the United States, where he would almost certainly face the rest of his life in prison and perhaps…worse.
[00:04:12] Now, to understand why Edward Snowden took the actions that he took, it’s helpful to learn a bit more about his early life and his character, so that's where we’ll start.
[00:04:24] He was born in 1983, to a family with a long history of government service. A grandfather was a senior navy official and worked at the FBI, his father worked at the coast guard and his mother in the US justice system. His older sister went to work for the government, and that was where Snowden figured he would probably end up too.
[00:04:50] He tried out for the army, feeling a patriotic duty to serve in the Iraq War, but broke his legs during training and had to drop out.
[00:05:01] It wasn’t long before he found his way into intelligence work, working for the CIA as a systems administrator.
[00:05:10] He had, from a young age, been very interested in computing, and would later write that he easily got a job because he was a “computer wizard”.
[00:05:21] This was in 2006, when he was 23 years old.
[00:05:26] He was posted to Geneva, in Switzerland, where he was given a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment. Almost immediately, his eyes were opened to the modus operandi of the CIA, to the way in which his government conducted its business.
[00:05:43] In one account, he reported seeing a CIA operative trying to get a senior Swiss banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home, knowing full well he was over the alcohol limit.
[00:05:57] When the Swiss banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA intervened, saying they would help him get off the charges but only if he became an informant, he gave up secrets on his banking clients to the CIA.
[00:06:14] Now, the Swiss authorities would deny this, saying it was extremely unlikely, but it was just one of a plethora of examples of what Snowden said he saw of the CIA and the security services overstepping the mark, behaving in a way that infringed on the civil liberties of members of the public.
[00:06:37] He became disillusioned, and to quote a later interview, “I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
[00:06:48] He resigned from the CIA shortly after, in February of 2009, but he continued to work for companies that contract for the government.
[00:06:58] In other words, he was no longer working for the government, but he was working for a company that worked for the government. As you may know, the US government in particular uses a large number of these outsourcing companies, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on these outsourced contracting companies every year.
[00:07:19] He worked for a couple of companies, first Dell and then one called Booz Allen Hamilton, but doing similar kinds of work: cyber security, systems administration and so on.
[00:07:33] He was, by all accounts, a talented and successful employee, and would even be called “a genius among geniuses” by a former colleague.
[00:07:43] But he had a secret.
[00:07:47] After starting working at Dell, he had been downloading large caches of sensitive information, classified files from the NSA that showed the extent of the spying the government was doing on its citizens.
[00:08:01] For several years, in fact, he was carefully, meticulously, accessing files and information that he was planning to use to out the government, to finally shine a light on what he believed to be a crime that the United States government was committing against its citizens.
[00:08:21] In fact, he steered his career in a direction so that he was able to access more and more sensitive information; the reason he moved from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton was because he would be able to access even more top secret information there. He had to take a large pay cut with the job switch, but by this point Edward Snowden had no interest in money.
[00:08:47] He had one thing on his mind, and that was making the truth known, whatever the cost.
[00:08:55] He continued to download more and more classified information, but the straw that broke the camel’s back came on the 13th of March, 2013.
[00:09:07] He was sitting at his desk, and reading a story on the news. The director of National Intelligence, a man called James Clapper, had stood in front of the Senate committee and sworn on oath that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans.
[00:09:29] Snowden knew this was a complete lie. I mean, a large part of his job was to deal with the information that was collected on millions of Americans without their knowledge. And everyone who worked at the NSA knew this, and of course James Clapper, as the Director of National Intelligence, he didn’t just know this, he practically oversaw the entire operation.
[00:09:56] Snowden turned to his colleagues, and said “can you believe this shit?”, but their reaction was more of a “huh, yeah of course he’s going to lie”.
[00:10:08] And it was at that moment that he knew he had to come clean, it was time. To Snowden, the entire security apparatus of his country was rotten to the core.
[00:10:21] There was one of the most senior US government officials happily lying to the American people, and everyone within the security services, from the NSA employees to the hundreds of government contractors who worked with them, just accepted it as the way that things needed to be.
[00:10:41] Snowden didn’t, and decided that now was the time to tell the truth.
[00:10:48] Fortunately, he had been putting out feelers for several years; he had been in touch with journalists that he felt could be interested in revealing the truth.
[00:10:59] In fact, going back to his time in Geneva, he had been in contact anonymously with a journalist from the Guardian newspaper, but it hadn’t really gone anywhere.
[00:11:10] Snowden was incredibly security conscious, as you might expect, and the Guardian journalist had found his security demands “too annoying”.
[00:11:20] But at the start of 2013, he had got back in touch with this Guardian journalist, a man called Glenn Greenwald, as well as a documentary filmmaker called Laura Poitras.
[00:11:32] He was still incredibly security conscious - he used the code name “Verax”, he asked not to be quoted at length, in case the NSA could identify him by his writing style, and of course all files were encrypted.
[00:11:47] Snowden knew how far the tentacles of the US government could stretch, because he had seen these firsthand, and he was not going to be taking any chances.
[00:11:59] After all, the information that he had was highly sensitive, if he was caught, he could be put on trial for treason and executed; he knew he would be committing a capital crime.
[00:12:14] Shortly after seeing James Clapper lie under oath, he requested medical leave and fled to Hong Kong, where he barricaded himself inside a hotel room with Poitras and Greenwald, who were now face to face with the whistleblower they had previously known only as “Verax”.
[00:12:33] Snowden handed over his huge cache of documents, entrusting the journalists to use their publications to tell the truth to the world.
[00:12:43] There were nail biting moments, not just for Snowden but for the journalists, who were fighting with their newspapers for the permission to publish. After all, this was no mere scandal about a footballer or a pop star or a misbehaving politician; these were revelations about the very mechanics of government.
[00:13:06] And it wasn’t only the US government. In the data treasure trove that Snowden had provided, there was information on the spying activities of a wide variety of governments all over the world.
[00:13:19] The newspapers had to be very careful about what they published, to ensure that it wasn’t going to compromise the safety of any individuals or missions around the world.
[00:13:30] Negotiations with lawyers went on through the night, but on June 5th, 2013, that first damning article appeared jointly in The Guardian and The Washington Post.
[00:13:44] Snowden wasn’t quoted directly in the article; after all, the story wasn’t about him.
[00:13:51] But a few days later, he publicly came forward as the source of the leaks.
[00:13:57] His face was all over the global news, interviews with him being broadcast 24/7 on cable news all over the world.
[00:14:06] At the time, he was still in Hong Kong, which he had chosen specifically because of its, and I'm quoting directly, “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Understandably, there were some raised eyebrows at this description, but clearly Hong Kong, under the control of China, was not going to hand over Snowden to the United States.
[00:14:31] On June 21st, a couple of weeks after the revelations, the United States government announced that Snowden would be charged with violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property. He was ordered to return to the United States to face trial, and to make life harder for him to leave Hong Kong and flee to another country, his US passport was revoked.
[00:14:57] He was now a fugitive without a nationality, a whistleblower lost in a diplomatic vacuum.
[00:15:05] Fortunately, for Snowden at least, there was another country that was willing to help, a country that had no love lost with the United States.
[00:15:15] He arrived in Russia a couple of days later, which granted him asylum, allowing him in without a passport. Snowden knew that the Russian government was unlikely to hand him over to the American authorities, so that was his next best bet.
[00:15:32] In fact, and this is to fast forward a few years, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship in 2022, so if we are being truly accurate, we should refer to him as Russian, not American.
[00:15:47] Now, to move on to discuss the impact of these leaks, of these revelations, and the content of them, the scale of the leak was staggering.
[00:15:58] The exact number of documents that was leaked, as you heard, is still debated, with some reports suggesting that there were 1.7 million documents, while others suggesting it is in the hundreds of thousands.
[00:16:12] Whatever the true number, it was vast, far too much for Snowden to have known exactly what was in every document, and so much that it has taken a long time for the journalists to trawl through and carefully decide which information to release and when.
[00:16:31] In terms of the content, the documents Snowden took exposed evidence of NSA spying on the communications of foreign leaders, like the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. It exposed the bulk collection of phone records in the Verizon leak. It showed that the NSA had direct access to the servers of major tech companies, which allowed it to collect personal data such as emails, photos and videos.
[00:17:00] Essentially, Snowden showed that many of the activities that we might consider to be private, from the messages we send our friends and family to the websites we visit to the people we have called, these are not private at all, and can be accessed by Snowden’s former colleagues and friends at the government.
[00:17:23] Now, as to the reaction to these revelations, there are clearly two very different sides to be taken.
[00:17:32] To some, he was considered a hero, someone who was prepared to stand up against a huge invasion of privacy and a breach of civil liberties. He was a true American patriot, someone who was prepared to put the safety of the American people and the sanctity of the US constitution above his own personal comfort, safety and happiness. After all, he's been on the run ever since, utterly unable to live any semblance of a normal life ever since the first story was published.
[00:18:06] But to others, he was the opposite, someone who had been entrusted with sensitive information about the workings of government, information that existed to protect citizens, and by choosing to go public with this, he was doing great damage to the security services and endangering the lives of millions of Americans.
[00:18:28] After all, if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter if the government can see the message you sent your friend or partner that you are running late for the cinema or asking if they could pick up some milk on their way home.
[00:18:41] He was a traitor.
[00:18:44] Snowden, as you will probably know, has never returned to the United States to face trial, instead living in Russia as a sort of “digital dissident”, speaking at conferences through a video link, writing his memoirs, standing up for civil liberties and championing personal freedoms.
[00:19:04] And his revelations and constant campaigning have led to some important changes. There have been various cases filed against the NSA contesting the legality of this bulk collection of personal data, and in 2015 Barack Obama signed something called the Freedom Act, which was a modified version of a previous security and surveillance law called the Patriot Act.
[00:19:29] These changes, although important, have not brought about the sea change that Snowden no doubt hoped for.
[00:19:38] But perhaps the most important legacy from Edward Snowden is that he ignited a global debate on where we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:19:50] How far should the government be able to encroach on our private lives in the interests of national security?
[00:19:57] As far as they see fit, or should there be important lines that they should never be able to cross, no matter the circumstances?
[00:20:06] And his revelations have also raised important questions about the role of the 21st century whistleblower.
[00:20:14] As you might know, whistleblowers are typically granted special protections, for obvious reasons.
[00:20:22] If you find out about criminal activity in a company or an organisation, most countries have laws that allow you to reveal it and receive protection and immunity.
[00:20:35] But if you are a whistleblower against the government, as Snowden’s case shows, things are not always so clear cut, and you can find yourself charged as a traitor, your passport revoked, with no prospect of ever returning to your home country.
[00:20:52] Why is it, that the government seems to be in a completely different category when it comes to whistleblowing, and what are the consequences of this?
[00:21:02] So, to wrap things up, the story of Edward Snowden has no easy answers.
[00:21:08] He believes he was acting in the best interests of his country; his government believes he caused huge damage to his country.
[00:21:16] He believes he is a patriot; his government believes he is a traitor.
[00:21:22] His story is a reminder that the line between one and the other is not always as clear as we might think.
[00:21:31] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Edward Snowden.
[00:21:36] I’m sure you knew a little bit about him before, but I hope that this episode has allowed you to go a little deeper.
[00:21:42] As always, I'd love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:45] Was Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?
[00:21:48] And where do you think we draw the line between personal privacy and national security?
[00:21:53] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:57] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:05] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:10] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
