#1536 - Edward Snowden

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Edward Snowden (0:13)

Good to see you. Thanks for having me. It's been like a year since we last talked.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

It's been like a year, believe it or not. You looked exactly the same, and the studio looks exactly the same. You might be on another part of the world. No one knows.

Edward Snowden (0:26)

Yeah, it's just my apartment that I rent. You know, I don't like to give out a lot of information about where I'm at and that kind of stuff. So it's just a plain wall that I've got the lights down low, so it looks kind of a nice gray. At least I think it's nice.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

I think it's beautiful. It looks amazing. First of all, congratulations on the recent ruling. Was it the 9th District Court of Appeals?

Is that what it was? It said that what you exposed with the warrantless wiretapping was in fact illegal. And there are many people that are calling for you to be pardoned now.

Edward Snowden (1:05)

Yeah, it's so much has happened. This ruling, this is actually not the first time the federal government has or the appeals courts have struck down some of the federal surveillance programs as unlawful. But this one is really important because it happened from an appeals court. It wasn't from a single judge. It was from a panel of judges.

And what they had ruled was that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records was illegal. And this is the very first sort of mass surveillance program that I and the journalists, really that the news was broken back in 2013 So this is a huge victory for privacy rights.

What it means is there was this provision of the Patriot Act. Remember the Patriot Act, remember, like, a zillion years ago?

Joe Rogan (1:57)

I do.

Edward Snowden (1:58)

Everybody was like, oh, Patriot Act, Patriot Act. Your friend Alex Jones, you know, I think.

He was worried about the Patriot Act.

Joe Rogan (2:03)

It's a terrible name. There's a real problem with that name. Because if you're against the Patriot Act, it's like against babies. This is the pro-baby act, but meanwhile, pro-baby act, they get to look through your email.

You know what I mean? It's like the word patriot is attached to that in a very disingenuous way. Like calling that the Patriot Act is, it's really creepy that they could do that. It should have like a number, like Bill A-1, you know what I'm saying? So you can debate the merits of it. It's just so much propaganda attached to that name, like the Patriot Act.

Edward Snowden (2:36)

This is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in, you know, just anywhere in the country and they hear on the news, they're talking about like the Save Puppies Act.

There's actually one that's been, they've been trying to push through recently, which is basically outlawing meaningful encryption from the major Internet service providers. Like if Facebook or Google for whatever reason got out of bed in the morning and they actually wanted to protect your, the security of your communications in a way that even they can't break. Like right now, Google and Facebook, they do a great job keeping other people from spying on your communications. But if Google wants to rifle through your inbox, right? If Facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government, like you tap one button and boom, they've got all of it. Happens every single day.

Well, companies like Facebook have recently realized this is a real problem for them.

Because first off, they get all these censorship demands that you've seen where like there's de-platforming requests and it happens in one country, right? Like if the US government is allowed to decide what can and can't be said by this person on this platform, or the US goes, look, we got a court warrant. They said, a judge said, we think this person's a criminal. We want you to hand over everything you have on this person.

And they do it, right? Facebook does this. Well guess who's next, right? The Russian government shows up at the door the next day. The Chinese government shows up at the door the next day.

And if these companies don't play ball, they get shut down in that country. They can no longer operate.

And so the idea that a lot of them have, that they've considered, and this has actually become a bigger thing in the COVID crisis, where we start talking about like contact tracing. These companies want to know where everybody is at all the time, so they can hand this over to medical authorities or whatever. There's this idea called end-to-end encryption, which what it means is that when you send a message, when Billy sends a message to Bobby, Billy and Bobby both have the keys to unlock that message. And it could be sent through Facebook, it could be sent through Google, it could be posted on a bulletin board in the town square. But without that key, which the people who run the bulletin board, the people who own the bulletin board, Google, Facebook, they don't have that key. Only the phones at the end, the laptops at the end, the people who own those, they're the only people who have the key. So if somebody comes to Facebook and says, we want to see that information, Facebook hands over the encrypted message, right? And Facebook goes, well, here you go, here's our copy, but we can't read it. You can't either. Now you've got to actually do some work on the government side and go get that key yourself. And then you can read it, right? But we can't read it. Congress is trying to stop the basically proliferation of that basic end to end encryption technology. And they're calling it like the Child Online Predator Act or something like that, where they say it's all about protecting the posting of like child exploitation material and really, really horrible stuff. But that's not actually what the law is about. The law is about making it easier for spies and law enforcement to reach deeper and deeper into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court. Now, the funny thing is this never used to be the way law enforcement worked in the United States. I mean, when you hear about a warrant, what does that mean to you? What can the cops get with a warrant?