Glenn Greenwald Reflects on Breaking the Edward Snowden Story

This is what I've always wanted to ask you about this. Did you feel physically in danger when that was happening? Because that was such a gigantic moment and so terrifying for most Americans that were now sure that the government had access to our emails and our phone records and it was all broken by you and Snowden. I wondered, were you worried for your safety? Yeah, for sure. For one thing, at the time we were living in a part of Rio that was very isolated, we were living literally on a mountain in the middle of the woods. I had with me at all times physically on my person 14 or 15 thumb drives that contained hundreds of thousands, if not more. I've never quantified it on purpose. Of the most sensitive documents possessed by the most powerful government on the planet, the most secretive agency within that government. I would carry them on my person at all times. I would go to the supermarket and just start laughing because on my back would be a backpack filled with top secret CIA and as an essay documents. Obviously, there were a lot of people who wanted to get their hands on those documents, not just the US government to take them back, though they realized at some point that that would be impossible, but other governments, non-government actors. On top of that, every story that we were doing was affecting markets, it was affecting diplomatic relations. There was obviously a big, big interest in a lot of intelligence agencies around the world and what I was doing. You know, felt monitored all the time because I was, not the paranoid feeling of monitoring, but the actual being monitored has been confirmed in a lot of different ways. But you know, the biggest concern at the time was that the US government, being the US government, got very bullying and very threatening and was explicitly and implicitly both in public and private, making clear that if I left Brazil, there was a good chance that they would try and arrest me. I mean, remember how extreme they were with Snowden. They brought down the plane of the president of Bolivia when he was coming back from Moscow on the suspicion that he might have been taking Snowden with him. And of course he wasn't, but that's how extreme they were. So I stayed in Brazil for about 10 months and didn't feel safe leaving. The Justice Department was telling my lawyers if he leaves and shows up at any airport, we're going to arrest him. And the Brazilian government was super protective of us because a lot of that Snowden reporting revealed how the NSA and the UK and Canada were spying on Brazilian institutions. The oil companies, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, the population. So in Brazil, this reporting was looked at very favorably. And so the government, the Senate offered a lot of protection. So I just felt very safe in Brazil and very unsafe elsewhere. Well, it's very nice that you felt safe in Brazil. It's very nice that they were protecting you. Do they have a history of monitoring their people the same way the United States does? Well, so as I referenced earlier, the history of Brazil, the recent political history is a really dark one, but relevant to the US. In the 1950s, early 1960s, they were building the first really vibrant democracy in Latin America. And they were steadfastly attempting to remain neutral in the endless Soviet Union-US Cold War. But in 1963, 1964, they had this kind of center-left president that the US thought was becoming a little too close to Moscow, a little bit too socialist. You know, nothing communist, but just very kind of mild reforms like rent control and land reform and some nationalization of companies to try and assuage the really brutal income inequality that has plagued the country forever. And so the US government, first under John Kennedy and then under Lyndon Johnson, worked with right-wing Brazilian generals to overthrow that democratically elected government violently. And they imposed a military dictatorship for the next 21 years, of which the current Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was a part as an army captain. And those were really dark days. You know, dissidents were murdered, journalists were killed and exiled, everybody was spied upon with the help of the CIA and MI5 and MI6 in the UK. And so a lot of that kind of endures that relationship between the CIA and the Brazilian government. But since 1985, when it democratized, it's kind of re- it's become once again a model of a liberal democracy. So no, I don't- no government in the world is as obsessed with spying on the world like the US is. But yeah, there's a pretty dark underbelly like there is in any major country in Brazil of kind of like a deep state or an intelligence community, whatever you want to call it, that definitely, you know, uses the dark arts to maintain control over the population. When you hit send, when you finally released, when you when you put that story out, what was the feeling like? Was there ever a oh shit, what have I done moment? No, there's probably should have been and if I were like healthier from a mental health perspective, there would have been a bigger one of those. But you know, it was we were I was in Hong Kong, first of all, you know, we had flown there to meet to meet Snowden. And I wasn't sleeping at all. I mean, obviously, I knew it was, you know, gonna be one of the biggest stories of that generation, if not the biggest. And I had spent years, Joe, you know, like writing about the NSA and, you know, kind of trying to warn people that it seemed like it was being a lot more invasive and a lot more aggressive about monitoring our private communications and our private activities domestically than either the law permitted or anyone new. But it was very difficult to sound that alarm because everything was done behind a wall of secrecy. And so when I finally got these documents in my hand, you know, it was like the dream, right? It's why you go into journalism, but especially for me to be able to show the world that everything was so much more extreme than even I thought that I just wanted to get them out in the world as soon as possible, like any delay at all on the part of the Guardian, which was the newspaper with which I was working at the time and reporting, you know, drove me into a rage. I just felt like the world deserved to see these documents. And also, you know, I was so inspired by Snowden. I mean, you've talked to him, I think twice now. So, you know, like, you know, he's this 29 year old kid at the time who pretty much gambled. We thought 95% likelihood he was going to end up in prison, not for a few years, but for the rest of his life and like not in a nice prison, but in the kind of prison that you go in when they accuse you of jeopardizing American national security. But he did it because he believed in the cause. Like, that was not the bullshit reason, like not the movie script reason, like that was his genuine, which shocked me, right? I kept was this jaded reporter who kept looking for the real motive. But that was it. There was no other motive. And so I just felt like I owed him such a duty and kind of inspired by his example. I thought, you know, if he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life and he chose me to work with him, you know, I kind of courage kind of became infectious and we kind of adopted this trench bunker mentality like we were in this together and we were going to fight everybody. And that became the energy much more and it kind of drowned out the fears that probably were rational for us to have. I felt very honored and very, very fortunate to be able to talk to him. I think he's a very noble person, unusually noble. And you in long form conversations, if if there was any hint of something different, I really believe it would have leaked out. He really is that guy. And I think history, when we look upon this case, I mean, the documentary was pretty excellent that showed all the moments leading up to you releasing the story. But I think these conversations with him. I just feel very fortunate to have that platform where he's willing to come on and talk for hours at a time and express his thoughts on just on spying in general, national security issues and all these situations that he faced up to and now currently because of that. It's a very embarrassing that this is the world that we live in. This is the country that we live in that that man, who I really genuinely believe is a hero, is now a Russian citizen forever. Yeah, I mean, hopefully there's an opportunity just because of all the bizarre vindictive impulses that Trump has and the fact that by complete coincidence, the people who want Snowden to be in Russia forever or to rot in prison happen to be Trump's enemies as well. That I'm hoping there's an opportunity to persuade Trump after the election, particularly if he loses, but even if he doesn't, that he should follow through on what he's now twice bizarrely raised on his own, which was the prospect of pardoning Snowden. It's something I'm probably my top priority in the world at the moment. The reason is what you just said, which is we're so accustomed to people doing things for just misguided reasons, corrupted reasons, people lying and deceiving about why they're doing things, about presenting a false version of who they are. That's the thing is you talked to them for those hours when I got to Hong Kong, you know, before becoming a journalist, I was a litigator in Manhattan and I used those skills. I mean, I kind of created a little mini Guantanamo where I just like put them in front of me and just question them for eight hours straight, three different, three straight days without letting them even have a glass of water or go to the bathroom because I really wanted to know what was actually motivating him, who was this person to whom I was about to tie myself and my reputation and credibility internally. And he really is somebody who, you know, and like the thing about it too is like, that's so amazing about it is that oftentimes people who leak secrets or who become a source that, you know, wants to expose secrets and are willing to go to prison are often kind of fucked up people, right? They're like alienated from society. They feel persecuted and mistreated. They don't have much going on in their lives and therefore don't feel like they have a lot to risk. No, it was exactly the opposite. You know, he had at the time, this incredibly beautiful and brilliant girlfriend who today is his wife. They had been together for years. And in order to do what he did, he had to deceive her. He had to leave the country and not tell her what he was doing because he wanted to make certain that when the government knocked on her door, she could truthfully say she knew nothing about it because he knew they would go after her if they could tie her to it. He had a great job. He was making a lot of money. You know, he was a high school dropout but had taught himself these really coveted skills. So he had a great career ahead of him, a mother and a father who both love him, very stable home life. He had none of those traits, you know, that typically are used to demonize people who do this, which is why I knew he was going to be gold from a media perspective and to be able to prevent the government from demonizing him in the way they like to do. But more importantly in that, like leaving aside all the perception stuff and all the PR and media stuff, you know, he's probably the person or one of the people certainly I admire most in this world in all the time I've lived. And what's so unbelievable, you know, people always say to me, oh, poor Snowden, you know, he's trapped in Russia. He can't come home. He's facing multiple felony charges. He's been separated from his all of which is true. But like, I also always say that he's the person who I know in this world, who when he puts his head down on his pillow at night, he falls asleep most easily. Because there's something about knowing that you, you face this dangerous choice and you chose the right thing. I mean, in Hong Kong, as I said, we were never, I was never sleeping. My colleague or poitress was never sleeping. We're sleeping like an hour or two with the aid of very strong sleep narcotics. And, you know, he would say like at 930, he would yawn, he would say, okay, guys, I think I'm gonna hit the hay like he had no care in the world. And that was I was like, what the fuck? And he would like sleep for eight hours, you know, and he would wake up, have a little coffee. But that's what that, you know, clean conscience does to a person. Even with a clean conscious, I just don't understand the weight of the stress that he was under how I don't understand how he could be so calm. He I mean, he didn't have stress. That's what's so bizarre. I mean, you saw in the film, right in the documentary, citizen four, we're like, you know, if we had no idea what the CIA knew, we had no idea what the Chinese government we knew, we had no idea what Hong Kong authorities knew. We were waiting, I was always waiting for the door to be kicked in at any moment, you know, and for him, at least if not the rest of us, you know, me and Laura to be taken away. And like I said, I mean, our working assumption the whole time, was that there was, you know, as excited as I was, the one thing that was kind of a dark cloud that hovered over all the time was that this person who I had now become connected with and developed an admiration for, I was certain at any moment, he was going to be in the hands of the US government. And the next time I would see him would be on television in an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a courtroom, getting ready to be sentenced to like 50 years in prison in one of those hellholes, you have the US specializes in where you spend 23 and a half hours a day alone in your cell. And you have 30 day 30 minutes a day where you, you know, get to walk in a little room and in the sun to satisfy legal requirements. And that was going to be him for the rest of his life. He got very lucky. I mean, he almost did end up that way. So for me, I was, you know, concerned for him, stressed for him. And but he was at peace with the fact that that was the path he chose. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, and that was really important for me to know that he had thought through all the likely consequences, I didn't want to feel like I was using somebody's work product, who hadn't given full thought to what it is that they had gotten themselves into. And it was only once I became very, you know, he could cite the statutes with which they were going to charge him and what the legal defenses that were available were. So he had given extreme thought to this, he's an adult, and he made that choice. And it was amazing to this very day, he's completely at peace with it. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1 to December 1. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye.